Doug Lasken
Many education activists were high-fiving in September when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney finally attacked President Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core State Standards. It was a long time coming, though it hasn’t quite come yet.
The Common Core standards are national academic standards that will replace the often shoddy and substandard standards (if that’s not an oxymoron) of the 45 states and District of Columbia that have approved adoption. As someone who consulted for the Fordham and Pioneer Institutes on assessing the states’ English Language Arts standards in the run-up to Common Core, I can attest that many states have abominable ELA standards in which, often, a functionally illiterate student can be certified proficient in reading. Ironically, one of the causes of such shoddy state standards is the federal
Common Core will falter if global competitiveness is sole goal - by Merrill Vargo
Why have public schools anyway? We’ve all heard the answer: Public schools are the engine of our economy, the cornerstone of our democracy, and the avenue for individuals to achieve their dreams. This list of goals sounds like mere rhetoric, but these three goals are worth thinking about. The first observation worth making about these three goals is that we don’t get to choose; we need to...