LAUSD- NO COMMON CORE WITHOUT COMMON SENSE
(Mensaje se repite en Español)
For a change, let me suspend my disbelief and assume that Superintendent John Deasy and those running the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and other underachieving school districts like it around the country are actually interested in turning things around in terms of academic achievement by the implementation of Common Core Standards. Of course, this requires the assumption that they are not just doing it to get their share of $4.35 billion of Race to the Top federal funds they stand to get if they adopt "college-and-career ready standards." In order to succeed with Common Core, they will have to be willing to implement some of these very same Common Core critical thinking standards, instead of blindly implementing Common Core form and not content as if the subjective reality of LAUSD's presently failed student population could be ignored to avoid the truly difficult work of making Common Core work.
The greatest challenge to Common Core implementation is that it will hold students, teachers, administrators, and parents to a higher standard of achievement than the one they are used to and already failing to attain. So how can Common Core possibly succeed? By finally taking cognizance of where LAUSD has been allowed to degrade to over the years in a system where only the rhetoric and blind obedience are rewarded, while the substance of all periodically changed reform projects never has the rigorous enforcement and pragmatism necessary for it to actually succeed. There is a certain irony to the fact that myself and other "enemies" of LAUSD have a greater belief in what positive change could be implemented across the board at LAUSD than those running the district.
In order to succeed, Common Core cannot be mandated into existence from one day to the next. Rather, it will have to be transitioned in grade by grade where there is an awareness that the longer students have been in LAUSD, the further they are away from