Education has become a staging area for innovative ideas. Similar to technology, education seeks the newest idea to improve test scores, measure student learning, and prepare students to be productive members of society. As an educator, witnessing these shifts in focus feel similar to waiting for the latest technology, destined to revolutionize and improve our lives. But, like Samsung, “The Next Best Thing Is Here.”

Recent reports asserted that Indiana became the first state to withdraw from the Common Core approach to teaching students reading and math. Mike Pence, the Governor of Indiana, suggested that students would be best served through educational decisions regulated by the state. In other words, the state of Indiana, as an educational community, will determine the best method for educating students. Perhaps other states should follow the state of Indiana, instead of transitioning to Common Core standards for advancing teaching and learning in their respective school districts.

An updated cover from Carter G. Woodson’s classic study about the mis-education of African Americans.

Once again, education in our communities has been left to the vices of educational policy-makers who claim to understand every angle of the growing problems regarding student learning. And their latest Band-Aid is the Common Core. Education is moving closer to isolating student learning to standards, and further away from the social component within schooling. John Dewey, one of the leading scholars and educators from the 20^th century helped to shape the importance of educating students both inside and outside of the school walls. In fact, Dewey argued that real learning happened when students had the ability to take lessons learned in school and exercise them through experiences outside of school. Essentially, this process ensured the application of student learning, and the development of communities in which the student was nested. This philosophy is extremely important, as many African-American students struggle with adapting behaviors associated with academic achievement, and understanding the connection between school matriculation and social mobility. Hence, the negative attitude towards schooling.

What happened to the ideation of linking schools with communities?

The overwhelming focus on testing has sequestered the importance of social education in schooling by refusing to acknowledge the community as part of the educational learning environment. As a result, the roadmap for school improvement somehow bypasses our communities and lands directly inside of school buildings. It is unreasonable to think schools can be improved without addressing the community first. While states and school districts sprint to adopt Common Core instructional practices, students are suffering by misunderstanding the relationships among school and community. In The Mis-Education of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson said: “[T]he emphasis is not upon the necessity for separate systems but upon the need for common sense schools and teachers who understand and continue in sympathy with those whom they instruct.” There is no need to continue separating school structures from communal frameworks. The “common sense” approach to education allows the community to operate in concert with schools to reinforce the meaning and purpose of educational pursuits.

The next best thing is there. And it dwells in our urban communities where policy-makers quickly assume that they know more than the residents living there. Seldom do educational policy-makers enter into urban communities and ask the residents, “What do you think your community school(s) need to excel?” People in these communities know better than anyone what works and what does not, as they have also endured the gamut of changes that claim to have “fixed” the problems in education. It is time to stop adding “new” answers, when pioneers in our communities can be leveraged to discover the answers.

Our students are not technology that educational policy-makers can upgrade or update when a new Operating System (OS) emerges. It is IMPOSSIBLE to discover the solution until the problem is fully understood. People in our urban communities fully understand the problem. Instead of continuously asking states to adopt the Common Core, how about coming to the core of our urban communities and asking the residents about standards needed to improve teaching and learning?

No need to wait. The next best thing has been in our communities. Go get it!