Random political opinion of the day, arrived at after five minutes of consideration: I think Common Core is stupid.
There seems to be this assumption behind it that it is bad if public schools in Alabama have less demanding standards than those in Massachusetts? But this seems obviously good. Schools in Massachusetts should teach more than schools in Alabama: since students in Massachusetts are on average smarter, the optimal curricula for the two states are different.
My friend is an elementary school teacher in an underprivileged area and she has this absurdly detailed list of things she has no choice but to teach, even if the students are still struggling with one-digit subtraction and have no business learning about the distributive property. But she can’t just go back and spend two weeks reviewing subtraction, because … we have to demand a lot of students? And this will somehow resolve the problems that different students (and, on average, different groups of students) learn at different paces?