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Comment by shmageggy | Hacker News Reader

Really? The author is advocating extending universal testing to higher education? Because that's working so well in secondary schools... /s

Common core is a failure. The idea of extending that model to cover an even broader, more diverse set of subjects and topics is really poorly thought out. Who's going to design these tests? What professor is going to give a shit about them when their evaulations are based solely on research performance, not teaching? What top school with world-class faculty would ever agree to hamstring itself with a generic curriculum rather than let its experts teach what they know best?

What a terrible idea.

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While I agree with your general sentiments,

I find that most people who bash the Common Core State Standards don't really understand them.

Why, exactly, do you feel that Common Core is a failure?

Education is one of the few areas that the state has clear, Constitutionally defined authority to manage over the federal government.

Yet, 46 out of 50 states have accepted the Common Core, which seems to me to be a tremendous success.

In my examination of the Common Core State Standards, I have found them to be thoughtfully designed, and a tremendous improvement over the fragmented and rambling state standards of old, at least in Illinois.

I find that most people who bash CCSS think that it's a method of teaching, rather than what it truly is: broad learning standards that give educators some general goal in which they can use any method to achieve.

Now, if I move my family to California, New York, or Wisconsin, these students should be working on roughly the same concepts.

This to me seems like a good thing.

Of course, there must be a reason why you think that they are a failure, and I am certainly willing to hear you out.

> Yet, 46 out of 50 states have accepted the Common Core, which seems to me to be a tremendous success.

I believe receiving Race to the Top money was tied to adopting Common Core, which contributed to the adoption rate. I think a state could in theory have adopted a different standard but Common Core granted them the most money and was the most easily accessible.

Maybe the Common Core standard is fine, but whoever is coming up with the actual problem sets for the Common Core seems to be an actual crazy person.

I have to agree. My kid's fourth grade class (Common Core, California; adopted a NY State based text) has been going over multiplication of two and three digit numbers in three different ways for over a month now.

I like math, and I can see what they're trying to do (build intuition in a multi-faceted way & justifying different multiplication algorithms) but the way it is done is boring her to death. It is too much repetition, and they have squeezed the fun out of it in what seems like a desire for repeatability.

The problem here isn't Common Core, it's "mainstreaming".

The issue is that the good students will always learn quickly and be bored while the average student is learning.

The only solution would be to skip her ahead a year in math.

I'm not going to weigh in on CC itself (I don't have an opinion either way), I just want to point out that when Texas, NY and California (or any combination of those 3) adopt a standard it becomes almost impossible to find a text book or other resources that are not geared toward that standard, and thus becomes very difficult to generate curriculum.

So with California and NY adopting CC this fuels the adoption of CC in more states as a standard because it opens access to more resources at reduced cost since you aren't buying, essentially, custom materials and books. I think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way and has contributed to a lot of noise around CC.

Right, it's like no child left behind for college kids. So small, private, and usually online colleges are taking advantage of poor people with access to subsidized tuition. I agree that's a problem, but creating a broad-spectrum standardized testing scheme is a completely wrong way to go about it. I don't know what the answer is, but some effort must be made to crack down on the for-profit diploma mills.

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