Jennifer Rubin sighs over growing right-wing distrust of the Common Core:
The rationale for Common Core is that state standards, even the best of them, are far too low, leaving our kids in the dust behind international competition. (“A 2009 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found no state had reading proficiency standards as rigorous as those on the highly respected and internationally benchmarked NAEP 4th grade exam. Only one state, Massachusetts, had an 8th grade test as rigorous as the NAEP exam. Worse still, a large number of states had reading proficiency standards that would qualify their students as functionally illiterate on NAEP.”)
At a dinner with a group of journalists a year or so ago, [Jeb] Bush explained to us that while middle-class families in good school districts may think they are getting a good education, a significant percentage of their kids are not college ready and, in any case, match up poorly against foreign competition.
Jamelle Bouie, who doesn’t agree with Rubin very often, describes the opposition from conservatives as “near-senseless”:
Common Core was a bipartisan initiative, with support from the vast majority of governors, including Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, who has since reversed course as he preps for a potential 2016 presidential run. What happened to make Common Core an object of hate for conservative activists? The answer is easy: “The Republican revolt against the Common Core,” noted the New York Times on Saturday, “can be traced to President Obama’s embrace of it.” This near-senseless Republican reaction is just one part of a growing tribalism that’s consumed the whole of conservative politics.
Steve Benen points out:
It’s become so bad that in January, Common Core supporters practically begged the White House not to mention the standards in the State of the Union address, fearing it would necessarily push Republicans further away.
“It’s imperative that the president not say anything about the Common Core State Standards,” Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said at the time, adding, “If he cares more about the success of this initiative than credit-taking, he will skip over it.”
Obama obliged, but it didn’t help.
But as Catherine Gewertz observes, the Common Core is a fait accompli in most states, “all but a handful” of which are set to administer exams based on those standards for the first time next year:
The two state consortia designing new tests for the standards – with the help of $360 million in federal aid – have sought to fundamentally reshape the way learning is assessed. And yet, over time they have scaled back some of their original testing plans in the face of political, economic, and technical constraints. Those realities have led consortium officials – who once made lofty promises about the revolutionary nature of their forthcoming tests—to represent them more humbly as “version 1.0” of assessments that are a vast improvement over what most states currently use, and will keep getting better in the coming years.
Meanwhile, Stephen Sawchuck reports that college education programs are not all on the same page when it comes to integrating the Core standards into their teacher training:
Teacher education has been under many pressures of late, including calls to improve student-teaching, classroom-management coursework, instruction, and program outcomes. The addition of the Common Core into that mix promises to be especially volatile, because it stands to reshape teacher education curricula to a greater degree than the other efforts. And that fuels concerns about academic freedom, as well as long-standing debates about whether programs’ main duty is to prepare teachers capable of carrying out specific, state-approved courses of study – or, as others argue, to prepare teachers to be knowledgeable about competing theories and to be critical actors in education policy.
Update from a reader:
Not only right-wing people are opposing Common Core. I am a former public school teacher and as liberal as they come. I put my kids into school this year, after home schooling them for many years. I have to say that the Common Core math instruction is truly insane. Parents can’t even help their child with homework half the time because getting the right answer is not enough. You have to do it the “right way”. And the right way is often crazy and filled with multiple steps well beyond anything needed to get to the answer. I have friends who are teachers or just parents and vote Democrat or even Green that feel the same way. I am waiting to see if it gets better or improvements are made, but we might be going back to home schooling in the future.
The Dish 