Education: The Common Core backlash

President Obama wants to nationalize your child’s education, said The Washington Times in an editorial. That’s the aim of a new federal initiative called Common Core—a one-size-fits-all set of teaching guidelines and assessments in reading, writing, and math. With the help of $4 billion in stimulus money, 45 states have been bribed into adopting the policy, which “transfers control of what is being taught in local schools away from teachers, parents, and administrators and hands it to a remote bureaucracy.” Once a system of national standards is established, “federal officials won’t be able to resist the temptation of inserting every trendy educational fad into the curriculum.” The dumbing down of our kids’ education is already underway, said Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo in The Wall Street Journal. To focus on more “textual analysis,” Common Core’s suggested reading list drops such classics as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and adds the novel Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Is that supposed to be an improvement?

Paranoid rumors to the contrary, Common Core is not a left-wing conspiracy, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. This voluntary set of standards was drawn up with the support of many state governors, including Republicans such as Bobby Jindal and Jeb Bush, after business leaders complained that high school graduates lacked basic math and reading skills. The program does not mandate certain textbooks or instruction in ideology, as some fellow conservatives fear. Instead, it sets “some coherent standards on what children should know about math and English by various grade levels,” with an emphasis on reasoning and thinking, rather than on rote memorization. The state-set standards they replaced were sometimes “dumbed down” to protect school districts serving the poor—leaving millions of children “unprepared for global competition.”

But higher standards don’t always produce better outcomes, said Steve Krashen in The Cincinnati Enquirer. Despite a series of well-intentioned programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, our education system still lags behind other nations’—a 2012 study of 49 countries ranked American students 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading. Why? The U.S. has the second-highest level of child poverty in the developed world. “When children are hungry, undernourished, ill,” and go home to dysfunctional families, new standards and tests mean very little.

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