There is usually a long distance between standards as drafted and their implementation. A reader comments:
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It’s not just standards that are being handed down. There seems to be a continuous stream of “clarifying” documents, like their Publisher’s Criteria, which double down on unverified approaches to learning, teaching, and curriculum design. These aren’t just academic standards anymore. Because writing standards involves a committee of multiple stakeholders, agreement is reached by allowing room for interpretation. But now, after the CCSS have been adopted, any room for interpretation and innovation that was created during the standards drafting process is being eroded by three men, two of which are handily available for consulting services. States may love this guidance. But understand what it does: dictates major curricular choices. Check out the math criteria. Among other things, you’ll see a mandated narrowed curriculum with rationale peppered with the same alarmist buzzwords common to the corporate reformers. You’ll also see where they demand instructional time follow the same proportions set by the national assessment consortia — making teaching to the test another mandated reality. You’ll see other things, too. Their sense of authority is stunning. It’s worth a look.
http://corestandards.org/assets/Math_Publishers_Criteria_K-8_Summer%202012_FINAL.pdf
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
CC has nothing to do with content.
It has everything to do with control.
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To understand the falsehoods that are the common core standards please follow my blog “Promoting Just Education for All” @ revivingwilson.org . I will be exploring Wilson’s work that exposes the errors and invalidities in the processes of educational standards and standardized testing. As Paul commented on the “abstract” discussion: “I will cast my intution in these words: “Measurement as performed in education environments is a tool used by persons in authority to legitimize / maintain control. If the measurement is flawed, if the measurement cannot be trusted, the authority evaporates.”
Exactly! Since standards imply measurement, and since that measurement is invalid then the “authority” of those promoting such concepts “evaporates”, that is, is “vain and illusory”, totally invalid.
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These are words from Pasi Sahlberg (an official from Finnish’s Mininstry of Education and now an education specialist by the World Bank) taken from this article by Mike Lombardi
http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=7988&printPage=true
“Finland’s success is not attributed to any revolutionary reforms but to a long-term vision of a comprehensive basic school system.
“Teachers focus on learning and teaching rather than preparing students for tests or exams.
“It doesn’t matter where you go, you’ll always find fairly well performing schools and high quality school in Finland.
“In Finland students stay at the same school until they reach 16 and then attend either academic secondary schools or vocational schools.
(I’ll add that kids don’t start school there until age 7.)
“I credit Finland’s top marks to the fact that teachers are given the flexibility and, more important, the respect to manage their own curriculum under a national framework.
“Testing restricts potential and teachers in Finland are allowed to be innovative in their classrooms.”
Yes, Finland has a national curriculum as I would guess like CCSS, HOWEVER, it is not prescribed. The reason for a prescribed curriculum such as CCSS is to be able to better observe and evaluate teachers and to test kids, everything that opposes why national curriculum works in Finland. The Fin’s account not only for academic achievement but also child development and welfare. For instance, their kindergarteners don’t start until age 7. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we can have kiddos who come to us with developed fine motor skills and cognitively, socially, and emotionally ready. Secondly, their teachers are given autonomy to deliver their national curriculum, whereas our prescribed curriculum enables teachers which we will end up with learned helplessness like half of our students–curriculum developers/publishers are the only ones who benefit.
Regarding the math alignment, mentioned in this article, which should only be used as a guide not a prescribed tool. Math to students is like reading. Students come to us at different reading levels and we are expected to get them at grade level. Math has many components where a students may be good in geometry but not problem solving, etc., and we are again expected to get them to met standards at grade level. My question is whose to say where a student should be in math by the end of the year at a certain grade level and then be given a standardized test?
Our country cannot emulate other country’s success, if they replace or eliminate the elements (autonomy, non-prescriptive curriculum, no teaching to the test, VAM, etc) that “grease the wheel”. In my opinion, CCSS is only a small component of the makings of a successful child, but yet our country’s approach is that it is the “end all, be all.”
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