Action Research Parent Opposition to the Common Core Literature Review

Parent Opposition to the Common Core and Educational Reform

While it might seem intuitively obvious that parents wish to provide a better education for their children, in many instances there has been extremely vociferous opposition amongst parents to standards-based reform in education. In New York State, for example, the ability to opt out of standards-based testing has been selected by an overwhelming percentage of the population. In 2014, "the parents of 60,000 New York students refused to have their children take the [standardized] test ... The superintendent of the Comsewogue Schools has test refusal letters for 80% of his students" and these numbers are increasing rather than decreasing (Burris 2015). Assuming parents want the best for their children, this indicates a sharp divide between parents' perceptions of what is necessary to improve their children's educational prospects for the future and administrators who are attempting to redesign the curriculum and use data from standardized tests to do so.

Parents often view the additional homework, unfamiliar instructions, and the difficulty in determining the rationale behind the teaching method to be a barrier to accepting a new curriculum. Interestingly enough, although the majority of Americans support educational reform in the form of the Common Core, opposition amongst parents actually facing the need to help their students learn via the Common Core method is strong. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice's annual Schooling in America survey found that while "a slight majority of American adults said they favored Common Core, when given a definition of the standards ...Nearly half -- 49% -- of parents polled said they oppose the standards" (Bidwell 2014). Parents' priorities are thus not necessarily always in line with what has been determined to be the best ways to educate their children by administrators and objective educational analysts. Parents also seemed to be more favorably disposed to individualized curriculums, however -- they were "more likely to highly rate private and parochial schools rather than public schools" and "think students are spending too much time on standardized testing" which indicates that if reforms are able to bolster the strengths of their individual students they may be more interested in supporting than blocking reforms (Bidewell 2014).

Clearly, it is necessary to get parents on board when a school decides to implement a reform program. However, simply because parents do or do not like a particular approach does not necessarily act as a measure…