Common Core Meets The Education Spring
With the 59th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education rapidly receding, it’s important to remember that the original purpose of federal intervention in local education was to guarantee access and equity. Any Southerner on the front lines of that effort can attest to what that intervention produced in terms of progress for the least-served children of the American community.
Today, that whole notion has gotten turned on its head as federal intervention for the sake of access and equity has gotten remade as a strategy to enable all sorts of bad actors who have very little regard for how schools actually serve the least-served children.
So many ideas masquerading as “civil rights” causes or platforms putting “students first”are proving to be vehicles for political agendas.
Into this maelstrom of contradiction and confusion comes the Common Core State Standards. Standards-based reforms, in general, have been posed as a necessary part of closing the nation’s achievement gap between minority students and their more affluent white peers. And because the Common Core has been described as being more“rigorous” and “advanced” than existing state standards, then there’s a strong implication
