Apologia pro Common Core

Steven Cromack

The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reformstunned Americans. Schools across the country scrambled to design content standards and implement assessments.

Thirty-years later, history seems to be repeating itself. In an effort to improve K-12 education, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted and implemented the Common Core State Standards. As of 2013, Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska are the five holdouts. Members of the academy and secondary school history teachers should be euphoric about the Common Core, which mandates that middle and high school students actually do the work of historians. This includes, but is not limited to, reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources, as well as synthesizing such information coherently in written assignments. The crux of the Common Core is 21st-century readiness, i.e., putting a verb in a sentence correctly, and being able to read not “good,” but well. 

The standards themselves are not revolutionary. In fact, they simply mandate that teachers actually teach reading and writing. The best teachers have always done this. But at least with the Standards, teachers will be held accountable if they choose to use PowerPoint and the textbook as their sole methods of instruction. 

Members of the academy should be excited, too. With Common Core on the ground in high schools, the next generation of students should be better readers and writers. It is now time to double down and ensure that history undergraduates who plan to be teachers are introduced to the seminal primary source documents of American history so they can be prepared to teach the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Seneca Falls Declaration, among many others, to the upcoming generations.

Finally, Common Core reminds teachers of something that they perhaps take for granted: words are powerful. Whether they rally the troops before battle, convey universal truths, or declare new ideas about government, words are at the center of any society. Ideas can only be expressed through words. Words are like the ka of the Pharaoh, the lifeblood of any civilization. They are the written and spoken laws. They are nomoi (human conventions) and physis (nature). They are a means of grace, salus (healing), and salvation provided by the religions of the world. Words ended slavery and apartheid. Words relocated sovereignty from the King in Parliament to the American people. They toppled the Senātus Populusque Rōmānus and the House of Bourbon.  Words inspired nationalism and broke the yoke of colonialism. Words also sentenced prisoners to execution, inspired terror, and declared purges. 

History is not just the study of past events, but of words and their meaning. The Common Core Standards allow for history teachers to roll up their sleeves and rediscover with their students the words that have shaped our world.