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The full implementation of the Common Core State Standards has come and gone, but its true impact on schools and education as a whole may still not be known for several years. Certainly, the shift to a national set of standards has been revolutionary and highly controversial. They have been debated and well discussed, and a handful of states once committed to the standards have recanted to go in a different direction. As the media continues to evaluate the significance of the Common Core and data from Common Core states begin to pour in, you can bet the debate will rage on. In the meantime, let's examine several of the pros and cons of the Common Core Standards that will continue to lead the debate.

Pros of Common Core

1. International Benchmark. The Common Core State Standards are internationally benchmarked. This means that our standards will compare favorably to standards of other countries. This is positive in that the United States has dropped considerably in educational rankings over the last few decades. Standards that are internationally benchmarked can help improve that ranking.

2. States' Performance Can Be Compared Accurately. The Common Core State Standards allow states to compare standardized test scores accurately. Up until the Common Core Standards, each state had its own set of standards and assessments. This made it exceedingly difficult to compare one state's results accurately with another state's results. This is no longer the case with like standards and assessments for Common Core states who share the same assessments.

3. Lower Costs for Test Development. The Common Core State Standards decrease the costs states pay for test development, scoring, and reporting, as individual states will no longer have to pay to have their unique tools developed. Each of the states that share the same standards can develop a like test to meet their needs and split costs. Currently, there are two major Common Core-related testing consortia. Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is made up of 25 states and PARCC consists of 21 states.

4. College Readiness. The Common Core Standards increase the rigor in some classrooms and may better prepare students for college and global work success. This is probably the single biggest reason that the Common Core Standards were created. Higher education has long complained that more and more students need remediation at the beginning of college. The increased rigor should lead students to be better prepared for life after high school.

5. Higher Thinking Skills. The Common Core State Standards-arguably-lead to the development of higher-level thinking skills in our students. Students today often are tested on one skill at a time. The Common Core assessment will cover several skills within each question. This will ultimately lead to better problem-solving skills and increased reasoning.

6. Progress Monitoring Tools. The Common Core State Standards assessments give teachers a tool to monitor students' progress throughout the year. The assessments will have optional pre-test and progress monitoring tools that teachers can use to find out what a student knows, where they are going, and to figure out a plan to get them where they need to be. This gives teachers an avenue to compare an individual student's progress instead of one student against another.

7. Multi-Assessment Model. The Common Core State Standards assessments are more authentic to a child's learning experience. We will be able to see what a student has learned across all curricula through the multi-assessment model. Students will no longer simply be allowed to come up with the right answer. Often times they must give an answer, state how they arrived at that conclusion, and defend it.

8. Same Standards Across States. The Common Core State Standards can benefit students with high mobility when they transfer from one Common Core state into another. States will now share the same set of standards. Students in Arkansas should be learning the same thing as a student in New York. This will benefit students whose families move constantly.

9. Stability. The Common Core State Standards give students stability, thus allowing them to understand what is expected of them. This is important in that if a student understands what, and why they are learning something, there becomes a greater sense of purpose behind learning it.

10. Teacher Collaboration. In many ways, the Common Core State Standards enhance teacher collaboration and professional development. Teachers across the nation have been teaching the same curriculum. This allows teachers in opposite corners of the nation to share their best practices with each other and apply it. It also provides the opportunity for meaningful professional development as the education community is all on the same page. Finally, the standards have sparked a meaningful, nationwide conversation about the state of education in general.

Cons of Common Core

1. Difficult Transition. The Common Core State Standards have been a tremendously difficult adjustment for students and teachers. It was not the way many teachers were used to teaching and not the way that many students were used to learning. There have not been instant results but instead, has been a slow process with many almost refusing to get on board.

2. Educator Attrition. The Common Core State Standards have caused many outstanding teachers and administrators to pursue other career options. Many veteran teachers have retired rather than adjust the way they teach. The stress of getting their students to perform will likely continue to cause more teacher and administrator burnout.

3. Too Vague. The Common Core State Standards are vague and broad. The standards are not particularly specific, but many states have been able to deconstruct or unwrap the standards making them more teacher friendly.

4. Increased Rigor for Some States. The Common Core State Standards have forced younger students to learn more at a quicker pace than they ever have before. With the increased rigor and higher level thinking skills, early childhood programs have become more rigid. Pre-Kindergarten has become more important, and skills students used to learn in second grade are being taught in Kindergarten.

5. Lack of Modifications for Students With Special Needs. The Common Core State Standards assessment does not have an equivalency test for students with special needs. Many states provide students with special needs a modified version of a test, but there is no such tool for the Common Core Standards. The entire school's population have their results reported for accountability purposes.

6. Less Rigorous Than Some Previous Standards. The Common Core State Standards could be watered down when compared to a few states who had previously developed and adopted rigorous standards. The Common Core Standards were designed as a middle ground of the current state standards, meaning that while many states' standards were raised, there were some whose rigor decreased.

