The Effect of the Common Core on Teachers
By Lisa Francis
By nature, teachers enter the profession with high expectations, energy, and a desire to “give it their all.” As the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are rolled out in schools across the nation, teachers are left to grapple with the vast implications these new mandates will have on education. “The Common Core spells out what students should learn in mathematics and English language arts from kindergarten to the end of high school… yet work done by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings has found little to no association between the quality of learning standards across the 50 states and either student achievement at a single point in time or gains in student achievement over time” (Chingos & Whitehurst, 2012, p. 8). It is mind-boggling to imagine the enormous impact the CCSS will have on teachers’ everyday lives in the classroom, yet startling to realize that teachers have had very little, if any, input on the creation or implementation of the CCSS. By examining the background of teacher burnout as a “crisis in a teacher’s self-efficacy” (Brouers & Tomic, 2000) and analyzing the expectations of standardized testing and the added curriculum narrowing of the CCSS, it is clear that teacher burnout, which manifests itself as emotional and physical exhaustion, is a subsequent effect of these new standards and the stressors they will inevitably place upon teachers across the country.
Background
Teacher burnout can be described as a “psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment” (Brouers & Tomic). When teachers are “emotionally exhausted,” it refers to them being “emotionally overextended” and depleted of their emotional resources (Brouers & Tomic). They may feel they lack the energy to meet all of their professional obligations or to even keep up with the demands of their students. The depersonalization manifests itself as a “negative, callous, or excessively detached response” (Brouers & Tomic) to one’s students. Teachers who are overstressed and suffering from burnout “have no confidence in their classroom management abilities are confronted by their incompetence every day, while at the same time understanding how important that competence is if they are to perform well and achieve the educational goals” (Brouers & Tomic). With the added stress of implementing brand new curriculum aligned to the CCSS and scrambling to figure out how to best meet these new expectations, teachers are bound to feel overextended and worry they are not achieving their goals.
There are many serious personal ramifications that result from burnout. Burnout has been linked to a “lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem, and clinically significant depressive symptoms” as well as “resentment, frustration, boredom, irritability, anger, and helplessness” (Grayson & Alvarez, 2008). The school will also suffer substantial costs as “increased teacher absenteeism, turnover, career change, mental health and medical claims, deteriorating performance and early retirement” (Grayson & Alvarez) result as well. Ultimately, teacher burnout is a double bind in which the teacher feels that “there is no escape” (Bateson, 2005, p. 15). A teacher has a seemingly infinite number of expectations and professional obligations, yet only an 8-hour workday in which to accomplish it all. It is the double bind of staying at school long past the bell has rung and accomplishing everything that needs to get done or leaving at a reasonable hour yet feeling unprepared and behind in obligations. Whether this career fatigue manifests itself as a ninth-year teacher who feels as though each school day is becoming repetitive and monotonous from beginning to end or a second-year teacher who is so utterly exhausted that her fatigue leaves her wondering what could have ever driven her into this profession in the first place, teacher burnout is a serious issue. “With so much to cover and so little time, teachers pace their lessons, trying to… [cover] the required content and seeing to it that most students master that content” (Posner, 2004, p. 194). This lack of time and high stress level diminishes the relational aspect of the classroom community.
Method
A helpful framework for understanding how a teacher’s self-efficacy affects teacher burnout is Bandura’s theory of perceived self-efficacy. Perceived self-efficacy refers to “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (Brouers & Tomic). Low self-efficacy can be a result of “teacher’s individual efforts to ameliorate the stressor on his/her own” (Grayson & Alvarez) rather than having a “school system and middle management” that utilizes a school-wide approach to “enhance self-actualization and esteem in their teachers” and work to solve problems, such as raising standardized test scores (Grayson & Alvarez). When teachers suffer from low self-efficacy and are at-risk of burnout, they may resort to dishonest and illegal ways of meeting expectations imposed by standardized testing and the CCSS. “Recent revelations of cheating on standardized tests in the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) alert us to the fact that high-stakes testing is not a viable solution to the problem of academic underachievement… Thousands of children in APS were deprived of educational opportunities they needed because the cheating cut off struggling students from the extra help they would have received if they’d failed” (Carter & Welner, 2013, p. 111).
The centralization of curriculum and assessment were “ironically…marketed as interventions to provide children with more opportunities” (Carter & Welner, p. 112), but schools whose students are underprivileged have faced “tremendous pressure to raise test scores” and have thus taken to many “counterproductive” measures. “Like cheating, they may appear to improve student achievement, but in reality, they… widen the educational opportunity gap” (Carter & Welner, p. 112). The new CCSS are essentially the epitome of “curriculum centralization” and thus have contributed greatly to the added pressure facing schools. “Principals visit teachers with stopwatches in hand… There is no room for addressing children’s interest, curiosity, critical thinking, artistic expression, personal and social growth, or deeply interconnected, meaningful, and relevant learning” (Bloom, 2013, p. 14). When teachers are limited by the educational system with very little room for creativity, it hinders the community and relational aspect of the classroom. Testing is another element that “hinders learning at deeper levels of understanding. There is no time to provide deep, meaningful, relevant, and stimulating learning opportunities” (Bloom, p. 13). The emphasis is placed upon testing rather than authentic learning opportunities that foster relationships.
