Common Core Architects Still Don’t Get It.
While the Comon Core is a shredded shadow of its ambitious former self, the standards movement that birthed it is still out there, still mulling over how their attempt to implement national academic standards came up so very short. A recent webinar suggests that they still have no idea.
The webinar was hosted by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown established almost six years ago that has backed charter schools, high-stakes testing, and the Common Core. For its webinar about the “unfinished agenda” of the “standards-based reform movement” (a less damaged and more open-ended brand than “common core’) included, it included Michael Cohen (former president of Achieve, a business instrumental in pushing Common Core), Chester Finn (president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Foundation, organizations that both pushed the Core and sponsor charter schools), John B. King (who as ed chief in New York created wide outrage by his support of Common Core), Lauren Slover (former head of PARCC, one of the two Big Standardized Tests linked to the Common Core), and Lauren Weisskirk (CSO of EdReports, a group that evaluates how well materials align with the Common Core standards). All part of the vast web that inflicted Common Core on U.S. education.
The Core were standards, an attempt to lay out what the end point of education should be (in math and reading only). But it didn’t say how to get there. And it did not result in vast improvements in student achievement (aka test scores).
The panelists suggested that the missing piece may be curriculum and a more detailed and specific directing of teachers. “In some sense, it’s striking that we left this off the table in any way from the outset,” Cohen said.
Not really. Common Core supporters were, at the time, extremely sensitive to charges that the Core was a curriculum and extremely vocal in declaring that it was no such thing, perhaps because the federal government is specifically prohibited from pushing any curriculum.