The coming modern world: an “iron cage” in which a caste of functionaries and civil servants monopolize power over the lives of citizens

The Iron Cage of the Common Core?

by Anne Hendershott

Writing in the early 1900s, sociologist Max Weber depicted the coming modern world as an “iron cage” in which a caste of functionaries and civil servants monopolize power over the lives of citizens. He warned that the emerging bureaucracies would concentrate large amounts of power in a small number of people—creating a technically ordered, rigid, dehumanized society—eventually trapping all individuals in systems based on efficiency, rational calculation and control.

Weber’s warnings are helpful to recall when considering the response by parents to the federal implementation of the Common Core in the nation’s schools. Since Crisis began alerting parents of Catholic school children that more than 100 dioceses across the country have implemented the Common Core, parents have mobilized—forming Facebook groups, creating advocacy organizations, contacting their parish priests, their bishops, and their diocesan school superintendents—in an attempt to learn more about these new standards that will be driving the curriculum at their children’s schools. Yet, as Weber would have predicted, many of these parents feel powerless in the face of what has become a huge bureaucracy in Catholic K-12 education.

Unfortunately, parents are getting little help from the educational advocates, lobbyists and policy makers. In an attempt to allay parental concerns, the National Catholic Educational Associationissued a position statement on the Common Core on May 31, 2013 reassuring parents that “The Common Core standards in no way compromises the Catholic identity or educational program of a Catholic school.” Concluding that “the Common Core standards are not a curriculum,” NCEA reassured parents that “A curriculum includes what is taught, when it is taught, how it is taught and what materials to use…. None of these items are included in the Common Core standards. For Catholic schools, all of these elements will continue to be determined by diocesan superintendents, principals, and teachers working to meet the needs of their students.”

But, many parents are not reassured—they know that standards drive the curriculum. Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that in a speech he gave on September 2, 2010.

In his speech, Duncan celebrated the “beginning of the development of a new and much improved generation of assessments for America’s schoolchildren … one more milestone, testifying to the transformational change now taking hold in our nation’s schools.”

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