Commonality Amid Growing Differences: Can the Common Core Standards Advance Schools’ Ability to Explore the Educational Benefits of Diversity?

• In Event: Lessons Lost in Six Decades Since Brown: Resurrecting the Sociocultural Dimensions of Race and Education

Abstract

This paper will examine the intersection of two central features of U.S. public education today:
A. The changing racial/ethnic demographics of the U.S. K-12 student population and the related need for public school educators to address the socio-cultural dimensions of educating this complex student population has led many to consider the educational benefits associated with diverse schools and classrooms that prepare students for the “real world.” Research on everything from brain development and learning to social psychology and culturally relevant pedagogy is converging in new and interesting ways to explore these issues. Indeed, since the mid- to late-1990s, a rapidly growing body of evidence supports the potential benefits of racially diverse classrooms on the social and attitudinal outcomes of all students. We see this research cited increasingly in affirmative action and school desegregation court cases and discussed in terms of the “educational benefits of diversity.”

B. At the same time that this interest in student differences and how it can facilitate more meaningful learning experiences for students is evolving, the federal and state governments are infusing more “commonality” into the public school curriculum via the Common Core State Standards, now being implemented in 45 states. These standards and related test are designed to “unify” an increasingly diverse population by providing a consistent, clear understanding of what all students are expected to learn across local contexts, communities and ways of knowing the world. Yet, at the same time that the Common Core Standards are unifying, standardizing and simplifying what it is that students need to learn, they are also intended to be robust and relevant to “the real world, requiring students to grapple with difficult questions and foster reasoning, synthesis, analysis, and problem-solving.”
Thus, philosophically and pedagogically, these two developments in the field of education overlap and share a stated-goal of deeper, more meaningful learning experiences for all children. Amid rapid implementation of the Common Core Standards, educators grapple with the need to both “standardize” and “equalize” access to high-level content and curriculum while not losing sight of the pedagogical potential of the rapidly growing racial/ethnic, social class, religious, and cultural diversity within and across our classrooms.
Our paper will present research from racially/ethnically diverse suburban schools as educators struggled to implement the Common Core at the intersection of uniformity and complexity, difference and commonality. We learned that they see the Common Core potentially helping them tap into the socio-cultural dimensions of student diversity, but they also see the latest accountability and testing system tied to the Common Core as problematic.
In writing about these issues as they relate to the schools we have studied, we will also draw from court rulings on racial diversity in public schools and higher education institutions. These rulings discuss the potential “educational benefits” of diverse schools as well as the socio-cultural dimensions of diversity itself. Our analysis, therefore, will illustrate the tension and possibility at the intersection between the “commonness” of a Common Core curriculum movement and our increasingly culturally, linguistically and phenotypically “diverse” society.

Authors

• Amy Stuart Wells, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Lauren Fox, Teachers College, Columbia University