How Common Core Literary Standards Undermine Education


by Michael J. Ortiz
Crisis Magazine

With the growing acceptance of the Common Core State Standards, a set of benchmarks that seeks to raise the literacy of our elementary and secondary school students, a debate is underway over the wisdom or folly of a federally crafted plan that aims to have a major hand in the education of our nation’s children. Presently, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted the Common Core.
The principle architect of the Common Core is David Coleman, a Yale graduate and a Rhodes Scholar.

While his critique that public schools could be more analytical in their approach to reading has some points in its favor, his solution of standardization and diminishing the role of fiction in favor of non-fiction is creating more problems than solutions. As many of his critics point out, Coleman has never taught in an elementary or secondary classroom. Nevertheless, he is among a group of reformers who want to reshape the landscape of education in America.

In 2012, David Coleman was named as the ninth president of the College Board. He is well-poised to continue the standardization agenda he has initiated with CCSS. In fact, his agenda, while its ostensible goals are unobjectionable, is deeply intertwined with progressive politics and a philosophical pragmatism infatuated with the “data gathering” that lead to President Obama’s two-term presidency. As noted by Susan Berry, in Breitbart, Coleman’s remarks at a Harvard Education conference in 2012 included a Who’s Who of Obama’s re-election campaign and Democratic activists: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Jeremy Bird, who lead the “Turning Texas Blue” campaign, and notably, Dan Wagner, Obama’s former chief analytics officer. The data collection gurus are now set to reform American education with an unprecedented access to our children by means of a nation-wide net of statistics starting in pre-school.

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