How Common Core quietly won the war
The standards that naysayers love to call “Obamacore” has become the reality on the ground for roughly 40 million students.
Note to 2016 GOP contenders: The Common Core has won the war.
Republican presidential candidates are still bashing the divisive K-12 standards. Donald Trump recently called the Common Core a “complete disaster,” and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz proclaimed they should be abolished — along with the Education Department.
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But it’s too late. Ask most any third grader: Just as Common Core and rigorous standards cheerleader-in-chief, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, prepares to step down, the standards that naysayers love to call “Obamacore” have become the reality on the ground for roughly 40 million students — or about four out of every five public school kids.
The math and English standards designed to develop critical thinking have been guiding classrooms for years now, even as the political fight wages on in statehouses and on the campaign trail: Many of today’s textbooks, workbooks, software and tests are designed to teach the oft-bashed academic standards and measure whether students are meeting them. The federal Education Department gave them a big boost, but never required them, nor can it.
In more than half of all states, millions of students took new standardized tests last spring based on the standards, and the expected uproar over these test scores hasn't materialized. The conspiracy theories about how Common Core would require monitoring kids via iris scans, force teachers to use porn to help students learn to read or ban teaching cursive have largely quieted.
After years of hand-wringing, very few of the 45 states that fully adopted the standards have attempted a clean break — and those that did found it wasn’t easy to do. In Indiana, where Republican Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill last year to ditch the standards, even Common Core haters have said the new ones are just the same standards by a different name.
“The few states that have rolled it back, when you look at what they’ve actually done, the standards they are using are 95 percent the Core standards. It’s what we know needs to be taught,” Melinda Gates said last week. She’s the wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose foundation has been heavily involved in promoting and implementing the standards.
As Common Core becomes more commonplace in public schools (and in many Catholic schools), some prominent Republicans concede they've lost their battle. Take former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona. As governor, she signed an executive order banning the use of the words Common Core by state agencies, though the standards themselves were still firmly in place. She wrote in a recent column on the Fox News website that implementation of the standards is “succeeding.”
Outspoken Common Core critic Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute agrees that the standards are likely here to stay — though that won’t stop his ongoing assault on the Obama administration using billions in incentives to nudge states to adopt the standards. What might change, he said, is how much states are held accountable for students' mastery of the standards, but “my sense is that most states are going to officially stay with Common Core or something like it.”
Karen Nussle, director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a group that helps lead the public relations charge in support of the standards, said the big fight over the standards is “a bit in the rearview mirror” as the conflict shifts to lesser skirmishes.
Standards have come under reconsideration in many states, yet some reevaluations have had a surprise conclusion — ringing support for the Common Core. That was the case for a public review in the deep red state of Mississippi. Kentucky also found wide support for the standards during a similar review.
In New York, where the uproar has been intense, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently declared the implementation of the standards had failed. But even as he ordered a review and promised reform, he didn’t throw out Common Core.
More than 40 states are sticking with Common Core though several have ditched
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/common-core-education-schools-214632#ixzz3oN2YcZWY