7. Costly Material. The Common Core State Standards caused many textbooks to become obsolete. This was a pricey fix as many schools had to develop or purchase new curricula and materials that were aligned to the Common Core.

8. Technology Costs. The Common Core State Standards costs schools a lot of money to update the technology needed for the assessments, as most of them are online. This created many issues for districts who had to purchase enough computers for all students to be assessed in a timely manner.

9. Focus on Standardized Testing. The Common Core State Standards have led to an increased value on standardized test performance. High stakes testing is already a trending issue, and now that states are able to compare their performance against other states accurately, the stakes have only become higher.

10. Limited Subject Scope. The Common Core State Standards currently only include skills associated with English-Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics. There is currently no science, social studies, or art/music Common Core Standards. This leaves it up to individual states to develop their own set of standards and assessments for these topics.

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Controversial Common Core, What You Should Know Before Taking Sides

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The Common Core Standards are controversial and well-debated and there are several pros and cons of its implementation.

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The Common Core has been in the news quite a bit of late. Conservatives have attacked it as a "Nanny State racket," while liberals denounced Common Core test results as "bunk" (Gewertz, 2013b). This year, legislators in nine states introduced legislation to drop the Common Core or to cut funding for its implementation (Bill Status Tracker, 2013). U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan felt called upon to defend the standards in a speech to the American Society of News Editors saying, "The federal government didn't write them, didn't approve them, and doesn't mandate them, and we never will" (McNeil, 2013).

Amid the resulting hubbub, it's been all too easy for the practical questions of the Common Core to fall by the wayside. This is a shame, as the standards are slated to become the backbone for student, teacher, and school accountability systems and will play an increasingly prominent role in the American educational ecosystem. Given the fact that the 2013 PDK/Gallup poll found that only 38% of American citizens had ever heard of the Common Core, it is an especially propitious time to begin to take a hard look at what the standards mean for schools (Bushaw & Lopez, 2013).

This is not to say that folks haven't already been talking about the challenges of implementing the standards. Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said, "the biggest potential pothole, by far, is failed implementation" (Gewertz, 2013a). William McCallum, the University of Arizona professor who cowrote the math standards, similarly said, "implementation is everything" (Weingarten, 2013).

They are undoubtedly right, but implementation is a word that obscures all manner of sins (Hess & McShane, 2013). Its very ambiguity allows any number of policy missteps, dumb decisions, or miscalculations to be dismissed as nothing more than "implementation challenges." Yet the last half-century of school reform includes a remarkably long list of once celebrated now discarded ideas accompanied by the common lament that they were undone by implementation. Using such a broad term bundles together missteps produced by a lack of forethought, political and institutional resistance, the innate difficulty in scaling new programs, insufficient attention to the nuts and bolts of change, or unforeseen and unforeseeable surprises and treats these missteps as if they were the same.

This all matters immensely when it comes to the Common Core. After all, on the one hand, the Common Core is simply a set of standards - a listing of what students should know, aspirational words on a page. On the other, delivering on the promise of the Common Core will require states, districts, and schools to make a slew of complementary changes to curriculum, tests, teacher training, and the like.

More to the point, the Common Core has huge capability to do harm if it doesn't work out. While previous initiatives that fell apart in implementation - including site-based management, block scheduling, or comprehensive school reform - created headaches, disruption, and frustration at individual campuses or in certain districts, their reach was limited. The Common Core will affect state assessments and accountability, revamp K-12 instruction, force changes in teacher preparation and professional development, and more. If the Common Core falls apart, it runs the risk of taking all of those down with it, and the costs in terms of time, dollars, and disruption will be enormous.

The Common Core intersects with current efforts to improve education in the United States in at least four key places. Understanding those intersections can help educators, parents, and policy makers maximize the chance that the Common Core is helpful to these efforts and, perhaps more important, not harmful.

Will these new tests live up to their billing?

Hard to say, but recent fractures in the coalitions developing the tests portend problems.
#1. New tests
In President Obama's 2009 economic stimulus package, the Department of Education granted about $330 million to two consortia of states to develop tests aligned to the Common Core. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) was joined by 22 of the participating states and the remainder joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). SBAC and PARCC have been developing tests for several years and released their assessments for the first time this spring. If all goes according to plan, students will take one of these two assessments instead of their state-level exam in the 2014-15 school year.

When these new tests were introduced, Secretary Duncan set a remarkably high bar. He said the new assessments would "be an absolute game changer in public education" and would "help drive the development of a rich curriculum, instruction that is tailored to student needs, and multiple opportunities throughout the school year to assess student learning" (Duncan, 2010).

Duncan was certainly right that standardized tests have ample room to improve. Tests borne of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are designed to measure proficiency for a given grade and subject. As a result, while they're extremely accurate around the cut point between "proficient" and "not proficient," they don't tell us much about students in the tails of the distribution. Similarly, they don't tell us how much a student grew in a particular year, something all teachers would like to know. But, most of all, because each state is allowed to develop its own test to its own standards, cross-state comparisons are difficult, and ample evidence shows that there is wide variation in what different states define as proficient (Gewertz, 2013c).

