memes

I don’t fully trust this - the problems it lists mostly existed prior to common core and speak about education in a very idealized way. As if if we were not using common core these wouldn’t be issues but they very much were prior to common core, teaching flexibility seems to be touched on a lot and that hasn’t been a thing since standardized testing was introduced and most of these changes occurred then, the shifting away from concepts to focus on skills, homogenous learning, inflexibility etc. Strict educational norms are traditional, not new. I do think the point about focusing on fiction writing versus nonfiction is valid enough but that’s also fairly arbitrary since the courses the students take would actually be the deciding factor there. The criticism about it being a “top down” solution is just how education works in a bureaucracy, standards for curriculum will be set that’s just how it works.

I don’t think common core is perfect and I especially take issue with any form of teaching that strays from phonics when it comes to reading specifically but it’s not any more problematic than the systems that came before it and the only way to avoid these issues really is to tailor education to each individual student, which is how we should be spending our money to be clear we simply don’t live in that world right now.

I don’t actually know if the issues being attributed to CC stem from it directly or if this is simply a new leaf on our very broken educational system tree.