Walk around a random college campus, and the odds are good the first student you’ll run into will be female. 57 percent of college students are women, versus 43 percent men, a 14 point gap. Look at Advanced Placement exams – those College Board tests that enable high-scoring takers to get college credit – and you’ll find that 56 percent of students taking the exams are girls, creating a 13 percent gap favoring women. But fear not! University of Miami president Donna Shalala assures us that the Common Core national curriculum standards will help address the “gender-based inequities” crushing female students.
As the data make obvious, there is no college-readiness gap unfavorable to women. Yet Shalala proclaims that, “These uniform, more rigorous K-12 education standards have the potential to reduce gender-based inequities by ensuring that every young woman receives the educational foundation she needs to be successful in college and career.”
Okay, maybe Shalala doesn’t really mean to suggest – as the quote does – that the Core will fix overall gaps. Maybe she only means differences in subjects like computer science and engineering that, as she writes, do lean male. But as Core proponents will point out if you assert the standards are too broad, the Core only furnishes math and English guidelines, not engineering or computer science. More important, of the two areas the Core tackles, AP-taking suggests women dominate one and hold their own in the other. 62 percent of students taking the AP English exams in 2014 were female, while 48 percent of Calculus AB takers were girls. At the very least, these figures belie any accusations of systematic efforts to exclude women from college-prep courses, even if girls tend to choose different courses than boys.
Sadly, superficial argumentation for the Core is widespread, if rarely quite so egregious as this. More common is proclaiming that “higher standards” will, simply by virtue of being higher, drive greater achievement and make the country economically triumphant. This despite what the research actually says about national standards.
Ironically, Core supporters love to take opponents to task for being misinformed, and they are sometimes right: Core opponents do too often ascribe curricula they don’t like, or malevolent motives, to the Core and its creators. But supporters have been just as untethered to reality despite, often, having been involved with the Core for years, unlike lots of parents forced to scramble for information after the standards suddenly showed up at their doors demanding their children. In the case of Shalala, at the very least she signed the Shanker Institute’s “manifesto” applauding the Core – and calling for an explicit national curriculum – in 2011.
Defense of the Common Core has too often come in the form of platitudes and ungrounded assertions. This latest effort hasn’t improved upon that.