By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The mail that we receive at First Teachers is overwhelmingly opposed to Common Core, the federal government’s effort to establish education standards for the country. Certain of our correspondents object to what they see as a liberal bias in Common Core’s curriculum, while others object to what they believe are confusing and gimmicky lesson plans and teaching techniques called for in the plan.
But there is something that puzzles me. There continue to be a number of well-known and respected conservative leaders and state governors who back Common Core. For example, Jeb Bush, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and former Indiana Governor and current President of Purdue University Mitch Daniels. These Republicans insist that state and local leaders will retain control over the process of implementing the standards that Common Core seeks to put in place.
Why this difference of opinion on the right? USA Today, in collaboration with North Star Research conducted a poll last month that offers some food for thought about how we form our opinions on the issues of the day.
USA Today reports that the poll “presented respondents with two different education plans, the details of which are unimportant in this context. What is important is that half the sample was told A was the Democratic plan and B was the Republican plan, while the other half of our national sample was told A was the Republican plan and B was the Democrats’ approach. The questions dealt with substantive policy on a subject quite important to most Americans — education — and issues that people are familiar with — class size, teacher pay, and the like.”
The results? When “the specifics in Plan A were presented as the Democratic plan and B as the Republican plan, Democrats preferred A by 75 percent to 17 percent, and Republicans favored B by 78 percent to 13 percent. When the exact same elements of A were presented in the exact same words, but as the Republicans’ plan, and with B as the Democrats’ plan, Democrats preferred B by 80 percent to 12 percent, while Republicans preferred ‘their party’s plan’ by 70 percent to 10 percent.”
In other words, “support for an identical education plan shifted by more than 60 points among partisans, depending on which party was said to back it.”
USA Today comes to the conclusion that the “views many of us hold are largely dictated by partisanship and ideological affiliations rather than intellectual rigor,” which in turn “leads to an almost chronic unwillingness to revisit and refine long-held positions. Our thinking on matters of politics and philosophy and faith not only can become lazy; it can easily ossify.”
This is a thought worth pondering, no? Have we made up our minds about Common Core as a result of a serious and in-depth study of what is in the plan? Or are we jumping to conclusions about it on the basis of things we read on the Internet and because it was put in place by the Obama administration? Might those who oppose it have a different point of view if the same plan had been proposed during the Reagan administration, while William Bennett was secretary of education? And would those who favor it, now that a liberal Democrat is in the White House, have been adamantly opposed if the same proposals had been made by supporters of Reagan?
On another topic: The June 11 edition of First Teachers, which reproduced the suggestions for how to preserve the Catholic identity at Jesuit colleges made by Fr. William Byron, SJ, in an article in the Jesuits’ America magazine. Byron, former president of the University of Scranton, the Catholic University of America, and Loyola University New Orleans, and a Jesuit since 1950, proposed that there be created “on every Jesuit college and university campus a group of Jesuits — say four or five in number, with the rector of the local Jesuit community as their leader.”
The Jesuits in this group could be professors, of course, but also could be, in Byron’s words, “retreat directors, chaplains, moderators, non-tenure track teachers, coaches, or counselors,” a “band of brothers whose presence and professional services help to set the institution clearly apart from other schools.”
M.T., a mother of a young woman studying at a Jesuit college, writes to inform us that she “chuckled” when she read Fr. Byron’s proposal. “His idea that four or five Jesuits would provide a Jesuit presence on campus seems like a joke. My first question is can you find a few Jesuits who would dress like a Catholic priest and really act like a Jesuit. My daughter attends a Jesuit university in the Midwest, and the Jesuits dress like laymen. So I have trouble thinking you could find a few Jesuits to do this job.
“Secondly would the administration really let them promote the Catholic faith by leading truly Catholic retreats, encouraging eucharistic adoration, running/managing a dormitory and enforcing a curfew, etc.? Once again I have a hard time believing that the university administration would support this. On my daughter’s campus, several Catholic students circulated a petition to have one Latin Mass said on campus on Sunday. My daughter eagerly signed the petition, but the university would not allow it.
“They even had a faculty adviser who supported the Latin Mass, but then the adviser mysteriously dropped his support when the petition received the required number of student signatures. There are non-Jesuit priests close by who would have eagerly said the Latin Mass for the students in the university’s chapel.
“If the university truly wanted a more Catholic Jesuit identity, they could provide parents with a list of the theology and philosophy professors who promise to teach the authentic Catholic faith in their classes. Some parents and students would appreciate this, and it might be a great selling point for the school
“But you have to think like the university does — which means being politically correct is more important than teaching the Catholic faith. If the university promises authentic Catholic teachers for some theology and philosophy classes, and too many students sign up for those classes, then they might have to hire more orthodox Catholic professors in those fields. Thus changing the composition of the theology and philosophy departments, and the liberal professors might be out of a job or become the minority in the department! The university would never let that happen!”
M.T. closes with the observation that she thinks First Teachers tends to be
“overly optimistic about Jesuit colleges wanting to be really Catholic. I don’t see it at my daughter’s university, and she is a senior. It is very sad because she has met a number of students who really would like to learn more about their faith and went to the Jesuit university for that reason.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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