The Educated Reporter: Why almost nobody is writing about the Common Core.

The Educated Reporter: Why almost nobody is writing about the Common Core.

Why almost nobody is writing about the Common Core.

by Linda Perlstein

A think tanky pal of mine wrote me today to ask why adoption of the Common Core standards is not getting more press. Fair question; I think when it comes to national ed reform right now, 89 percent of the attention is going to teacher quality, 9 percent to turnarounds and 2 percent to everything else.

I told him that ... standards are boring. I don’t mean to be glib. Among policy people, the question of state standards vs. common standards is and always has been interesting. But for beat reporters, far less so. Perhaps that is because on a day-to-day level, standards are wallpaper. What’s on the benchmark test, what’s in the district curriculum (if there is any), what’s in the Open Court book: This is what determines what happens in classrooms each day. Yes, state standards influence all that, but they are not on educators’ minds as much as policy makers think they are.

Maybe it is just too removed, the question of whether and how much the Common Core standards will change