Twice MarcTucker wrote blog posts saying that I was wrong about the Common Core. In his second post, he challenged my assertion that parts often standards were developmentally inappropriate, and he cited experts (but not teachers) who agreed with him.
Here, Susan Ohanian responds to Tucker:
:
Arguing about the content of the Common Core State (sic) Standards is a dangerous diversion, steering us away from the important question of Who decides?
I don’t accept the premise of the very existence of these standards, but leaving that point aside, I do have a question for the “leading scholars” of the Validation Committee of the Common Core State (sic) Standards. Looking at their very impressive credentials, I don’t see any mention of elementary school teaching experience.
I’d ask when was the last time any of them was shut up in a room with twenty-five eight-year-olds–or twelve-year-olds. A teacher offers books to students based on the actual classroom reality of that minute. Case in point: I taught third grade in a school that rigorously classified students into high readers, middle readers, and low readers. My first year there, I taught, at my request, the “low readers.” A few months into the school year, an Amelia Bedelia title offered a phenomenal breakthrough reading experience for more than half the class, and so the next year, I started out the year with Amelia Bedelia. For that group, also classified as “low readers,” but significantly more able, Amelia was ho-hum history, something they’d enjoyed in second grade. They immediately showed me they needed something with more meat. So we jumped into Beatrix Potter and Beverly Cleary. Different kids need different books at different times. And you can’t decree this ahead of time.
Ten years teaching seventh and eighth graders showed me this same truth again and again. After he claimed he’d read every book in our classroom, including two sets of encyclopedia, I shoved Dr. Seuss’ Hop on Pop at fifteen-year-old Keith and commanded, “Read this!” Keith, a boy usually on the move–never still–sat motionless for the entire period–at first because he recognized my ‘she who must be obeyed’ mode but then because he got hooked into the book. When Keith finally closed the last page, his expression was one of puzzlement. “I did it. I read this book. Seriously, Miz O. I read it. For real. You wanna hear me?” Throughout the rest of year, whenever things weren’t going well for Keith, he’d say, “How would you like to hear that Hop on Pop book?” and he’d pull up a chair and calm himself by reading a few pages out loud. And he asked those magic words, “Did that Dr. Seuss write any more books?” He ended the year having read more than one book.
In a video produced by the Council of Great City Schools ($8,496,854 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), self-proclaimed Common Core architect David Coleman orates that all students need rigorous texts and he offers advice to the student, like Keith, who is several years behind: “You’re going to practice it again and again and again and again. . . so there’s a chance you can finally do that level of work.”
Those words show Coleman’s chilling disregard for the individual needs of individual students and this is the thread that runs throughout the Common Core imperatives–approved by the august committee referred to by Marc Tucker.
As any teacher worth her salt can do, I offer individual, idiosyncratic stories about individual idiosyncratic kids’ special connections with books. I was lucky enough early in my career to be hired as reading teacher in a program funded by the New York State department of education in the name of innovation. My boss there was himself a reader, and we decided to take the state at their word and be innovative. He let me use the book budget for voucher chips redeemable at a local bookstore. Every month I gave every student a chip good for the purchase of one paperback book. I took kids on a tour of the store the first time. After that, they were on their own. Their choices were remarkably smart. From time to time I was able to dip into the voucher chest and buy multiple copies of high interest titles such as Soul Brothers and Sister Lou and J. T., for group reading. When state inspectors came to see what caused standardized test scores to soar, they asked, “What program do you use?” I replied, “We read a lot of Shel Silverstein”–because my boss had told me we must never let the very conservative school board know how we were spending the book budget. I kept the secret for the fifteen years I worked in the district. Now I tell it as tribute to an administrator who believed in the power of books.
I saw this same ability to make good choices when I taught the “low readers” of third grade. In the Spring we won a Scholastic contest in which the prize was 100 free books. I handed out catalogues and told the kids they each got three choices–two to keep for themselves and one for the classroom library. No standards committee could have chosen as well as those kids did. No teacher savvy about reading could have done any better.
The issue here is not which “informational text” (what a pompous, ignorant term, as though fiction and poetry didn’t provide critical information) is assigned or which grade gets drilled on apostrophe use. The issue is Who decides? The decision should be local and never allowed to fossilize. The truth of the matter is that universal standards can’t apply in a single classroom, never mind across the country. The issue is trusting teachers, trusting kids, and trusting them to find the books they need. The Common Core trusts nothing but computerized programs that train teachers and kids to do what they’re told.
This is magnificent. How I wish all involved in the education “reform” movement would read this with enough sympathy to enable them to comprehend what Susan Ohanian is saying here. It’s extremely important.
Sadly, “reformers” are not real great at reading comprehension. And they think “personalization” is something you need a computer to do.
“Coleman’s chilling disregard for the individual needs of individual students and this is the thread that runs throughout the Common Core imperatives–approved by the august committee”
That says it all, right there!
Thank you Susan.
PS: love your posts on EDDRA and EDDRA2 and your website!
Thank you for all you do!
Absolutely important! It is truly insulting to those of us who do know the nuances of teaching to be subjected to the condescension of these top down tests. The WHO is making these decisions is very important to deciding if we buy into these changes.
I taught secondary school for 17 years, 4 of those in middle school, where one year as well as my certified area of social studies I also taught the same students English and Reading. The reward for doing something good was to get a free book. I haunted yard sales and used book stores and also bought things like cheap Dover classics. Some of my students had never owned their own books. I wanted them to see reading as a pleasure and books as a reward, not either as a punishment or a task to be overcome.
That the likes of David Coleman have so much influence on educational policy while the voices of classroom teachers who have a track record of helping students succeed in more important measures than scores on standardized texts are excluded clearly demonstrates why our schools are continuing on the three-decade downward spiral that began to intensify with A Nation At Risk in 1983.
Absolutely spot on. I was a voracious reader as a child, which has transferred to adulthood. I’ll say this, I didn’t read any “informational texts”. My premise is that kids must enjoy what they’re reading, if not we’re wasting their time. To have 5th graders spending 2 months on The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as NY would have us do is ridiculous. Higher level thinking skills are important, but there must be some acknowledgement of developmental readiness and appropriateness. Coleman and State Ed. don’t get it.
But you are reading this blog!!!!
“Different kids need different books at different times. And you can’t decree this ahead of time.” Well put, Susan. Even teaching high school, I find this to be the case. No two classes of kids are alike. Needs and preferences (and with them, attention spans and resulting discipline issues) vary. Whether corporate reform admits it or not, I realize that as the one trained to teach and as the one closest to my kids, I must be able to tailor curriculum expectations to the needs of a specific class. Sometimes this invloves changing texts; other times, it involves adapting the manner in which I teach a text. Therein lies the root of professionalism: Acting upon informed professional judgment.
There are no specific texts required under Common Core. If you can’t teach a book that is the fault of your district or state. Your sentiment here is the reason why the standards do not mandate curriculum.
Once you tie everything to test scores, for evaluation and measuring all humans, it IS the curriculum. This is another top down approach with educators NOT involved again….this will eventually implode.
Think again. Here we are in New York, and here is John King’s high school reading list:
http://engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/9-12-ela-text-list.docx
Can you give me the link to find the middle school reading list? Thanks.
Shocking some of the titles on this list. No wonder our country is lacking values and principles. We have lost our way, but I will keep it PC and secular for fear of offending anyone. There you go, though…biggest question is: “Who decides what our children should read in the first place?”
that is simply false. i have been told point blank by my kids teachers, i have seen mandated scripted teaching plans and the books are the same year in year out. all dragging the kids through progressive issue after issue, never a stop for pleasure and joy and beauty. I have seen the list too. depending on the political zealotry of the librarian or the teacher. for example the book ” revolver” for 7th grade. I read it with my daughter and was appalled at the gratuitous vapid story including all the social justice memes and third way politics wrapped together with children being stalked by a hateful man with a gun who raped and killed their mother, keeping them hostage in a cabin with the corpse of their father. a little fun reading, eh. and they seem to all be like that. it’s a horror as a parent, so spare us the propaganda from the educrats.
Many districts are so rattled by the test, scores, results, they are purchasing, experimenting, having trial runs with scripted educrap, aligned on line virtual workbooks, MAP testing, etc…we are getting away from teacher made units and well crafted lessons. The Common Bore is becoming a scripted land for Stepford robots who will follow the orders of emperor Gates and his minion, Coleman. This is a very sad time to be in the business of training students to take tests, previously known as education. Kids are assets, teachers are human capital and data is for sale. RTTT is a stimulus program masquerading as reform. You have been duped.