Will these new tests live up to their billing? It is hard to say, but recent fractures in the coalitions developing the tests portend problems. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania have decided to not use PARCC's assessments, and Florida and Kentucky have not committed to field test the assessments in the upcoming school year. If states drop out of the consortia to develop their own tests, the 50-states, 50-systems problem the Common Core was designed to solve will remain.

There are also more prosaic issues, the most pressing of which is cost. PARCC's price of $29 per student for its assessments is more than the assessment costs of half of the states participating in the consortium. SBAC's $22.50 per student was more than the costs of a third of the states of its consortium (Gewertz, 2013b). Critics were quick to point out that those prices didn't include the additional costs of computer-based assessments like upgrades in hardware, software, and Internet bandwidth. So far, there are no reliable nationwide estimates for the cost of these upgrades, but 46% of the more than 500 school administrators surveyed last summer said their districts are delaying technology purchases due to budget cuts driven by the sequester (Ellerson, 2013).

Without some meaningful vetting process, all of the benefits of the nationwide market for new tools will be washed away in the flood of misaligned materials.
#2. Materials and professional development
In order to align instruction to the new standards, a raft of new materials for students and teachers are being developed. How schools integrate these new materials will play an outsized role in determining the ultimate success or failure of the Common Core. If the experience of Louisiana's Superintendent of Education John White is any indication, there will be problems. His department initially rejected every math and reading textbook that it reviewed because they were not sufficiently aligned to the Common Core (Sawchuk, 2012). If teachers can't find good materials, they can't teach to the standards effectively.

As it turns out, pretty much anyone can slap a Common Core-aligned sticker onto a textbook, professional development module, or supplemental resource. States, districts, and schools will have the daunting task of wading through all of these. Without some meaningful vetting process, all of the benefits of the nationwide market for new tools will be washed away in the flood of misaligned materials.

Instructional alignment is important because if teachers aren't teaching what is going to be on the test, then when poor test results come back we can't tell if (a) students were taught what they needed to know but didn't learn it or (b) students weren't taught what they needed to know. Each scenario requires a vastly different response. As new materials are rolled out, we might need several years to know if an expected dip in proficiency scores is due to harder tests or textbooks and materials that don't cover Common Core material adequately, or something different altogether, like students simply adapting to new question structures.

There are real questions about whether states have the capacity to deliver the high-quality professional development necessary to align instruction to the Common Core. The Center on Education Policy's survey of state education officials in 2013 found 37 states reporting challenges in implementing quality professional development and 31 states reporting challenges in providing all math and English languages arts teachers with state-sponsored professional development at all.

The hope that lower performance will shock parents and voters awake flies in the face of what happened when students and schools fared poorly on standardized exams in the past.
#3. New expectations
Results from the new, Common Core-aligned exams have shown drastic declines in student proficiency rates. This is almost axiomatic. Raising the standard from basic "proficiency" to the more rigorous "college and career readiness" means more students will struggle to clear it. Also, if the ACT is a reliable barometer of "college and career readiness," there is ample evidence that the American education system is not preparing students adequately. ACT, Inc. reported last year that only 25% of students who took the test were found to be college ready in all four tested subjects. This problem was not simply confined to more disadvantaged populations - while only 5% of African-American and 13% of Hispanic students were college-ready in all four subjects, only 42% of Asian-American students and 32% of white students were as well.

Part of the Common Core's theory of action is that the resulting scores on new college and career-standard exams will serve as what the authors of Pathways to the Common Core call "a crucial wake-up call" (Calkins, Ehrenworth, & Lehman, 2012, p. 9). Advocates expect the results to mobilize suburban and middle-class parents to the cause of education reform. But folks may also view the results far more skeptically, saying "I'd rather trust my 'lying eyes' than what any standardized tests tell me."

When the state of New York released results on the first round of Common Core-aligned assessments in summer 2013, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten told the New York Times that she was "worried" about the Common Core because "you have a lot of people all throughout the state saying, 'Why are you experimenting on my kids?' " Quoted in the same New York Times article, education commentator Diane Ravitch called the new standards "inappropriate" and "too high" (Rich, 2013).

The hope that lower performance will shock parents and voters awake flies in the face of what happened when students and schools fared poorly on standardized exams in the past. NCLB is a poster child for this. When more and more schools were deemed to be failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress, particularly schools that many believed were doing well, support for NCLB evaporated. Gallup polling showed modest popularity for NCLB in its early years, with 31% of Americans viewing it favorably in 2006 (Hess, 2006). As scores dropped, so did the support. By 2011, only 16% of Americans believed NCLB made the American education system better rather than worse (Saad, 2012). Gene Wilhoit, then executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, characterized NCLB at the time as "a system that was well intended" but that had led to "a result that is causing the law to lose its credibility (McNeil, 2011).

