Common Core is turning out to be a Common Disaster.
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the largest teacher union, wrote a letter to the union’s three million members calling the Common Core rollout, “completely botched.” This is a blow to the standards and assessments many thought were a consensus among educators and states across the country to prepare students for college.
In recent months there has been a steady stream of teacher unions, teachers, parents and government officials expressing their concern over Common Core and hesitation about its rapid rollout and implementation timeline. Common Core is a state initiative that the Obama Administration is pushing and is already being incorporated in schools across the country, with full implementation required by the 2014-2015 school year.
Common Core removes local accountability for a child’s education. Presently, if a parent is concerned about their child’s education or teaching material in the school, there is a direct course of action for a parent to raise their concerns. With Common Core, however, that course of action and accountability between parents and teachers is muddled, at best, and completely removes accountability from the local school, teacher and even the state.
This is because Common Core was written, developed, and adopted with little input from parents and educators. Now, with 45 states and the District of Columbia having adopted the standards, educators and parents are learning that their child’s education is suffering, and there is little they can do because the standards and assessments are already written, being taught in school, and only allowed limited revisions.
In his letter to the union members, Dennis Van Roekel stressed the fact that the frustration with the standards are not isolated, citing the fact that 70% of teachers believe the implementation of Common Core is going poorly in their schools.
This statistic is astonishing. Developers of the Common Core standards and assessments seem to have forgotten that educators and parents should be consulted about what is taught in the classroom.
