Winning the Common Core
Perhaps because Americans as a nation have a gift for organizing, we tend to meet any new situation by reorganization, and a wonderful method it is for creating the illusion of progress at the mere cost of confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
Charles Ogborn
There was another one in my inbox today--an irritating guest column from a grinning "business leader" urging Michiganders to get behind the Common Core State (sic) Standards, thereby supporting greater learning for our "future entrepreneurs, innovators and talent." (Read: low-level employees.) There was a total absence of entrepreneurial innovation in this column, alas, which seemed to be a cut-and-paste of the usual faux international-comparison stats, puffed-up claims about standards and outright fibs about the convincing "evidence" underlying the CCSS.
I have long held that the CCSS are a thoroughly political response to a nagging, century-old problem: our national inability to eradicate poverty via education alone. Pretty much everyone knows that standards, by themselves, have absolutely zero magical transformative power. If test scores improve as a result of the imposition of CCSS, it will be because teachers decide--one at a time, school by school--to reshape their own instruction, conforming to these national standards and the aligned tests.
Standards, however, were something we could do. It wasn't all that difficult to weasel a way around the federal proscription against a national curriculum, hire a bunch of writers and consultants, get something down on paper, then hit the road to publicize the new policy and