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?
Isn’t the point that the reason MS schools are smarter on average is because the curriculum is more rigorous?
I agree that people think that, but I disagree with the claim itself: I think Massachusetts just has a very different population of students from Alabama.
My understanding is that Common Core was supposed to solve two problems: make sure that students who move states will have roughly the same knowledge base as their peers, and increase the value of a high school diploma by ensuring that it represents mastery of a set of rigorous standards.
So there are real reasons to be concerned about different standards in different places; it’s not just a basic assumption. If schools in Massachusetts teach the distributive property in second grade and schools in Rhode Island teach it in third grade, then a kid moving from Providence to Quincy could fall through the cracks. And if you can graduate from high school in Alabama without ever learning long division, someone with an Alabama high school diploma is gonna suffer on the job market.
I can think of a few ways to negate the second problem (like overturning Griggs). But I’m not sure what you can do to solve the first problem other than a set of common standards.
Also, in terms of ludicrously unrealistic expectations for education policy, this has nothing on No Child Left Behind’s stipulation that every student in the country should achieve a “proficient” level on statewide standardized tests by 2014.
Those both seem like reasonable justifications to me, just not very important ones? In the course of going to four different elementary schools in six years, I managed to learn about Native Americans in social studies for three years in a row, while never learning long division. But like, I was fine. (I learned long division on my own.) And what percentage of students ever move states? It seems like not a compelling enough reason to make every school in the country teach the exact same curriculum.