Louisiana Educator: Almost Everything Parents and Teachers Should Know About Common Core

Louisiana Educator: Almost Everything Parents and Teachers Should Know About Common Core:

Almost Everything Parents and Teachers Should Know About Common Core

This is Part I of a Two Part Article

How The Common Core Developed

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for K-12 education were adopted by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) in the Spring of 2010. Those standards had not yet been written at the time, so they actually were adopted sight unseen. The CCSS were an initiative by the National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to standardize the teaching of English language arts and mathematics and later science and social studies for all states. The goal of the NGA and CCSSO was to modernize the teaching of those basic skills areas to raise the level of achievement of American students to a higher world class ranking and to make American students more competitive for the world job market.

There were no public hearings explaining the contents of the CCSS before their adoption. There was really nothing to share with the public at that time except that the standards were intended to be state of the art learning with emphasis on rigor and critical thinking skills for our students. From the very beginning, the push for the new standards did not come from parents or even from classroom teachers.  It came from non-classrom teacher elites who believed they had the answer to improving U.S. student performance compared to other countries.

The driving force for the development of the CCSS came from the National Governor's Association with heavy influence from the Hunt Institute and philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and a group called Achieve. (Thank you to Dr. Mercedes Schneider for finding the news storiesexplaining the involvement of these groups in proposing this standards effort.) The Obama administration as represented by Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan bought into the project from the very beginning. In June, 2009 Duncan announced that 350