Monday, April 28, 2014 11:25 AM
The problem here is that some of the nuts in the GOP have brought out the most bizarre complaints about the Common Core. To hear them talk, you'd think that the Common Core was developed by space aliens intent on subjugating the United States. They are so far out there that reasonable people just automatically defend the Common Core against them.
Many of the complaints against the Common Core from the Left also sound like bogey-men arguments when they complain about the influence of Bill Gates and the Testing Industry.
That's too bad, because there are some significant issues with it; the state would be well-served by a second look.
What issues? Well, Diane Ravitch (a liberal on such matters) has pointed out some good ones: because it was never field tested and was developed without any input from classroom teachers, it demands level of thinking and learning which are inappropriate for the targeted ages. For example, it seeks certain kinds of abstract thinking from 5-year-old kindergartners, when that ability typically doesn't develop until age 7. It also focuses too heavily on non-fiction reading and short-changes narrative reading (even narrative non-fiction), which is dumb because people think in terms of stories -- it would be better to focus more on narrative non-fiction.