Results
Teacher burnout is a result of the Common Core State Standards, which are the ultimate manifestation of nationwide standardization. Children are falsely presumed to be “blank slates and passive recipients of content, rather than active constructors of meaning who bring their prior knowledge and experiences to the learning situation” (Carter & Welner, p. 119). A teacher may recognize a strength in a student, such as being able to write “imaginative essays or stories” but must face the fact that perhaps this talented student “cannot or does not wish to write the way standardized tests require,” thus labeling this student deficient. Children are then forced to “remedy their deficiencies at the cost of losing opportunities to develop their strengths. As a result their talents are devalued, suppressed, and left to wither” (Carter & Welner, p. 119). The teacher is also branded as a failure for not being able to help this “deficient” student meet state standards imposed by educational legislation. “Because teachers are so closely linked to the school environment, it is likely that legislative pressures exert further strain on their occupation” (Grayson & Alvarez).
The school curriculum has suffered because teachers have had to narrow it down to what it most likely going to be on the standardized tests. Sadly, this happens “much more frequently in schools that serve economically disadvantaged students, because their students, historically, score significantly lower on standardized tests (Carter & Welner, p. 112). This type of curricular reductionism creates a situation of fewer opportunities for students who actually most need to receive broad and diverse educational experiences and “offers disadvantaged children fewer opportunities to engage with the range of subjects, activities, and experiences that constitute a full, high-quality education” (Carter & Welner, p. 115). Teacher burnout will be on the rise as “all that is artistic, emotional, personal, socially conscious, and culturally different is erased” from the curriculum “in the pursuit of a shallow pool of reproducible skills and knowledge. Those students and teachers who do now bow in reverence are essentially weeded out via high-stakes testing” (Carter & Welner, p. 115). This added job insecurity will only serve to decrease teachers’ self-efficacy and increase feelings of professional incompetence.
The Common Core State Standards were created with “insufficient public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators, no research, no pilot or experimental programs” (Strauss, 2012). Although the standards have been presented to the media as being approved by 75% of surveyed teachers, this “research study” was performed by a national teacher organization that only surveyed .07% of its members (Schneider, 2013). This poses the question of who exactly “does” approve of these new standards. It can be surmised that it is primarily “people who know next to nothing about how children learn” (Kohn, 1999, p.3). The CCSS are a “set-up for national standardized tests” that will ultimately cost a fortune and are poised to fail to “measure complex thought, avoid cultural bias, or measure non-verbal learning” (Strauss, 2012). These tests will not be an accurate measure of authentic student learning or valuable educational experiences.
Discussion
Action must be taken to lessen the pressures teachers will face under the CCSS in order to prevent an epidemic of teacher burnout. “The Common Core standards will only have a chance or raising student achievement if they are implemented with high-quality materials, but there is currently no basis to measure the quality of materials” (Chingos & Whitehurst, p.1). Currently, major publishers have “touted” many products as being “Common-Core Aligned,” but this has typically meant “little more than making sure that everything listed in the standards can be found under the same name in the table of contents or index in the publisher’s materials. Materials that are identically aligned at this superficial level are likely to differ substantially in their functional alignment and effectiveness… If the investment in the Common Core is going to pay off, an empirical link between standards and instructional materials must be provided” (Chingos & Whitehurst, p. 8).
One proposed solution is for state education agencies to “collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools” (Chingos & Whitehurst, p.4). This is because a lack of knowledge about which instructional materials students are using will leave us “unable to discern that the Common Core standards are working in some palaces and not others in interaction with the materials that are deployed” (Chingos & Whitehurst, p.4). Teacher burnout could also be prevented with proper maintenance and support of the teacher’s mental and emotional well-being as well as adequate attention given to classroom relationships. Another possible solution is to try and emphasize seeing students as “sets or bundles of relationships” and by “trying to develop more meaningful relationships with them” by meeting with students individually and “trying to see the unique interrelationship comprising each one” (Bloom, p. 7).
A constructivist approach towards education focuses on student autonomy and has students “view learning as something under their control rather than as disembodied, objectified, subject matter” (Kohn, 1993, p.7). If the CCSS incorporated more student autonomy into its expectations, teachers could encourage students to use class time towards deciding on individual activities in which to partake, such as creative writing assignments like poems and essays or art projects like a collage or sculpture (Kohn, 1993). Another solution would be to divert some of the funding directed at developing the state tests and new standards. It would be much more valuable to instead direct this money back to schools to allow them to acquire new curriculum, materials, and supplies that will help teachers be able to support students in a way that will help them “raise their game” in light of these new standards and tests (Strauss, 2013). These proposed solutions would help teachers not feel forced to implement standards they have no ownership, investment, or faith in. As a society, we need to work to prevent teacher burnout that results from increased professional pressures. It is time to reign in the unrealistic demands from educational legislation that have led us to extreme curriculum centralization, as illustrated by the Common Core State Standards.
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