Common Core: Now It Gets Interesting
by Frederick M. Hess • May 9, 2011 at 8:26 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareA few months back, I noted that the impressive early success of the Common Core effort risked breeding overconfidence, complacency, and inattention to how the effort would play out in practice. I warned that many who signed onto common assessments might be alienated by an effort that pushed too far or too fast.
Well, as of this morning, the Common Core battle has been officially joined. The notion that something this potentially momentous would unfold with no more than a bit of carping was always unlikely. Today, the anti-Common Core-ites fired their first organized response, in a manifesto titled, "Closing the Door on Innovation." Organized by the Hoover Institution's Bill Evers, Jay Greene of U. Arkansas and the Bush Institute, Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice, standards crusader Sandra Stotsky, and former Bush administration official Ze'ev Wurman, the document opposes "the ongoing effort by the U.S. Department of Education to have two federally funded testing consortia develop national curriculum guidelines, national
