You would, to quote some of my friends across the pond, have
to be quite daft to claim that there is no political element to resistance to
the Common Core State Standards regime. But what truly baffles me (I like to
think I can be a semi-detached observer to all this, given that world languages
aren’t touched by this program…yet, at least) is that the Common Core partisans
apparently did not see this pushback coming.
I may be totally off-base here, but the last big
national-level educational measure, No Child Left Behind, while
well-intentioned, possessed some very noteworthy flaws, most infamously the “100%
proficiency” benchmark, which resulted in standards being lowered to help push
students over the threshold so that states could continue to get that hot,
nasty federal largess poured all over them. This system-gaming resulted in a
not-inconsiderable number of people being rather displeased.
Now we have the Common Core crew seemingly shocked, simply
shocked, that their (admittedly bottom-up and elective) national program to
align curricular goals is stimulating the pitchfork and torch sectors, so to
speak. I have seen the, shall we say, discomfort, which Common Core has caused at
the in-service meetings that I attended at my placement school with the new
emphasis on following student’s reasoning, rather than if they got a correct
answer or not.
In fact, the article made me think of this image, which I
shall attach below.
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| I'd say "RMFH," or "Read more freaking history" |
I have to agree with you about the discomfort surrounding the Common Core roll out. It has certainly caused some confusion and a lot of frustration. Common Core is pushing for quality education and the increase in critical thinking is certainly beneficial. But it is important to point out that the main drivers for this change are not educators and are pretty far removed from the actual education process. Nice observations on the article and this coming storm.
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