The Press Dropped the Ball on the Common Core :: Frederick M. Hess

The Press Dropped the Ball on the Common Core :: Frederick M. Hess:

Archive Frederick M. Hess's Blog The Press Dropped the Ball on the Common Core by Frederick M. Hess  •  Dec 2, 2013 at 11:35 am Cross-posted from Education Week  Print  Send  RSS  Share During the past couple months, newspapers and cable news have had a field day analyzing Obamacare's troubles. Firestorms over HealthCare.gov or President Obama's unfounded assurances seemingly sprung from out of the blue. This followed years during which these boiling issues received little media scrutiny, permitting problems to fester. There are important lessons here for K-12's current brouhaha over the Common Core. Introduced in 2010 and adopted by forty-plus states with little notice by the end of 2011, the Common Core has since rocketed into the popular imagination. Headlines are now filled with tales of angry public meetings and legislative clashes in places like Florida, New York, and Georgia. This discord has surprised some enthused about the effort, which The New York Times editorial board celebrated as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity," and which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said "may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown versus Board of Education." The Common Core wasn't always contentious. When unveiled in 2010, it drew little controversy and little public examination or debate. At that time, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Michael Petrilli, the president and vice president of the Thomas Fordham Institute, and conservative champions of national standards noted, "This profound... shift in American education is occurring with little outcry from the right, save for a half-dozen libertarians who don't much care for government to start with." They concluded this inactivity was a testament to the quality of the standards and broad support for more uniform expectations. Three years later, things look different. States that raced to adopt the standards in 2010, including Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, have expressed second thoughts on participating in the standards. In New York, Common core critics have called for the resignation of education commissioner John King, due to