John Kuhn: Our Kids -- Coddled or Confident?
Guest post by John Kuhn.
Frank Bruni recently wrote an article for the New York Times in which he argued that American children are coddled. In related news, Frank Bruni apparently doesn't know any poor children.
I'm not as upset about the Bruni column as many of my friends because he's right about a subset of American kids. We do have coddled children. But we also have hungry children. Bruni comes off as strangely uncurious and out-of-touch with the realities of that tiny sliver of America that isn't Manhattan. He wrote the column primarily to advocate for the Common Core State Standards, a collection of nationally-adopted learning expectations adopted by a coalition of state leaders who had been incentivized to do so by Washington, D.C., in a pretty brazen gambit to sidestep laws prohibiting the US Department of Education from exercising "any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum."
Bruni, like the Department of Ed., feels that high-quality, nationally-shared minimum learning standards will improve our students' outcomes on standardized tests. He's probably right about that. The nations that do the best on tests like PISA tend to all have national standards. They also don't have our history--we started our government with