Common Core’s Lasting Damage
Have you ever watched Americans line up informally? An ex-CIA analyst once said the best way to tell if you are not in America is to watch if people line up to receive things without instruction. In other countries, large mobs will rush the distributor. In America people line up. And where no formal stanchions exist, we will form lines with unwritten but commonly understood rules. No cutsies. No shoving. You will follow the established serpentine. It is part of the American psyche.
So when someone comes in and establishes a new formation we are preconditioned to follow it to maintain order. This was and remains the danger of common core. Even though there were no official stanchions to make us get in its line, we lined up behind it anyway; buying textbooks and curriculum, paying for teacher training, etc. Once the que is formed, Americans, though complaining about the length of the line and what awaits us when we get to the front of it, are not easily moved out of the line.
Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, wrote in the Heartland blog about the effects of common core which he predicts will be with us for a long time. He says, “chances are it has robbed a generation” of education and opportunity. Wood provides an excellent answer to the question “Well what’s the harm with moving forward with what we have from Common Core?”
Common Core Damage Will Last for Years to Come
Common Core (CC) K–12 math and English standards are lingering, despite concerted efforts by concerned parents and taxpayers to remove them.
It is like a house with an underwater mortgage: The United States has invested so much in Common Core that it can’t easily get out. The investments include very large amounts spent on textbooks, computers to support the Common Core tests, and teacher training. The investment also includes some hard-to-quantify things: the squandered opportunity, the huge expenditure of political capital, the disaffection of millions of parents, and the psychological harm to students who face spending many more years living out the classroom consequences of a discredited educational experiment.
Students face those extra years of miseducation simply because there is no easy exit from Common Core. The textbooks and computers have been purchased, and the teachers have been trained. Even the states running for the exit door have a long wind-down ahead of them.
Undoing some forms of bad policy can take years. Build a road or a bridge in the wrong place and chances are it is a permanent mistake, but if the government builds the wrong curriculum, chances are it has robbed a generation.
Demoting Literature
Some of the specific harms are easy to see. The Common Core is making a mess of instruction in reading and writing. It demotes reading literature, Common Core’s Lasting Damage – Missouri Education Watchdog:
