Carol Burris, the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, was an early proponent of the Common Core standards. She wrote a book about how to implement them to benefit students.
But as the standards are turning into reality, what she imagined is going sour. She recently wrote two articles (here and here) about why she has decided she cannot support the Common Core.
To her dismay, the Common Core has turned out to be a way to standardize curriculum and testing across the nation and to generate uniform data.
This is not what she hoped for.
She writes:
“I confess that I was naïve. I should have known in an age in which standardized tests direct teaching and learning, that the standards themselves would quickly become operationalized by tests. Testing, coupled with the evaluation of teachers by scores, is driving its implementation. The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted. The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.”
In her second article, she expresses concern about the developmentally inappropriate nature of the standards in the early grades. She explains them in this way:
“The disconnect between the standards and childhood development is not difficult to explain. The standards were developed through backwards mapping, that is, standards for college readiness were established and then skills were walked backward through the grades. However, children move forward not backward through development, and as any pediatrician will tell you, they do so at individual, unique paces.”
