SchoolsRetooled TM

Finessing the Common Core

February 27, 2015 at 10:48 AM Leave a comment

Here’s the deal. The Common Core was heralded as a new higher standard for college readiness in PreK-12 education that ¾ of the states adopted at one time or another. Now there is some buyer’s remorse because states want flexibility in implementation. Therein lays the mistake. The wholesale adoption of the Common Core by states was misplaced. What we needed in the end was a nationwide minimum standard (hint: the Common Core) for Interstate portability and absolute flexibility within the states to direct how they achieved the minimum as well as how they wished to raise the bar locally.

In politics, like marketing, there’s more than one way to achieve the desired result. Take for example, the pharmaceutical industry, which takes a two-pronged approach to selling a new drug…sell it to the prescribing physicians and/or sell it directly to the consumers to get them to ask their doctors for it. Likewise, the Nation’s political agenda can be legislated directly or bubble up through grassroots operations within a critical mass of states. Gay marriage offers a brilliant example of the bumpy road to victory and the legal altar. Anyway, back to the Common Core.

The Obama Administration believed in a national standard for education, but they hesitated to define it as such. Instead, they let the early adopters of the notion among state education chiefs develop Common Core State Standards and sell them to their colleagues across the nation. Then, they offered NCLB waivers as an incentive for states to adopt the Common Core themselves. But, rather than sell the idea to the Legislature when they had more favorable odds, the Administration made a strategic mistake of solidifying the agenda via the back door to the states. Instead of seeing the ¾ adoption rate among the states as a mandate for a national standard, they were satisfied with uniformity within the states…a straight-jacket that would eventually irk states’ rights advocates and more independent thinkers among the local education leaders.

The opportunity that remains would be to stop waxing eloquently about the new high level of achievement offered by the Common Core and begin to sell it as a good minimum standard for the nation…the starting point from which states would have great liberty in setting their own agendas equal to or greater than the national mandate. Because that is what the Common Core is. We forget that any standard to be achieved by “all of the children” is the new floor for achievement. Yes, our glorious Common Core, if successful, is actually intended to be the lowest common denominator.

For now, we are mired in the false starts of treating standards as curriculum mandates, which they clearly are not, and thinking that states who wish to rewrite or modify the Common Core in their own words are wrong. It is time to let go of the rigid thinking and find the common ground founded in the Common Core.

Entry filed under: Common Core State Standards. Tags: Common Core, Common Core State Standards.