NCLB had credibility when it said the schools that parents and voters thought were failing were deemed failing. It lost credibility when it started to identify as failing the schools that parents and voters thought were doing well. It's hard to imagine why the Common Core would be any different. Is "proficiency" vs. "college and career readiness" a powerful enough distinction to help suburban parents deal with the sting of learning that their school (for which they may have paid a premium when buying their home) has pass rates in the 30s and 40s? If it's not, the Common Core risks undermining confidence in accountability policy that took decades to build.

Teachers are pushing back, arguing that the breakneck speed at which the standards are being implemented is simply too much.

#4. New stakes
A central feature of the U.S. Department of Education waivers to NCLB was a promise to develop teacher evaluation systems that use Common Core-aligned assessments as the measure of student achievement by the 2014-15 school year. To meet that timeline, tests have to be field-tested this school year. Instruction, materials, and professional development ought to align by the time these new assessments "count" for the purpose of evaluation. This is an enormous undertaking. Most of these accountability systems took years to develop, and changing the fundamental metric upon which they are based will have serious consequences.

In states all across the country, teachers are pushing back, arguing that the breakneck speed at which the standards are being implemented is simply too much. Joshua Starr, superintendent in Montgomery County, Md., took to the pages of the Washington Post in early 2013 to call for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing so schools would have time to align their instruction appropriately (Starr, 2013). AFT president Randi Weingarten seconded his call in April 2013, calling for an open-ended moratorium. Weingarten went on to take a firm shot at Common Core advocates, saying, "These standards, which hold such potential to create deeper learning, are instead creating a serious backlash as officials seek to make them count before they make them work. They will either lead to a revolution in teaching and learning, or they will end up in the overflowing dustbin of abandoned reforms" (Weingarten, 2013).

In order for these tests to give meaningful and actionable information, instruction must be aligned to them. Alignment is a messy process that works through trial and error - schools teach what they think will be on the test to the best of their ability, get results back, figure out what they did not cover but should have, and adjust practice accordingly. This accelerated timeline compresses the ability to do that, and risks serious consequences being attached to tools that aren't ready for primetime. Even though Secretary Duncan offered a form of "waiver waivers" to states that needed more time implementing teacher evaluation programs in summer 2013, granting an extra year before tests would count, the alignment process could take longer, pausing accountability even more.

Conclusion
Political scientists have long recognized that it's easiest to forge broad coalitions when the idea is alluring, practical implications are fuzzy, and you've got a little money to help ease things along. The practical stuff of implementation was always going to ruffle feathers and spur the emergence of opposition. New standards and tests would pose concerns for teachers and unions when tied to new evaluation and tenure systems. Legislators and governors, many of whom weren't in office when the Common Core was adopted, would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars for implementation. Proficiency rates would either remain high (angering advocates) or would be slashed (angering parents). In short, the very things that helped the Common Core rush to its surprising success in 2010 and 2011 carried a price tag. The decisions that will determine the success of the Common Core enterprise will bear their own trade-offs, many of them affecting other key pieces of the school improvement agenda.

The Common Core has huge capability to do harm if it doesn't work out.

Such disputes speak not only to the fidelity of Common Core implementation or effect. They remind us that efforts to alter standards and assessments affect so many other improvement efforts that rest on that edifice. The plight of the Common Core will matter not just for that effort, but will play an outsized role in determining the fate of so many other developments that have defined 21st-century school reform. Whether educators, policy makers, advocates, and funders recognize that, and what they do about it, will in many ways be the educational story of the second decade of this young century.

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The Common Core has been in the news quite a bit of late. Conservatives have attacked it as a "Nanny State racket," while liberals denounced Common Core test results as "bunk" (Gewertz, 2013b). This year, legislators in nine states introduced legislation to drop the Common Core or to cut funding for its implementation (Bill Status Tracker, 2013).

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The standards-driven push for project-based learning and collaboration may inadvertently penalize introverted students who prefer to work quietly on their own, some educators say.

"As the 21st century school moves into an arena where students learn to communicate and work together in addition to working alone, there has to be an accompanying awareness on the part of educators to support students of all personality types," says Jill Berkowicz, co-author of The STEM Shift and a former curriculum director.

"Everyone has to be valued, because otherwise their contribution is missed."

Susan Cain's bestselling 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, criticizes schools and other institutions for primarily accommodating extroverts, who are more likely to participate in class and to enjoy the stimulation of group work.

Introverts "feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments," Cain said in her TED Talk on the subject.

Engaging introverts in class

Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, recommended the following in a TED blog post to aid introverts in the classroom:

Alternate between group and individual work. Increase work in pairs, which are beneficial for both introverts and extroverts.

Rethink class participation to allow students to demonstrate that they are engaged in ways other than speaking aloud.

Build silent reading time into the school day.

