THE
CORE
ing parents to keep their kids
home from school. The Baltimore
County teachers union filed a
grievance against its board over
Common Core implementation.
A few months earlier, a Maryland
parent was thrown out of a school
board meeting for protesting the
standards. Tea party groups including the American Principles
Project have organized their members against the Core, and conservative radio personality Glenn
Beck has called it a product of
extreme leftist ideology.”
These critiques puzzle the
Core’s proponents. “This whole
agenda, the Common Core, is
pretty much a Republican agenda,” said Holliday, the schools
chief of Kentucky, an Independent. “I find it interesting when
some factions of the Republican
Party push back so hard on this
work.” In early January, Idaho’s
Republican Governor Butch Otter
pledged to press on with implementing the Core despite the negative response from his base. “It’s
the right thing to do,” he said.
But the pushback has led to reflection on the part of some of the
Core’s creators. It seems that by
not involving enough stakeholders on the front end, they opened
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
themselves up to much of the current criticism. “There should have
been a deeper state-level engagement in terms of their communities,” said Minnich, the CCSSO
president. “The discussions may
not have been deep enough.”
Most Americans weren’t informed about the process as it
happened, and they still aren’t. Ac-
Through good luck, good timing,
the support of the federal government and
a long-held desire among governors to get
it done, they had created the country’s
first set of shared ideas for what
students need to know and when.
cording to a Gallup poll last fall,
only 38 percent of the populace
had ever heard the term “Common
Core State Standards.” Perhaps a
more deliberately public debate
could have avoided some of the
attacks that now threaten to undermine what was meant to be a
promising change, a reform Arne
Duncan called “the single greatest
thing to happen to public education
in America since Brown v.
Board of Education.”
Joy Resmovits is an education reporter
at The Huffington Post.