Mercedes Schneider here reports on the ongoing debates about Common Core standards and tests in the states.

Links to the earlier posts are included in this one.

The reason for the controversy is the lack of democratic process in imposing the standards.

Imposing them by stealth was not a good idea.

The public doesn’t know what they are, and their merits and demerits were never discussed and debated in an open democratic process.

Even now, the standards have a copyright, by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

I have never heard of “national standards” that were copyrighted, essentially outside the public domain.

These standards need to be reviewed and revised by expert practitioners. They can be fixed by the experts, the teachers who know the children and the classroom.

In the meanwhile–and perhaps forever–they should be decoupled from the two federally funded testing consortia–whose very existence is legally dubious, since the federal government is legally prohibited from seeking to control, direct, or supervise curriculum and instruction. Nothing is more effective in controlling, directing, and supervising curriculum and instruction than the tests used.