I’d love to see the state and the education establishment abandon Common Core and similar exercises in faux-accountability and paperwork. But that won’t happen with opponents claiming that Common Core kills Indian kids:
We’ve buried eight kids down on that reservation in the last week. We need to sit up and pay attention. I’m not naive enough to think the Common Core is the… is what’s causing all of this, but it’s part of the effect. We’ve got teachers down there who have just quit teaching it, because the kids can’t do it [Rep. Elizabeth May (R-27/Pine Ridge), remarks on House Bill 1223, South Dakota House, 2015.02.24, timestamp 21:12].
At this point, Speaker Dean Wink (R-29/Howes) interrupted Rep. May to pull her back to the motion at hand, which was not the Common Core-repealing House Bill 1223 itself but the question of whether to place HB 1223 on the calendar for debate. Even if the House had allowed that debate to happen, the suggestion that Common Core leads to Indian youth suicide sounds more like a high school debate nuke-war disad (the classic argument that demonstrates that any federal policy change leads to mushroom clouds) than a useful legislative contention.
Suicide is a serious problem for our Native neighbors. The Pine Ridge Reservation has had waves of youth suicides since well before the adoption of Common Core. Dr. Delphine Red Shirt says the despair driving these suicides comes from the culture of fear imposed imposed by colonialism. Maybe we could make the argument that imposing Western rationalist curriculum standards on Indian reservations is one aspect of colonialism. But with the Department of Education warning that repealing Common Core would only require implementing new (Western rationalist) standards, and with Common Core opponents suggesting new standards, the colonialism critique doesn’t get us anywhere on HB 1223.
But Rep. May wasn’t making that deep critique. She seems to have been colonializing her Indian neighbors again, exploiting their pain to advance her political goal of the moment. This one ill-considered rhetorical tactic only weakened her position, opening education policy critics to ridicule from the national press, which lump her suicide claim in with other wild accusations made by Common Core opponents.
The Huffington Post lets Rep. May try to explain herself:
May clarified her comments for The Huffington Post, noting that, “Our suicide rate keeps increasing on the [Pine Ridge] reservation, our kids are under a lot of distress socially and economically.”
Indeed, the suicide rates of Native youth are disproportionately high around the country.
May further said she thinks the Common Core State Standards put too much emphasis on standardized testing.
“Very simple, testing, testing testing. They have to teach to the test. You know and I know and every teacher in the trenches on the reservation know it,” wrote May in an email. “It never is about children and teachers it’s about a bureaucracy.”
“There’s kids who just won’t go to school,” she added over the phone. “This is not even just about Indian children, but about all of our children. We see it more in the depressed areas of our country. Not all children learn the same. We can’t put everybody inside a box, it doesn’t work.”
The Common Core State Standards do not necessarily increase amounts of standardized testing, but tests aligned with the standards have been noted for their rigor [Rebecca Klein, “South Dakota Legislator Suggests Common Core Contributed To Kids’ Deaths,” Huffington Post, 2015.02.27].
We can dismantle Rep. May’s elaboration on straight logic:
- “Our suicide rate keeps increasing” indicates the problem has arisen from and will continue as a result of other factors. HB 1223 would not have solved.
- “too much emphasis on standardized testing” has been a critique of every standards movement (remember No Child Left Behind?). HB 1223 would have left the testing regime in place.
- “This is not even just about Indian children, but about all of our children”—then why did Rep. May’s remarks on the House floor Tuesday talk about suicide among Indian children? Is there a spate of white youth suicides induced by Common Core that Rep. May left unmentioned? This comment sounds like Rep. May realizing she’d made a weak claim and trying to move the debate to a different topic.
We could beat back Common Core and other centralized intrusions on the art of good teaching with better, more practical arguments. Claiming that Common Core kills Indian kids only invites ridicule that prevents good arguments from being heard.