The lists in the NY link are of all the books included in the modules they’re developing, not a required reading list. The full P-12 list can be found at engage.ny
Absolutely spot on. Teachers who see kids as complex and unique individuals will always get my vote. This is teaching, this is connecting, this is what stands the test of time.
There is a human rights issue blended in this whole notion that someone else has the corner on the market of what to read than the individual doing the reading. It is a slippery slope to engage in so much heavy handedness when it comes to restricting the freedoms of choice…even for little kids. Surround them with classics, help them with selections but quit this power trip of narrowing the lens on what a child/young adult can read or not read. I’ve always maintained that adults in authority wield tremendous power. It is in the use of that power that lies the nugget of teaching. It can be used for good…or it can be used for bad. Foremost, we must never forget the learner. Teachers can learn a few things along the way, as well. Try being the sage on the stage instead of the general of the army…against the will of those who are doing the learning. I am seeing a lot more angst, anger and animosity in teachers these days. Can’t say I blame them with all the from-on-high irrational controlling going on in education right now. Seeking that almighty dollar, prestige and power tends to undermine the work of the laborers. How about we invert the pyramind so that those closest to the students are at the top with everyone else supporting from the bottom. The admin level is too full of wasteful positions and bureaucracy. We have lost our identity as educators because of all the juxtiposition for power from those who are simply trying to justify their positions by finding something old that is new again for us to change, do or implement. I wonder if I could still teach with my hair on fire as I try to do if the district office and the Dept. of Ed. shut their doors and returned the responsibilities back to those of us who are closest to the learner? It would save a lot of money, allow the pundits to go find more productive work to manage and bring back the inspiration, innovation and individualization back where it belongs…in the neighborhood public schools. My heart aches over the devastation of the great American public schools. Do they need to improve, change and explore new heights in this technological world we live in….absolutely. Wielding inhumane abuse of powers is not the way to go about it. Let the children read!
I don’t know anything about the reading standards. I agree with much of this post. However, I’d caution about one part of this. You don’t need to be an elementary teacher to know what is developmentally appropriate. You need to do or read research on that topic. Understand there is a difference between being developmentally appropriate and being experientially ready. I’d agree that our students are not currently experientially ready for some of what the Common Core expects.
There also needs to be a recognition that development doesn’t happen at the same time for every student, so a one-size fits all approach is unlikely to be successful. I can say that I like most of what’s in the mathematics standards.
I agree we need to emphasize that the content of the standards is not the biggest issue. But in addition to asking the important question of “who decides?” we need to see that a huge problem is not what’s in the standards but the misguided high stakes testing attached to them.
I have criticized before our penchant for lumping Common Core in with all sort of reforms that are unrelated. Ohanian’s critique here illustrates the best argument against the Common Core. Even though the Common Core outlines some pretty good goals for deepening student understanding, there is no evidence of any kind that students will be able to meet these standards. I would love to believe that we would have the freedom to try them out to see if they work but the environment that the CC is coming up in makes that virtually impossible. Ohanian also falls into the trap of conflating a little when she talks about informational text. It is ridiculous to claim that increasing a focus on informational text means that students are no longer allowed to read Shel Silverstein. This is totally preposterous. However, it is absolutely true that there are many students that have a near impossible time meeting our current standards and raising the standards is more likely to leave them farther behind than it is to inspire them to work harder (especially since it is highly unlikely that struggling students are struggling because they are not working hard enough). The Common Core is untested. It does not specify which books and materials should be used (so we need to stop using curriculum arguments against the CC). It has a crazy emphasis on standardized testing which will NEVER provide an accurate picture of the skills that they are trying to address with these new standards. Kids are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. It is great to expect kids to think more but we must systematically teach that skill. Even more than the piling up of factual knowledge and experiences, thinking skills take more time and are far less linked to grade level than our current teach/text/test model is designed for. Asking all children to think deeply without building in time and patience is an experiment; not a program. If it fails, will we blame the program or blame the teachers and students? I think that we know the answer.
