What's so bad about Common Core?

No, it won’t affect adults. It’s a K-12 education reform, which is something American schools have dealt with countless times. Sometimes they stick, but usually they eventually fade away and the next reform comes about. I don’t think anyone is really expecting the Common Core to complete revolutionize education- we’ve all heard that before- but it is a pretty common sense reform and with any luck the basic ideas will stick.

There is some higher education involvement in the sense that one of the main motivations for developing the Common Core is that there is a gap between the knowledge that high school kids are graduating with and what colleges are expecting incoming freshmen to know- hence the massive numbers of students who have to take remedial classes before beginning college level work. Done right, the Common Core is meant to ensure graduates are at least on the right track towards actually being ready for university level coursework. Obviously, not every student is going to achieve that, but at least that level of education will be available to those who can manage it and hopefully nobody will be going to schools that don’t prepare anyone for college level work.

Universities at this point are pretty uninterested in the whole thing. For one, it will take a while for the effects to trickle up. Today’s high school seniors are not going to magically be transformed into higher achieving students. But maybe today’s sixth graders will. For another, universities just have a lot more pressing issues on their mind. For the most part, they take the students they take and leave the students they leave, so if everyone is achieving slightly more that’s great, but doesn’t really change much.

In other words, it’s not even a question of left vs. right, since pretty much only the right opposes it for purely ideological reasons.

I remember that about 15-20 years ago, The Right ™ was pretty riled up over Goals 2000/Outcome Based Education and how it was supposedly going to replace academic standards with affective and social standards. E.g. instead of having to learn how to do algebra, you would have to develop an appreciation for diversity and accept that people from different cultures, especially minorities, might interpret y = x + 1 in a different way than you. This was obviously not acceptable to a lot of people because 1) it took away book learning and 2) most importantly, it taught kids to think for themselves rather than accepting the world view of their parents and their parents’ church.

I’m not sure how you define “ideological,” but I see conservatives with a deep-seated opposition to and fear of Big Government, and liberals with a deep-seated opposition to and fear of Big Business. I see conservatives opposing it because they don’t want Washington inserting itself into things that have always been state & local decisions, and I see liberals opposing it because they don’t want Washington inserting itself into things that have always been state & local decisions.

If your conclusion from that is that one side is ideological and the other isn’t … well, that tells me a lot about your ideology.

Sorry, not everything in life boils down to white hats vs. black hats. Sometimes the baptists and the bootleggers have common cause.

This is a real problem. Administrators need to realize that they don’t have to use stuff stamped “Common Core” and a good deal of what’s being peddled is crap, but developing your own assignments is time consuming.

I’ve seen lots of complaints about common core, and lots of examples of terrible test questions and inexplicable math procedures and such.

What I think has happened is that common core has caused a whole lot of new test material to be generated, and some of this material is simply bad. As I understand it, this isn’t the fault of common core - the tests aren’t written as part of it, are they? Rather, I think the problem is that the states are farming out material prep to local firms, and some of them are producing bad material.

It’s hard to tell how big a problem this is, because it’s only the bad stuff that goes viral on the internet. No one cares to read about a beautifully formed question.

We don’t have common core in Canada, but I see the same thing here. And I’ve been involved in the system of material creation, and know how the sausage is made. It’s not pretty. Test questions and worksheets are often farmed out to college students or small education companies (who then farm that work out to contract workers - probably college students, but it could be anyone). They get paid per question, and have a financial incentive to crank out as many questions as they can.

Quality control on the finished products ranges from mediocre to nonexistent. My kid’s newer school materials are just riddled with errors and poor questions. The older stuff is much better, but that’s the material that has survived scrutiny from parents and teachers over a number of years. The old dreck got filtered out.

So when something comes along that causes an upheaval in the curriculum, it causes a lot of new educational material to be generated. That material is going to have more errors and more bad questions than the established stuff, simply because the established stuff may have gone through many revisions to get to the level of quality it’s at.

I don’t see anything particularly conservative or liberal about this. I do agree that conservatives seem to be making more of a fuss at the grassroots level, but I suspect that has more to do with their general distrust of anything supported by Barack Obama and their fear of the federal government dictating what their child learns in school.

If there’s liberal propaganda injected into the material, I think this is likely because the large majority of people involved in the chain of content creation are likely to be liberals, and they are going to inject bias into the material even if they don’t realize it. For example, a lot of my kid’s essay-type questions in all subjects seem to involve the environment and how it’s being destroyed. I don’t think that’s an intentional form of propaganda, I just think it’s an issue that is on the mind of liberals, and since liberals write these questions they are more likely to choose that topic.

There is also institutional bias in our schools here - formal curriculum that teaches one side of a contentious issue as fact and ignores counter-arguments, or teaches what is really a political value as an objective fact. But that’s a completely different issue.

Not specifically, no. But there is a dynamic going on where there is a lot of money flowing towards getting common core in place, and then a lot of money flowing towards creating new curriculum to meet those standards, and a lot of money from the same sources, and a lot of it cross-flowing, and this is ripe for those inclined to be suspicious.

IOW, a nonprofit like the NMSI supports common core standards; College Board is a donor to NMSI; College Board is in the lucrative standardized-test business; and whaddya know, the Common Core requires standardized tests, and in fact the College Board is aligning the SAT to the Common Core…

In the same vein, a lot of the foundations that got behind Common Core in a biiiig way – Gates being #1 – have also given a loooot of money to the various nonprofits and and startup companies that are producing and selling CC-compliant curriculum. If you’re trusting, you see this as Gates helping on both sides of the fence; if you’re not, you see an evil plot by “moneyed interests” to dictate what our children learn even as they deny they’re doing so.

And of course, there is a positive boom in the ed-tech industry, with more and more education being computer-delivered, and a sudden disruption accelerates that, and we all know how Gates made his money, right? And these computerized learning people are also supported by Corporate America, and they take away the need for teachers, even though students are only able to learn if they are taught by a certified union-card teacher, and … OMG THEY’RE TAKING OUR JERBS!

Sorry. I’m knee-deep in this stuff. Just Google, it’s out there.