"New Analyses Find Common Standards Lacking
By Catherine Gewertz
President Obama wants to tie Title I aid to states' adoption of the common standards, as you already know from reading our story. But a couple of new reports are out today claiming that several states would have more to lose than to gain by adopting them.
One study comes from the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Massachusetts. The institute compared the September and January drafts of the common standards with the state standards in Massachusetts and California. The study concludes that the common standards will not ensure that students are college-ready in math or English/language arts.
The math standards draft includes fewer topics than the state standards, places some topics at inappropriate grade levels and 'dumbs down' others, it says. The English/language arts draft doesn't do the trick either, the Pioneer Institute co-authors say, because it doesn't step up the difficulty level enough from grade to grade, is 'unintelligible' in places, and doesn't specify the content knowledge necessary to develop certain skills."
