George Rebane
My 21jun13 KVMR commentary ‘Common Core is Coming’ invited an intense and long debate in the comment stream of its transcript posted here. Well, time has passed and the early results of Common Core testing are beginning to come in, and the results aren’t pretty. The kids are scoring markedly lower on the new standardized tests. First, Kentucky reported that its elementary and middle schools performance dropped by about a third. And now New York result is that only 31% of its students test proficient in math and reading. (Here’s more in the 7aug13 WSJ and from the Daily Caller.)
In other states where Common Core is being implemented, education administrators and officials are telling parents to brace themselves for lower test scores. And now the national debate will be launched as these test scores come in. CC proponents argue that we will finally get a true picture of our kids’ academic achievements from these nationalized tests, and to do better in the future we should turn to and spread CC across the land to bring our kids academic performance up to par. CC opponents are pointing out that the results reflect the application of a dysfunctional ‘one size fits all’ misdirected curriculum that is destined to fail our students during the coming years – another federal education program that doesn’t perform. Meanwhile, the unions are worried that the teachers will be held to account for their students’ poor showing.
Ah, the joys of central planning.
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