All About Common Core

Growing up, the words “common core” could be found on the lips of every person who found themselves in a classroom at some point or another? Now, they aren’t discussed nearly as frequently? So, what is Common Core, and how do people feel about it now?

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an educational initiative from 2010 that set academic standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics. The standards define what knowledge and skills students should have gained at each grade level. It’s an attempt to standardize education nationwide, aimed at preparing students for college and career.

Since it’s development, criticism of the Common Core has made its way to the public forefront. In fact, criticizing this set of standards was so commonplace growing up that I could tell you that people didn’t like the Common Core, although I had no idea what that actually was. The criticism around the Standards developed for a variety of reasons, ranging from lack of input from working teachers on writing the Standards to the content to the whole idea of standards-based education. 

In terms of actual effectiveness at getting students ready for college, The Washington Post states that the Common Core Standards are not achieving this goal. In English language arts, this is mainly because of the discrepancy between what grade schools and colleges view as most important to writing. In grade schools, especially high school, the emphasis is disproportionately on critical analysis of written material, while the key element of writing in college is stated to be generating ideas for writing in the first place. This discrepancy could lead to students being unprepared for the actual realities of writing in college.

In terms of mathematics, teachers often report teaching math skills beyond the Common Core requirements, either because they find these skills as most important or because they find that students are unprepared for later math courses.

However, there are obvious benefits to the Common Core Standards. Since so many states adopted Common Core Standards in some form, it allows for different states to compare standardized test scores accurately.  (Although, standardized testing itself has its own set of pros and cons.)

Common Core has also given educators a way to evaluate student performance since set skills are supposed to be learned at each level. Plus, having students learn the same things, at least in theory, sets them up equally as well for their future.

That said, a big problem with the Common Core is that the standards are vague and broad, and educators can pick and choose different pieces of the standards, or apply them in very different ways. So, while the sentiment is there, with very little regulation or way to ensure educators are all following the same standards, the common core is less effective. (Some argue that this is actually a good thing because and that standardized education kills creative teaching.)

That said, what is the fate of Common Core today? What happened to the rampant discussion of these standards that populated the classrooms of my youth? The answer is, essentially, nothing. After so many states adopted the Common Core, in 2017, about half of them claimed to have plans to revise or replace the Common Core Standards.

Despite these claims, Peter Greene claims in Forbes that the Common Core Standards have never really left our classrooms. First, he makes a point to state that Common Core was never really implemented in a standardized manner anyway and that only the subjects that would be on standardized tests were emphasized in classrooms. As a result, areas such as speaking and listening were neglected because of their lack of possibility to appear on standardized tests.

Then he gets into the meat of the article: despite claims to reject or reform Common Core, the Standards never really left. From the beginning, different districts and even individual teachers have been picking what worked, revising their lessons, and designing a curriculum that they claim aligns with the Common Core. And since there is neither an authority to say otherwise nor hard and fast rules in terms of what a Standards-based education looks like, these teachers were actually right. So, nothing that the government of each state could say or do in terms of Common Core could actually change how teachers are teaching. They’ll keep using the Standards, albeit with different names, to categorize and organize what information needs to be taught, and they’ll keep filling in the gaps based on what specific information needs to be learned in a particular school district to allow for further success in school.

So, although the promise of change has allowed the discussion of Common Core to fall to the wayside, the much-debated set of standards has never really left. Educators and students alike are still as influenced by it as ever.