Common Core Curriculum—Dumbing Down Education

I have written on this page my aversion to the widely accepted Common Core Educational standards.  Common Core is being instituted all over the United States—at least in 45 of the states.

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have written this national curriculum; and it is strongly supported by the Obama Administration. There is nothing new about the Curriculum; it is a decades old idea fostered in the Clinton era by Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Mr. Tucker proposed a system of labor-market boards at the local, state, and federal levels where curriculum and job matching will be handled by government functionaries.

Since the early 1990’s the state of Massachusetts has found a way to beef up the educational prowess of their high school graduates by instituting rigorous academic standards, teacher testing, and high-quality tests that students must pass to graduate from high school. These three measures have caused Massachusetts graduates to move from mediocre performance on the SAT tests in the early 1990’s to first place in the nation in 2005. In that year, Massachusetts students scored best in the United States in all categories on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.

Why do states adopt the Common Core? It is simply because of money paid to them by the Federal Government for buying into the system. Of course, they understand that the Feds have LOTS of money. The Feds get it from China and give it to local school boards.

One home-schooling mother in our family has told us that if she were to use the Common Core in her teaching she would have to tone down her teaching so that it complies with lower academic standards than the standards she is using now. That’s dumbing down education in order to comply with government standards.

This post was resourced from the Wall Street Journal of 5/28/13 page A15.