Mark: you write
Actually, given the realities of the classroom it is right on. Principals and superintendents worried about test scores on informational text will focus on that to the exclusion of anything else, and thus crowd out time (and funds) for Shel Silverstein or any other non-informational texts. We already see that with the restricting or even omitting of Social Studies under NCLB and now we are seeing districts dismiss all art and music (and other non-tested subject) teachers on the supposed rationale that when resources are tight (an test scores are low) it is important to focus on raising the test scores which means only tested subjects get taught. Within those tested subjects only the tested domains will be taught.
The constraints of time is obviously a legitimate concern. It is odd that you bring up the crowding out of social studies which is almost exclusively consisting of informational texts. Ohanian said that Shel Silverstein is not allowed and that teachers had to teach it in secret. That is what I meant by preposterous.
Mark – sorry this has to appear directly beneath your original comment to which I responded rather than your response to that, but it is the only place I saw could serve
Properly taught social studies is about a hell of a lot more than informational texts. What should be included in original “documents” are things like art, architecture, religious ceremonies and texts. Rather than merely having students read what others think about such things, one helps them learn how to experience and form their own judgments.
Similarly, fiction and popular songs often teach as much as historical tomes and biographies.
Methinks your definition of social studies may need to be expanded
Primary source documents of any kind should be seen as informational texts. In fact, one of the CC anchor standards is to include visual and diverse media. The Common Core calls for balance and that is all. I am simply pointing out that it is very poor critique to say that the Common Core is calling for all informational texts. People read informational text all the time and it is really important for people to be able to do that. I don’t mean to raise hackles. I thought it was clear that I meant ‘of the texts that are used in social studies, they are mostly informational’ and not ‘social studies is the practice of sitting down and reading informational texts’.
my reading both of the standards AND HOW THEY WILL BE ASSESSED is not as sanguine as you make it appear. Given the history of how testing has narrowed education as the stakes on that testing increases, the kind of teaching I did will become ever less possible to do for students in schools where test scores are low because of the high impacts of poverty upon the community.
Further, while you might have a broad interpretation of informational texts, that is clearly not how the standards are being interpreted and implemented. It does not matter what the likes of Coleman say after the fact, CCSS are going to be used to delegitimize public education, increase profits for the likes of Pearson and MIcrosoft (who are cooperating on creating online assessments, and of course the “curricular” materials keyed to those tests will follow as surely as night follows day) and narrow educational opportunities for those already cheated by our society’s increasing disparities of wealth and power.
Ken, I am with you on the assessment piece. The assessments and the curriculum are still unknown. This is what I meant by the environment that the CC is coming up in. The textbook, test prep, and standardized testing industries already has a crazy stranglehold on education. Couple that with the political class totally unified against teachers and parents and in favor of complete privatization. Now we find these standards which on balance are actually really good for kids as long as we are given time to work out how best to present them. There are plenty of legitimate lines of attack that we can use particularly in the area of excessive testing and the implementation plan. I am a little annoyed at the anti-Rheeform movement in general because we are now drifting away from our core mission which is to fight performance pay, deprofessionalization, union busting, privatization, vouchers, and TESTING. I feel that so much of our attacks on the Common Core are misguided (although Ohanian’s here is not too bad) and I believe that the Common Core standards are better than what we have now. My support for Common Core is tempered by the knowledge that the current education environment is toxic. However, I think that we are spending too much time venting about things that are totally unrelated to Common Core while calling it Common Core and not enough time attacking the real insidious parts of school Rheeform like Value Added Models, performance pay, and mass firings/school closings/privatization. Thanks for the discussion. I think the fact that our replies get smaller and smaller is meant to discourage these posts. Sorry for squeezing one more in.
I hope you might elaborate on one idea you presented. You said “However, it is absolutely true that there are many students that have a near impossible time meeting our current standards and raising the standards is more likely to leave them farther behind…”
Do you mean that students who are not meeting the current standards would be perceived as falling further behind because they fail to meet the higher standard by a wider margin or do you mean that the students will actually be further behind because some students will be pushed ahead in their efforts to meet the higher standard?
I mean that I agree with Ohanian on this point. I mean that students who already can’t meet the standards are not going meet higher standards. It may be possible that high standards make children smarter but this won’t happen until we study 13 years worth of data to see how these Kindergartners are doing in high school. Kids who fail now will fail under new standards in all likelihood. I know many students who respond to higher expectations with greater frustration and shutting down. With CC, we need to prepare ourselves for this possibility. On your second question, this is also possible but it is not clear that we will have half of the students meeting and half the students failing. We simply need lots and lots of time to see if this all works. I think that it is a good thing that we are asking students to do more but it is a bad thing if we blame them and their teachers when they can’t do it.
