The last two lines of Dr. Stimpson’s poem—“In the New Year, to assess/ CCSS is a mess—“sum up the sentiments of some concerned MLA conference-goers regarding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
At the Friday morning panel, “Who Defines College Readiness? The Common Core State Standards and the Future of English Studies,” high school and college leaders discussed opportunities for better connection between higher education and the K-12 system with regards to CCSS implementation. Panelists shared a concern that CCSS had been developed with limited input from higher education.
CCSSI will also have long-term effects on the future of the MLA as students move from high school to college, bringing with them the English and reading skills developed in classrooms governed by those standards.
“Colleges and universities have done some things with the standards, but overall the engagement of higher education in CCSS has been uneven, and perhaps the community colleges have been most active,” Stimpson said.
Dr. Stimpson said that suspicion of high-stakes testing is merited, referring to CCSS as an “unholy alliance” between legislative and industrial entities. She said that, although she is in favor of reasonable national criteria for student assessment, current CCSS testing has too much of a tendency to be “punitive” and “mechanistic.”
Since the standards were developed to ensure that students graduate high school ready either for a two- or four-year college or to enter the workforce, it would seem logical that colleges should have some say in what the standards look like. Yet panelists gave examples of instances where higher education was left out of key dialogues.