Provide alternatives to recess, such as by opening up the classroom for students who would rather play board games or do an activity quietly.

An estimated one-third to one-half of the U.S. population identifies as introverted, the book says.

Cain's book and the adoption of new learning standards has brought renewed attention to introverted learners, says Ann Myers, a co-author of The STEM Shift and a former New York district superintendent.

Though class participation and group work have long figured into grading, the 20th century classroom more easily allowed introverted students to be invisible during lessons but achieve on tests, Myers says. This is changing with the Common Core's focus on communication and collaboration skills.

Teachers can use standards to build a curriculum specific to their own group of students, Berkowicz says. And lessons should not connect academic success with extroverte traits (such as quickly answering questions aloud) or introvert traits (such as speaking quietly).

Rather, class work should be varied between group and individual work, Myers says.

"We need to look for environments in which everyone has an opportunity to shine and make their unique contributions," Myers says.

Modeling inclusion to administrators

The classroom is not the only place where introverts may be overshadowed. District and school administrators should consider the different personality types of faculty and staff during meetings and professional development-and make an effort to include everyone in discussions.

A common example is an administrative team meeting in which the leader raises a topic for discussion. The first person who speaks has an influence over everyone else who participates and on what other ideas are voiced, says Myers.

One way to ensure everyone gets a say is to ask all participants to spend a few minutes writing down their thoughts. Then the leader asks each person to share their ideas, Myers suggests.

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Does Common Core hurt introverted students?

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The standards-driven push for project-based learning and collaboration may inadvertently penalize introverted students who prefer to work quietly on their own, some educators say.

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#1 The Main Arguments for Common Core are Vague and Dubious

The most pressing reason for Common Core, its supporters claim, is that American school children are not prepared for the so-called "twenty-first century global economy."

Yet the Common Core standards themselves never actually define what they mean by "twenty-first century global economy." In reality, it is little more than a sound bite intended to scare parents. Without Common Core, we are told, those Chinese or Singaporeans or Finns are going to stomp all over us. They somehow forget that America did pretty well dominating the 19th century global economy, never mind the 20th century global economy, all without the help of a nationalized education scheme like Common Core.

"College and career readiness" is another dubious slogan used by Common Core. The problem with this slogan is that it underscores a distorted view of education. For progressives, education's main purpose is not to teach truth, form character, or transmit the timeless principles of Western civilization. On the contrary, education's primary purpose is to prepare citizens to be workers, to be cogs in the great "twenty-first century global economy" machine.

In his book The Story Killers, Dr. Terrance Moore points out that Common Core confuses "education" with "job training." While every parent naturally wants their children to succeed in life and acquire material and financial security, reducing education to a jobs program cheapens the former and cripples the latter.

Both the "twenty-first century global economy" and "college and career readiness" slogans are based on the conceited notion that government bureaucrats or progressive educators can predict both the job market and new technology decades in advance. Who foresaw with any accuracy the massive economic, social, and technological changes we have seen over the last 30 years, or even the last 10 years?

#2 Common Core is based on a Materialistic, Egalitarian Philosophy

Common Core is the fruit of a long line of progressive education reformers. This process of destruction of Western education did not begin in the last few years or even decades, but way back in the so-called Enlightenment.

Prominent eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers and educators such as Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, and Herbert Spencer developed education theories that are the direct ancestors of modern schemes such as Common Core.
They were Naturalists. Naturalism is a type of secular religion that replaced the Christian God with man and so-called "reason." They harshly attacked the influence of tradition, family and Christianity in the formation of children.

They were also radical Materialists. School subjects that did not have a direct benefit to material prosperity or that did not prepare a student to be a worker - such as philosophy or literature or languages - were useless and should be abolished.
John Dewey, the founding father of progressive American education, continued this materialistic trend here in America. For him, education was a means to create an egalitarian, socialist society, freed from the supposed "superstitions" of religion. He wrote:

"The moral responsibility of the school and of those who conduct it is to society. ...[A]part from participation in social life, the school has no moral end or aim. ...[T]he moral trinity of the school [is] the demand for social intelligence, social power, and social interests."

This philosophy of education is exactly the same as that of the progressives today who wrote Common Core.

#3 Uniform "Standards" Themselves Will Not Improve Education in America

There is no evidence that imposing a uniform education system on the country will, in itself, result in a more educated citizenry. It is true that some countries with uniform "standards" such as Finland and Singapore rank higher than the United States. However, it also happens that many countries with uniform standards, such as Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Russia rank lower than the United States. The problem therefore is not a lack of uniform "standards," but rather a host of other factors that cannot be reduced to a single numerical score on a standardized test.

And contrary to the claims of the Common Core, it is completely unlike any education system in the world. Common Core was never evaluated or peer reviewed by teachers or education specialists, nor did parents have any say in their development or implementation.

#4 Common Core Eliminates Local and Parental Control over Education

The Common Core standards were written and copyrighted by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, two non-profit organizations that are beholden to no federal or state agency or parents' rights group. If parents have a very difficult time getting elected politicians to change bad laws, influencing a corporate-funded liberal non-profit is next to impossible.

