Two key standards I strive to teach my students:

• Regarding informational text: Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.
• Regarding speaking and listening: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.

False statements, fallacious reasoning, exaggerated or distorted evidence: I can think of nothing more important for literate 21st-century students to be able to decipher, as these are rampant and pervasive in our culture and media today, from reality TV to TV news and from advertising to politics.

In our complex, fast-moving world of constant stimuli from vibrating little screens, one of the easiest categories of fallacy to fall victim to are the fallacies of distraction.

Simply put, this fallacy arises in an argument when the listener distracts the arguer from the issue by raising a point that is tangential or only tenuously related, and thus hijacks the argument so that in the end the original issue never gets resolved.

This is exactly what is happening in debates and discussions about public education today. Why is one of the greatest and most vehement arguments in modern public education about the Common Core State Standards, for example?

As I see it, this argument is a fallacy of distraction.

Full disclosure, of course, my teaching is referenced to the Common Core State Standards. I’m not opposed to them. And the main reason I’m not opposed to them is simple: the standards are not the great issue to fight about. I had standards before (Washington State EALRs/GLEs), and if CCSS is abolished, some set of academic standards will replace them. Standards are standard in public education.

And ultimately, standards don’t make kids learn.

That’s the fact that the argument about standards has distracted us from. When I interact with opponents of Common Core, they are passionate, and usually that passion takes three (general) flavors: first, there’s those skeptical of the money machine that is behind the standards; second, there’s those who question the developmental appropriateness of some of the standards in the early grades; third, there are those who hate the idea of testing or anything Pearson related.

The only of those three arguments that is germane to the larger issue is the middle one: it is certainly possible that the standards as written are not developmentally appropriate at the earlier grades. But still, let’s remember: standards don’t make kids learn.

As for the money machine, let’s also remember that it is in fact possible to use the standards without paying anyone a dime. Good teachers know how to find the standards on the website, cull and sort, do some good lesson design, all the while remembering: standards don’t make kids learn.

And the testing argument: We need to remember that the standards and the tests are two different things. I am fine with the standards but am opposed to the testing and do have concerns about Pearson’s apparent influence (yet all that to me is still a distraction). My position is possible because I recognize that the standards and the tests are actually two different things. A weak analogy: an exercise plan and the scale I stand on to weigh myself are not inherently connected. I can use one without the other. The scale doesn’t make me trim pounds.

Here’s the problem with these distractions: like all distraction fallacies they ultimately prevent the actual issue from being resolved.

We need to be careful of getting distracted by the Common Core argument. It is a distraction because, as I think I might have mentioned somewhere, standards don’t make kids learn. What we need to focus on instead are the things that make kids learn: well-trained and supported teachers.

As Spencer pointed out in his most recent post, other school systems often heralded as “more successful,” spend far more time investing in people than in standards, tests, or “accountability measures.” I beat a similar drum constantly: the single most impactful change that our system could make has nothing to do with standards or even tests, but rather, it has to do with teacher time. If we provided more time in a teacher’s work day for assessment, collaboration, responding to student work, and planning lessons informed by student needs, then I believe we would witness unprecedented gains in student performance.

Because, let’s remember the real issue: we want students to learn. Standards don’t make kids learn. Tests don’t make kids learn. Quality teachers make kids learn. Frankly, it doesn’t matter a hill of beans which set of standards I’m referencing my teaching to if I as a teacher have time to design lessons, assess kids, craft interventions, and in reality, do anything more than just keep my head above water.

What started, I believe, as an argument about how to make schools better has fallen victim to so many distractions that in the end, we engage in these side battles about tangential issues that prevent us from putting energy toward a real solution. This is why fallacies of distraction are used in debates: when introduced, these fallacies prevent the actual issue from ever being resolved. That is exactly what is happening.

Maybe we need to distract our distractors more. Whenever we find ourselves in an argument about the standards, we need to hijack that conversation and steer it back to what matters: (re)creating a system that permits and promotes quality teaching in order to have a greater impact on student learning. No matter what standards we argue about or what tests we rally against, we are ultimately distracted from the necessary work of changing the way schools look both for teachers and for students.