Common Core

I’ll be on NPR’s On Point today discussing Common Core opportunities, risks, and politics.

2 Replies to “Common Core”

  1. Andy–
    Valiant job defending the common core, but your argument about the consequences of adoption of standards and assessment sounds incredibly glib to anyone who spends any time at all in classrooms. You said the “gap” is “curriculum” and that “policymakers” will have to face the issue of what is currently taught in comparison to what will have to be taught. The problem is NOT curriculum– it is that the human resource base in the sector– selection, training, induction, support– is a generation away from being up to whatever the Common Core will deliver. This can only happen in a system that is so hyper-institutionalized that policy wonks can dream up ideas that are completely disconnected from the reality that most educators work in. The Common Core is the metastasized result of the rein of the policy wonks. The countries that are doing well right now are those that made investments in human resources a generation ago that allow them to do the work now.

  2. Hi Dick –

    Thanks for your comment.

    Probably worth noting that you’re not the only one out there who spends time in schools and classrooms – and as you know people can and can then come to heterogenous views on things. That’s said, I agree with your point. I thought we’d get to that issue because we’d discussed it in the pre-interview, but there wasn’t time with the various questions and so forth. Hacker brought it up, in a different vein, but the conversation moved on too fast. It’s an enormous issue though. It’s one of the big ones I see:

    https://www.eduwonk.com/2013/05/common-core-challenges.html

    There was way too much ground to cover this morning to get to everything because there are so many dimensions to this.

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