The Standards prohibit states from modifying more than 15% of the standards. The remaining 85% cannot be modified in any way by states, school districts, teachers or parents.
Most ominously, the Common Core Standards document refers to itself as a "living" document, and therefore one that will "evolve" in the future. We can guarantee that those changes will not come from parents or teachers but from the non-profits that own the Common Core copyright.

#5 Common Core Virtually Determines What Will be Taught in the Classroom

Supporters of Common Core claim that it is not a curriculum. We are told that the standards only require that certain concepts be taught, and that teachers are free to choose the books, methods, and authors with which to teach those concepts.

But the distinction between standards and curriculum is a hazy one. In reality Common Core will heavily influence, if not outright determine, what will and will not be taught in the classroom.

How do we know this?

First, because the Common Core scheme includes standardized tests. In the public school system, it is an open secret that teachers teach to the test. With teacher performance directly tied to test scores, few teachers will forego teaching what they know the Common Core puts on the tests.

Second, because the architects of Common Core have freely admitted that it determines curriculum. Bill Gates, the biggest funder of Common Core, revealed this goal in a speech in 2009:
...[I]dentifying common standards is not enough. We'll know we've succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards...

When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well-and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.
David Coleman, the primary architect of Common Core, has said the same thing:
"Teachers will teach toward the test...There is no force strong enough on this Earth to prevent that. There is no amount of hand waving, there is no amount of saying 'They teach the standards not the test, we don't do that here,' whatever." 5

#6 Common Core English Harms Literature

Progressive education has always been hostile to the teaching of the classic works of Western Literature. The Common Core English standards take this hostility a step further by replacing up to 70% of traditional literature with so-called "Informational Texts." According to Common Core, an "Informational Text" is a non-fiction, non-literary type of document that includes newspaper articles, technical manuals, government documents, genres that most students find boring or that do not contain any wholesome moral or life lesson.

The Common Core "Recommended Reading List" contains a few enlightening examples of "Informational Texts":
"The Evolution of the Grocery Bag" by Henry Petroski

"Invasive Plant Inventory" by the California Invasive Plant Council

Recommended Levels of Insulation - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency/U.S. Department of Energy

Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management - U.S. General Services Administration 6

Although these documents are only "Recommended Reading" in the Common Core, the Common Core tests will virtually guarantee their use in the classroom.

#7 Common Core Math Will Not Prepare Students for Careers in So-Called STEM Fields

The primary reason given for adopting Common Core Math is that it will supposedly prepare American high school students for careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math - the so-called STEM fields.

Ironically, Common Core does exactly the opposite. It forces states to adopt a Math curriculum that is simply inadequate to prepare students for these demanding fields.

Prof. James Milgram of Stanford University was the only Mathematics expert involved in developing Common Core. He refused to sign off on the Common Core Math standards when he saw how inferior they were to existing Math standards. He pointed out that Common Core Math delays Algebra I until 9th grade and does not include Calculus in high school at all, which are necessary for students to be prepared for STEM courses in college. Prof. Milgram concluded that Common Core will put American students at least two years behind the high-achieving countries of Europe and Asia.

Jason Zimba, the main architect of Common Core Math, admitted that it will only prepare students for Math courses at a non-selective Community College, not a four-year university. 7

#8 Common Core Imposes a Cult of Testing

Common Core includes a massive increase in standardized testing. Already starting in the lower grades, children are required to take regular high-stakes, high-pressure tests throughout the year.

Tests have become an end in themselves. They are no longer one tool among many to measure progress. Common Core tests are akin to a high-stakes 100 meter dash with increasingly-higher hurdles. This has created a hostile learning environment, with some teachers reporting a spike in stress, depression, and resentment towards school.

This obsession with testing underscores a shift in how our society view education. Like socialist bureaucrats, progressive education reformers love forms, tests, and statistics. For them, such things make centralized planning and control much easier, anything that cannot be reduced to data is either useless or does not exist. The problem with this materialistic view is that success in the more abstract subjects such as English, History, Philosophy, or Literature cannot easily be reduced to test scores and tables of data.

And high-stakes testing has led to high-stakes cheating, as in the case of the 11 teachers and administrators of the Atlanta Public School system who were convicted in the wake of a massive cheating scandal.

#9 Common Core is Increasingly Unpopular

Public support for Common Core has fallen precipitously over the last two years. According to an Education Next Poll, from 2013 to 2014 teacher support for Common Core has fallen from 76% to 46%, and support among general public has fallen from 65% to 57%.

As of April 2015, three states - Oklahoma, Indiana, and South Carolina - have pulled out of Common Core. Grassroots groups opposed to Common Core are active in every state that still has it. Common Core has even become an issue in the primaries leading up to the 2016 presidential election. A recent University of Connecticut poll showed that the parents who are most knowledgeable about Common Core are also the most likely to oppose it.

