Educate me on your take on Common Core.

[LWolf]

3. Here.

"Common Core" is a set of standards. It's what you do with those standards that count, for the good or the ill.

The Common Core standards have some elements that lend them to inquiry based teaching methods...which I fully support. There is an emphasis on thinking, which I fully support. Personally, I'd prefer going back to the "frameworks" that used to organize curriculum before the "standards and accountability" movement started issuing too-long laundry lists of isolated skills and calling them "standards." But that's just me. The CCSS are not the problem. High stakes testing of those standards...that's the problem.

I don't support, in any fashion, high-stakes testing of any set of standards, including Common Core, and that is at the "core" of the controversy.

When high stakes testing is in force, it's the high-stakes test that drives instruction, and the authoritarian control of how that happens.