By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
My hunch is that even the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump will admit that Trump never gave a thought to what Common Core is all about before he decided to run for president, and that when he shakes his head and tells us “Common Core is a flop; we have to end Common Core,” he is repeating a line an adviser gave him shortly before his first speech on the topic.
We know that if some reporter asked him to give specific examples of what he dislikes about Common Core, he would find a way to change the topic so fast that our eyes would spin.
There is nothing wrong with him being in this dilemma. No presidential candidate can be an expert on every topic that is at issue during the campaign. I suspect that Hillary Clinton could give us little more than a couple of pious generalities about the “need for standards to help our children compete in the world,” if she were asked why she favors Common Core.
Fortunately for Trump and those who support him, his vice-presidential pick Mike Pence should be able to take up the slack for him on this issue. Pence has a record on Common Core.
Grace Smith in the July 21 edition of Education News (educationnews.org), in an article entitled “With Trump Quiet on Education, Pence’s Record Stands In,” summarizes it for us. She writes that while “Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump hasn’t said very much about education during his campaign — just that he is ‘a tremendous believer’ in education and that Common Core should be ended, calling the standards ‘an absolute disaster,’ his running mate Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana has made education a top priority during his time in office.”
Smith writes, “Pence was one of only two dozen Republicans who voted against the No Child Left Behind Act, a 2001 initiative of President George W. Bush that defined the decade’s education policy. Pence was worried about too much federal overreach into what formerly had been states’ and local schools’ purviews. When Pence took office in 2013, Indiana was just ending two years of legislation to establish school vouchers and increase the charter school presence in the state. But Pence wanted more.”
This was a time when Pence could have easily shifted away from education as a priority. Tony Bennett, a former state superintendent for public education, spoke of an “education reform fatigue” that had taken shape in Indiana. Bennett admires Pence for staying with the issue.
As an example, Bennett points to Pence’s commitment to charter schools and school vouchers while he was governor: “In Indiana, he pushed for shutting charters that were performing poorly. The state has one of the largest voucher programs in the nation, with over 32,000 students receiving aid packages. Pence discarded the Common Core standards and called for the state to come up with its own standards.” He “hired a company to create a new test for Indiana, but disliked that it was too lengthy.”
Many on the right would say the best indication of a political leader’s position on education is to examine what Hillary Clinton and the teachers unions have to say about that person: that whomever Hillary and unions favor, they will oppose; and vice-versa. If you are in that camp, consider what Smith has to say: “Hillary Clinton told a rally of the American Federation of Teachers in Minneapolis that Pence was ‘one of the most hostile politicians in America when it comes to public education’.”
Smith calls our attention to the comments of Allysia Finley in The Wall Street Journal. Finley contends that the “battles waged by Pence are an example of his record as a fighter” on educational matters and an indication of how “conservative policies can assist low and middle-income kids.”
On another topic: On August 11 in this space we published the comments of a reader who described the curriculum at the Holy Innocents School of the Northwest in Federal Way, Wash., as a possible model for Catholic schools to follow if they are looking to differentiate themselves from what is taking place in public schools these days. We recently came across another example, in the August 1 issue of the Jesuits’ America magazine, in a column by Fr. John J. Conley, SJ. Conley points to the Chesterton Schools Network.
The Chesterton Network describes itself as a provider of “templates for operating a school” with the “Chesterton Academy curriculum framework,” which is a “a four-year, sequential, integrated curriculum overview with high level day-to-day lesson plans, reading lists, and sample tests. The framework provides school founders with a blueprint for marketing, hiring and evaluating faculty, resource acquisition, scheduling, and assessing state requirements.”
What this means is that a currently operating Catholic school will be able to contact the Chesterton Network and adopt the curriculum that the network recommends, either for the entire student body of the school or as a specialized offering, an honors program of sorts. Fr. Conley offers as an example what is taking place at his alma mater, Cardinal O’Hara in suburban Philadelphia, which has announced a new educational track, the Regina Chesterton Academy, for the high school, to begin in the fall of 2016.
In Conley’s words, the “structure is generally historical, with echoes of older Western Civilization. Freshman year focuses on the ancient world, sophomore on early medieval, junior on high medieval and Renaissance, senior on modern.” Students in the Regina Chesterton Academy will study authors such as Homer, Sophocles, Augustine, Chaucer, Dante and Dostoyevsky. In addition, “four entire years of philosophy are required.”
Conley describes a “church-militant Catholicism” that “flavors the theology curriculum.” He adds, “The academy’s reference to Chesterton is more than decorative. Each year’s literature course includes a book by G.K. Chesterton.” Fr. Conley summarizes the Network’s goal as an attempt to treat “Catholicism as a complex culture with its own language, literature, history, philosophy, economics, music and art,” noting that “in a society that systematically reduces religion to a matter of sentiment and service” Chesterton academies “may quickly become a spiritual oasis.”
There are Chesterton academies currently operating in Edina, Minn. (the flagship school that started it all), Downers Grove, Ill., Buffalo, Omaha, Rochester and Warren, Mass., with new openings scheduled for this fall in Iron Mountain, Mich., Brookfield, Wis., along with Fr. Conley’s alma mater Cardinal O’Hara in Philadelphia. Additional information is available at the Chesterton Network website: chestertonacademy.org.
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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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