#10 Common Core Collects Massive Amounts of Data on Children

Federal law prohibits the federal government from establishing a national database for public school students. To circumvent this, Common Core includes a requirement for each adopting state to establish a mutually compatible databases, thereby allowing data to follow students wherever they live. These databases collect data in more than 400 data points, which will record students' performance and behavior from Kindergarten through college and beyond. 9

The state and federal government have no business collecting such massive amounts of data on children.

Conclusion

Common Core will not improve American K-12 education. It is a socialist/progressive experiment that will impose an inflexible, one-size-fits-all, egalitarian education scheme on America's children. It drastically harms the way both Math and English is taught, and violates the sacred right of parents to have a say in their children's education.

Every patriotic American should reject Common Core, and voice his concern to his elected officials urging them to repeal it.

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Why Is Common Core Bad for Children's Education?

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The most pressing reason for Common Core, its supporters claim, is that American school children are not prepared for the so-called "twenty-first century global economy." Yet the Common Core standards themselves never actually define what they mean by "twenty-first century global economy." In reality, it is little more than a sound bite intended to scare parents.

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I feel like the purpose of this app is to be a reference and that's precisely what it is. With the standards handy on my phone, I'm able to avoid lugging around binders full of information to endless PD sessions. I have it all right there. I agree that copying and pasting would be a nice feature. For those complaining that it isn't "tailored to their state"...the CCSS were designed to put all the states in the same page with the same standards. Wouldn't tailoring them be exactly what they were meant to move away from? That's not the app designer's problem.

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‎View the Common Core State Standards in one convenient FREE app! A great reference for students, parents, and teachers to easily read and understand the core standards. Quickly find standards by subject, grade, and subject category (domain/cluster). This app includes Math standards K-12 and Langua...

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BY CHERYL SLAVIN

One of the most vociferous objections to the Common Core State Standards to date has been the perception of Common Core implementation as a "top-down," thinly veiled attempt by the federal government to control nationwide educational policy. Less obvious, but perhaps ultimately more substantial, lurks the possibility that the CCSS is a semi-disguised play by for-profit educational corporations to bolster their coffers by tens of millions of dollars a year through the development and sale of materials geared toward implementing the new standards.

The official tale of who developed the standards goes something like this: About six years ago two not-for-profit public policy organizations, The National Governor's Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) started a joint initiative to develop a set of nationwide educational standards for the purpose of setting clear and consistent goals that would ultimately prepare students by the end of high school for successful college or workplace careers. The developers issued clear disclaimers of any federal input.

However well meant in and of themselves these goals were, on close inspection it remains unclear who exactly participated in the creation of the standards, and certainly, who spearheaded the initiative in the first place. While the inclusion of the words "governors" and "states" in the names of these organizations seems to support the assertion that the CCSS was developed by a forum of public officials, Diane Ravitch, education historian and blogger who has written extensively about Common Core, notes that in fact there was "minimal public engagement." It seems just as likely that the "business and corporate partners" of the NGA and CCSSO were the true influences.

The NGA and the CCSSO share a number of funders, including The College Board, ACT, and Pearson Education. The CCSSO is additionally funded by a number of other well known educational publishers such as Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As Mercedes Schneider, a teacher and Huffington Post blogger has uncovered, Pearson Education created its charitable foundation and started donating money to the NGA and the CCSSO at precisely the same time that they started to develop the new standards. Recently, Pearson agreed to pay a $7.7 million fine to New York State for illicitly using its charitable foundation to promote its financial interests related to Common Core.

Pearson has stated openly that it expects to make millions off the new materials, especially its online and digital resources. It is not a far stretch of the imagination that other educational corporations expect to do the same. Indeed, a recent article posted by Education Week noted that 68 percent of all school districts plan to purchase new instructional materials for the coming school year, the overwhelming majority of which will be toward implementing Common Core Standards.

Meanwhile, there is a continuing perception that the implementation of a unified national system of standards and assessments is in truth an attempt by the federal government to clamp down more closely on policy which historically resided within the power of the states. Certainly, the close tie between implementation of the CCSS and the award of Race to the Top money does contribute to the appearance that the federal government has a stake in the imposition of a unified set of educational standards.

As teachers and administrators continue to struggle with competently grasping the new standards in time to adequately prepare their students for the 2014 assessments, the question remains: who is really profiting from the new standards, and who is really paying for them? The goal of setting rigorous standards in order to prepare the next generation of leaders is itself a lofty one, but not at the counter-productive cost of poor teacher and student performance. An informed the public can decide whether its children's educational future should rest in the hands of those who would make the most money from it.

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Following the Money Trail: Who Profits From the Implementation of Common Core State Standards?

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Part 2 of a 4 Part Series BY CHERYL SLAVIN One of the most vociferous objections to the Common Core State Standards to date has been the perception of Common Core implementation as a "top-down," thinly veiled attempt by the federal government to control nationwide educational policy.

