THE
CORE
partisan politics. The Core’s most
high-profile supporter, President
Barack Obama, was reelected. But
during the 2012 campaign, his
opponent branded the Core as a
federal overreach, pushing Obama
to walk a fine line between bragging about it and falling prey to
those sensitivities. “We’ve convinced nearly every state in the
country to raise their standards
for teaching and learning,” Obama
said in one debate, but he was
careful never to mention the Common Core by name. At the state
level, new governors and legislatures took office and found they
had inherited their predecessors’
ideas about how to educate their
children — ideas they didn’t necessarily agree with.
The Common Core has yet to
be tested in a big way. To understand where the initiative goes
from here, we have to go back
to where it started, and recover
some of the history that’s often
lost on newcomers to the debate.
To do that, The Huffington Post
spoke to key players responsible
for the Core’s creation and adoption to find out exactly how we
got here.
Think fewer zombies, and much
more bureaucracy.
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
CORE BEGINNINGS
Terry Holliday had a problem.
That’s what the Kentucky schools
chief thought as he sat in an auditorium filled with governors and
state school leaders in the Chicago
Airport Hilton one day in April
2009. His legislature had told him
he needed to write new learning
standards that ensured students
Students will learn less content, but more indepth, coherent and demanding content. In
other words, students should know fewer
things, but they should know them better.
were more prepared for higher
education or careers — a process
that could cost as much as $3 to
$5 million per subject — but his
budget had been slashed. How
could he possibly satisfy the law?
As he munched on pasta and
salad, Holliday focused on the
meeting. High-ranking employees
of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief
State School Officers — organizations that represent officials
involved in the process of setting
education standards — were giving presentations. Both hit on an
attractive idea: Instead of states
developing standards on their
own, why not pool resources and