If I understand your answer correctly, you don’t think that one group of students will be falling further behind another group of students (unless frustration sets in), those students will be in the same position relative to each other. Is that correct?
Sorry if I don’t understand your question. Can you express it in the form of statement?
Perhaps I should express my question as a sport analogy, say by talking about qualifying to run in the Boston Marathon. You said that students will fall further behind with the new standards. I can think of three ways that might happen: a) the runners at the back of the race are running slower than before, b) the runners at the front of the race are running faster than before, or c) the qualifying standards for the Boston Marathon have been changed so that even though all runners are running at the same pace as before but fewer will qualify for Boston.
I could imagine any one of the three being possible or some combination of all three.
Some combination of all three.
If it is a combination of the three, should not we applaud the students who are able to run faster because of the higher standards?
Do you think we should hold the faster runners back so that the slower runners do not fall too far behind?
Susan I just need you to know how grateful I am for your voice, not because if your stories or hardships but just because you speak the truth. My soul has been getting more and more sick as I read more lies about kids, teachers, budgets, etc. It’s voices like yours that make me get out of bed, open my slit eyes, unfurl my brow, put on a smile and go back to school everyday. Thanks for truly caring for the education of children.
Let me see if I can ground this a little because its getting a bit confusing for me, anyway (but then I am not a teacher). I thought we agreed that top-down (or any) standards do not help children learn but some seem to think (as I do) that standards can be good for teachers. In fact, at the rate knowledge is changing, someone – with their hands in what Industry needs and where science is headed — has to be making sure that teachers are keeping up with the state-of-the-art, at least in the Sciences.
As a sophomore in HS, I was barely getting by in English Literature and doing hardly any reading until one teacher put me in the honors class and that teacher got me interested in Greek and Roman mythology. Somehow, that lead me to the great Russian classics and I found myself reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov and others when I was 13.
Meanwhile, I was having problems with HS Algebra much to the chagrin of my father, who had graduated from a top Engineering school back in the days when they were not admitting many Jews to private colleges. Geometry started out even worse until one day I happened to mention, at dinner, that my teacher had said that one could not ‘legally’ trisect an angle (based on theorems and axioms). “Ridiculous”, said my father, and we spent about 3-hours that night and several nights after that until he gave up. By that time, I was far ahead of the rest of the class. I went on to to graduate from one of the top-rated Engineering schools and then later get a PH.D. in Management Systems Engineering. It wasn’t until 14-years later that I was diagnosed with vision-related reading disabilities. My academic success had nothing to do with standards or tests or evaluation of my abilities and everything to do with inspiration and curiosity.
In the nineties, I worked at a large edutainment media company. One day a group of Boston-based researchers (I think they were from MIT, but don’t remember) came to our offices and demo-ed a “digital narrative engine” that they thought we could use to generate little videos and interactive learning activites for our website.
The narrative engine was a very deep artificial intelligence exploration that attempted to quantify, codify and manipulate every key ingredient of narrative construction and understanding. It was a breathtaking intellectual achievement that represented 5 years of expensive research for a large committed team of scientists.
If you put in the right variables it could produce – without writers, animators and designers – a little piece of 3D computer graphics video that was almost as good as what a creative person could make in a weekend. We asked the scientists why not just hire the person?
The Common Core standards seem like that engine. The people who made them and support them are in love with the idea of building such an intelligent model that it is a person-proof. Maybe they believe (like the narrative engine developers clearly did) that the model itself is a more important intellectual undertaking than the products it might help generate.
Now they have to convince themselves and everyone else that their model could and should replace personal creative efforts that have worked in the past. Unfortunately they seem to have more receptive clients.
If you hired the creative person you would get a video. If you used the software to make the video you would get a video AND whatever the creative person would do over the course of the weekend, perhaps a second video that the software could not come close to creating.
It is possible that the very purpose of ed reform (which does not affect upper class children in their private schools), from the point of view of the upper class people who are implementing it, is to do precisely what it actually does: make children not want to read.