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Can Common Core effect anyone harmfully? 

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Can Common Core effect anyone harmfully? 

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People's opinions against common core have been primarily targeted towards their organizations lack of obvious improvement. Any many years they have been unable to close the gap between rich and poor students.

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Opinion

Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Credit... Hedof

FOR 15 years, since the passage of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind act, education reformers have promoted standardized testing, school choice, competition and accountability (meaning punishment of teachers and schools) as the primary means of improving education. For many years, I agreed with them. I was an assistant secretary of education in George H. W. Bush's administration and a member of three conservative think tanks.

But as I watched the harmful effects of No Child Left Behind, I began to have doubts. The law required that all schools reach 100 percent proficiency as measured by state tests or face harsh punishments. This was an impossible goal. Standardized tests became the be-all and end-all of education, and states spent billions on them. Social scientists have long known that the best predictor of test scores is family income. Yet policy makers encouraged the firing of thousands of teachers and the closing of thousands of low-scoring public schools, mostly in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

As the damage escalated, I renounced my support for high-stakes testing and charter schools. Nonetheless, I clung to the hope that we might agree on national standards and a national curriculum. Surely, I thought, they would promote equity since all children would study the same things and take the same tests. But now I realize that I was wrong about that, too.

Six years after the release of our first national standards, the Common Core, and the new federal tests that accompanied them, it seems clear that the pursuit of a national curriculum is yet another excuse to avoid making serious efforts to reduce the main causes of low student achievement: poverty and racial segregation.

The people who wrote the Common Core standards sold them as a way to improve achievement and reduce the gaps between rich and poor, and black and white. But the promises haven't come true. Even in states with strong common standards and tests, racial achievement gaps persist. Last year, average math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined for the first time since 1990; reading scores were flat or decreased compared with a decade earlier.

The development of the Common Core was funded almost entirely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was a rush job, and the final product ignored the needs of children with disabilities, English-language learners and those in the early grades. It's no surprise that there has been widespread pushback.

In 2009 President Obama announced Race to the Top, a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grant money. To qualify, states had to adopt "college and career ready standards," a requirement that was used to pressure them into adopting national standards. Almost every state applied, even before the specifics of the Common Core were released in June 2010.

The federal government, states and school districts have spent billions of dollars to phase in the standards, to prepare students to take the tests and to buy the technology needed to administer them online. There is nothing to show for it. The Race to the Top demoralized teachers, caused teacher shortages and led to the defunding of the arts and other subjects that were not tested. Those billions would have been better spent to reduce class sizes, especially in struggling schools, to restore arts and physical education classes, to rebuild physically crumbling schools, and to provide universal early childhood education.

Children starting in the third grade may spend more than 10 hours a year taking state tests - and weeks preparing for them. Studies show that students perform better on written tests than on online tests, yet most schools across the nation are assessing their students online, at enormous costs, because that is how the Common Core tests are usually delivered. Computer glitches are common. Sometimes the server gets overloaded and breaks down. Entire states, like Alaska, have canceled tests because of technical problems. More than 30 states have reported computer testing problems since 2013, according to FairTest, a testing watchdog.

Standardized tests are best at measuring family income. Well-off students usually score in the top half of results; students from poor homes usually score in the bottom. The quest to "close achievement gaps" is vain indeed when the measure of achievement is a test based on a statistical norm. If we awarded driver's licenses based on standardized tests, half the adults in this country might never receive one. The failure rates on the Common Core tests are staggeringly high for black and Hispanic children, students with disabilities and English-language learners. Making the tests harder predictably depresses test scores, creating a sense of failure and hopelessness among young children.

If we really cared about improving the education of all students, we would give teachers the autonomy to tailor instruction to meet the needs of the children in front of them and to write their own tests. We would insist that students in every school had an equal opportunity to learn in well-maintained schools, in classes of reasonable size taught by expert teachers. Anyone who wants to know how students in one state compare with students in other states can get that information from the N.A.E.P., the existing federal test.

What is called "the achievement gap" is actually an "opportunity gap." What we need are schools where all children have the same chance to learn. That doesn't require national standards or national tests, which improve neither teaching nor learning, and do nothing to help poor children at racially segregated schools. We need to focus on that, not on promoting failed ideas.

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Opinion | The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students (Published 2016)

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Opinion Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. FOR 15 years, since the passage of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind act, education reformers have promoted standardized testing, school choice, competition and accountability (meaning punishment of teachers and schools) as the primary means of improving education.

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What does preservice teacher need to know about common core? 

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What does preservice teacher need to know about common core? 

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Three-Minute Video Explaining the Common Core State Standards

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Common core is hosted and maintained by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.

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About the Standards | Common Core State Standards Initiative

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This site is the official home of the Common Core State Standards. It is hosted and maintained by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center). It provides parents, educators, policymakers, journalists, and others easy access to the actual standards, as well as supporting information and resources.