Sol Stern of the rightwing Manhattan Institute is a fierce advocate for the Common Core Standards. He is a journalist of great rhetorical skill, not a classroom teacher or a scholar or researcher. Stern is a devotee of E.D. Hirsh Jr.’s Core Knowledge curriculum, and he thinks that Common Core will install CK in every school in the nation. He cant accept the reality that CCSS is not the vehicle to impose CK. It must be puzzling to him, if not infuriating, that his arch-enemy Lucy Calkins and her colleagues have written the best-selling book about the Common Core, called “Pathways to the Common Core.” That sort of thing can make a person cranky.

In his piqué, Stern wrote an article excoriating me for abandoning this great national experiment. He didn’t seem to notice that my major objection to the CC was not substantive but procedural–that is, the absence of participation of knowledgable parties in the drafting process, the lack of any effort to include early childhood educators or experts in educating students with disabilities or any classroom teachers, the absence of any means of appealing or revising the standards, the failure to try them out before imposing them nationwide–all of which made their implementation speedy but built distrust. Process matters. Democracy matters. I have consistently maintained that it is better to go slowly and get it right than to move fast and sow dissension and suspicion. Back when I was on the dark side, Sol was a friend, so I decided not to be offended by his unprovoked attack on me.

However Mercedes Schneider, who probably knows more about the Common Core than anyone else, decided to respond to Stern and set him straight. He responded to Schneider, dismissing her, a mere classroom teacher in Louisiana, with disdain. And here, in this new post, Mercedes Schneider–who is not only an experienced classroom teacher but holds a Ph.D. In research methods, again corrects Stern’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Common Core.