Business Engagement in Common Standards: “a chance to raise the bar on all children”
Submitted by claus on Fri, 2012-04-20 07:39
If you’re looking for a strong business case for common academic content standards, have a look at the video of the STEM Salon we held last Tuesday. An overflow crowd heard Bob Corcoran, a GE engineer who also heads up the company’s foundation, and Josh Thomasis, a senior staff member in the New York City Department of Education, describe the vital work they are doing together to implement Common Core standards in the city’s schools.
Here’s how Corcoran explains GE’s support for common standards. “The focus on logical and clear standards is logical, it’s rational, it’s what we would do in a business to be an efficient company. You would not want your aircraft engine made the way that we design teaching….” That belief prompted the GE Foundation to invest $18 million to support the implementation of Common Core.
He described his shock years ago when he discovered how varied standards were across the country: “As a…process person who has worked on manufacturing processes and engineering processes in our aviation business, I know that when you have variation like that, you have good variation and you have bad variation. The bigger the sample size, the worse the variation.”
For him, Common Core gets at the heart of a problem that has plagued American public schools since they first came on the scene: inequity. If you travel through a district, he said, you can tell “which schools had the best curriculum, which had the worst, based solely on how old the cars in the driveways are…when was the house last painted, and what was the size of the lot.”
His conclusion? Common standards are “a chance to raise the bar on all children.” But they’ll miss their mark if we don’t implement them well. GE has put its money where its mouth is.
See the full video of this event:
GE is a member of Change the Equation.
Comments
I am curious why my comment
I am curious why my comment was not posted from last week? I feel it had viable points that should be considered.
Pamela, rest assured that
Pamela, rest assured that there was nothing nefarious going on. We merely got behind in our approvals as other work piled up. Apologies.
I appreciate the fact that
I appreciate the fact that Mr. Corcoran, an engineer from GE,sees the "common core" standards as a "focus on logical and clear standards." He goes on to say that they are "rational" and "what we would do in businees to be an efficient company." He then says a semmingly irrational statement: "If you travel through a district you can tell 'which schools had the best currculum, which had the worst, based soley on how the cars in the driveways are....when was the house painted, and what was the size of the lot." Where is the logic in that statement? There are so many other variables in every school in America besides the curriculum. Education is not like manufacturing. The human element is found everywhere you look in education. So if business leaders think that the "common core" will solve all of the problems of education, and then the country, they will be very disappointed. If you study history, you will see that a utopian viewpoint has never been sustained, although many still seek that utopia. Education is not the end all. It is instead the beginning and the foundation in the life of a child that provides learning experiences that hopefully will be built on for the rest of his/her life. But education does not just start when a child enters school. Learning is taking place from the time of birth. And unfortunately some parents do not value the edcuational experience, and therefore do not provide support for their child when they are in school. And then there is the student. People usually take care of things they value, and many students in our country do not value education. They don't see the point of learning material that isn't going to help them make more money. This is unfortunate for all of us, because they are the future. I could go on and on, but I hope my point is understood. The car in the driveway, the lack of paint on the house, and the size of the lot DO NOT tell me what kind of curriculum is going to be found in the school. That is not logical, and that equation needs to change. An alternative solution for those problems might be: the person who drives the older car is frugal; an unpainted house might indicate some laziness, or simply the lack of money to purchase the paint, and the small lot size might just be because the person living there does not like to mow the lawn. But how in the world can it tell you about a school's curriculum? That type of thinking scares me.
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