>Arguing about the content of the Common Core State (sic) Standards is a dangerous diversion, steering us away from the important question of Who decides?
We can’t disagree that when it comes to choosing books to read and topics to write about, students will always learn more and perform better when the topic is something of interest to them, and who better to recognize those interests and match them to assignments than the astute educator?
And while we know Ohanian’s post is about ELA standards, math is different.
Math education in the US remains in a perpetual state of crisis and the latest TIMSS results bears this out once again. A great majority of American students continue to achieve “low” and “intermediate” benchmarks in math, while very few reach the levels of “high” or “advanced”, levels considered beyond the ability to “apply basic mathematical knowledge in straightforward situations”.
We recently poked our heads into a Twitter chat among first grade teachers and when we asked why they posed certain kinds of math problems to their students, the answers revealed they had no idea of the pedagogical intent of the questions. They repeatedly used the word “review” and our take on their motivation was that they posed problems simply because they seemed “about right”, or they copied from Pinterest what other teachers were doing.
Reading has what is sometimes referred to as the “fourth grade slump”, whose origins can be traced to earlier years, and math has its equivalent: TIMSS reveals that American 4th graders are gaining slightly, but 8th graders are falling further behind their international peers.
We think the problem in math education originates before 4th grade. Elementary teachers need better guidance in what math to teach and how to teach it, and this has to come from a coherent and complete curriculum. Call it “top down” if you will, but it doesn’t have to be spun negatively.
Our reading of Common Core math standards sees no concerted effort by its authors to address timeless issues in elementary math: adding and subtracting fluently without using one’s fingers, understanding fraction arithmetic, and solving problems with unknowns (without calling it algebra).
We write verbosely about the math standards and how they might be improved because we’re interested in better math education (and we think our writing has improved perceptably since starting our blog). We’d hate to be forced by education standards to write a blog about the health benefits of and recipes for spinach.
Did you actually READ the TIMMS results?!
“Compared with 1995, the U.S. average mathematics score at grade 4 was 23 score points higher in 2011 (541 v. 518)…
“The 8 education systems with average mathematics scores above the U.S. score were Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong-CHN, Chinese Taipei-CHN, Japan, Northern Ireland-GBR, North Carolina-USA, and Belgium (Flemish)-BEL… [ed: Oh my god! North Carolina is beating us!!!!]
“The percentage of 4th-graders performing at or above the Advanced international mathematics benchmark in 2011 was higher than in the United States in 7 education systems, was not different in 4 education systems, and was lower than in the United States in 45 education systems.”
This so-called “crisis” is nothing but power grab by tin-plated, over-bearing, swaggering dictators with delusions of godhood.
>Did you actually READ the TIMMS (sic) results?!
We looked the actual data in TIMSS, not the summary, which appears to be your primary source of information.
As for your last, um, sentence, we are not blinded by the paranoia instilled by some political ideology.
You can remain satisfied that although we are behind several countries, we are ahead of far more—but we’re not so smug. We are simply interested in better math for all.
While you’re formulating a response, feel free to have a go at some world-class math problems: http://fivetriangles.blogspot.com
Wonderful post, Susan hit the nail on the head with: ” The issue is trusting teachers, trusting kids, and trusting them to find the books they need.” It reminds me of my Finish teacher-friend who is treated like a reasl professional who can make wise choices to benefit his students without the constant nag of standardized test scores and imperious mandates from non-educators. Lets grow more respect! Thanks, Diane and Susan for your leadership!
As Colman suggests his teaching method: “You’re going to practice it again and again and again and again. . . so there’s a chance you can finally do that level of work.” is already in practice. My 2nd grader was required to re-read the same book every night each week. Thus, he was running, screaming, and crying in anxiety each night after the first day of reading. I told the teachers it was killing his love of reading and stopping his growth to read the same book each night. His reading level stagnated because of this awful homework.
After many complaints by parents, the school changed homework to new books each night and Bingo!, his reading level increased twice within a short period. He loves to read all books on a variety of topics especially when learning new ideas. Just another example of the child abuse caused by CC(sic).
Susan’s got it right.
Exactly. Although I retired ten years ago, the attack on teachers is still personal, and not trusting that through working with their students, teachers do get it right is the biggest problem with the rigidity of the Common Core.