Common Core and the Food Pyramid
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 16, 2013 at 9:01 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
Back at the beginning, in 2009 and 2010, I never would've expected the Common Core debate to get this heated and impassioned. Why? Unlike a lot of folks, it's because I thought (and continue to think) that the Common Core itself just doesn't matter that much. Now, please stay with me a bit before deciding you disagree.
How can I say that, when so many luminaries (including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, College Board prez David Coleman, and self-impressed PISA Overlord Andreas Schleicher) have insisted that Common Core will transform schooling? To be frank, I've never quite understood where the enthusiasts were coming from. Standards are just a bunch of words on paper.
I always think of the food pyramid (the one that the feds unveiled decades ago, only to decide that it was offering families bad advice and needed to be revised and replaced by "food plate" that Michelle Obama has championed. Whoops.). When the pyramid was unveiled, I'm sure some amped-up nutritionists excitedly thought it would make a huge difference when it came to health and obesity. Turned out: not so much. Most people have never paid a whole lot of attention; after all, it's just a bunch of suggestions assembled through a bureaucratic process. (And did I mention it was questionable advice?)
Now, there is one scenario where I could imagine the food pyramid having really mattered: If it had been used to set out new policies about what parents could feed their kids. Then it would matter a whole lot. Of course, what would matter would not be the guidelines about bread or cheese so much as the rules and consequences that policymakers attached.
And that brings us back to the Common Core. If the standards are better than those that many states had in place, swell. If more common reading and math standards make things easier for material developers and kids who move across states, that's fine. But I don't think that stuff amounts to all that much.
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a "game-changer" has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common
