In this post, Bill Korach calls Common Core an empty suit and Will Fitzhugh describes it as literary kudzu.

Korach writes:

“Remember when standards actually expected students to learn something like: “Why did the German’s decision in WWI to launch unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping, cause America to enter the war against the Germans?” In CCSS language arts you learn about a system or a method, but you don’t obtain knowledge, much less wisdom. Twenty or thirty years ago, students were taught to write, by learning grammar and then writing. But we always wrote about something that required knowledge.”

Fitzhugh writes:

“Educrat Professors and Educrat Psychologists who have, perhaps, missed learning much about history and literature during their own educations, and have not made any obvious attempt to study their value in their education research, of course fall back on what they feel they can do: teach processes, skills, methods, rubrics, parameters, and techniques of literacy instruction. Their efforts, wherever they are successful, will be a disaster, in my view, for teachers and students who care about academic writing and about history and literature in the schools.”

What do you think? Is Common Core “how-to ism,” as Fitzhugh claims or does it promote richer curriculum, as its advocates claim?