After the local newspaper printed an article indicating that Louisiana’s teachers support the Common Core, teacher Glynis Johnson wrote a letter saying that the reporter was wrong.
What I found interesting about her letter was the cogency of her critique:
1. Very few teachers were involved in the writing of the standards.
2. Bill Gates, who did not graduate college, put his millions into the development of the standards.
3. She writes: The Common Core State Standards are a federal intrusion and the “data-mining” involved is a violation of student privacy. Many of the standards are developmentally inappropriate, particularly in the lower grades. This leads to undue stress in our students and parents. We need high standards, but do not need to be part of a 10-year federal experiment on our children.
Many people have explained why they do not support the Common Core standards. This is as good a short description as I have seen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes. Succinct. Perfect.
Bottle that. Avoid the weeds and just repeat those points.
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Ultimately, this program does not represent the best of participatory judgement of educators, and is a mistake that needs to be called out before it causes further damage.
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I do not support common core for the same reasons as the author, however I’d like to add one more. We are evaluating instruction under the Common Core with the PARCC test. I teach 4th graders in a low-middle income school. I teach great kids who work incredibly hard, but the PARCC test is an unfair assessment. The questions are developmentally inappropriate. Take a look for yourself… http //parcc.pearson.com/practice-tests/. Remember 4th graders are 9 or 10 years old.
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I’ve been saying this for years now. The 8th grade Texas Social Studies exam (STAAR) uses high school and college level vocabulary. Completely inappropriate. Most 12-13 year olds aren’t there yet. I’m sure I wasn’t either at that age.
It seems the only way to ramp up “rigor” on the tests is by using upper level vocabulary. There has to be a better way. Oh wait, what’s wrong with teacher-developed tests?
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I’m not honestly sure what exactly to think of Common Core. There’s still a lot of things that I find unclear, but one thing is for sure, this is still greatly based on a test score. I find that this is not exactly helpful especially when you look at schools that have students from low-income backgrounds that are behind in their schoolwork due to various out-of-the-school’s-control-reasons. That’s the thing that really bothers me, the fact that all this is based on how well student’s perform on a test, they should be taking a look at other issues and factors before they decide to judge a school just based on a number.
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I totally agree. The CCSS, PARCC, and the rest of this nonsense is not only harmful, theoretically bad pedagogically inappropriate, but just plain bad and a boondoggle for a few. Follow the $$$$$.
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When the current, New York State 8th grade cohort enters HS next fall, the vast majority will have been inaccurately and unfairly mislabeled as failures in math and ELA for three consecutive years. In may upstate urban districts (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and the “small city” districts as well), chronic failure rates are in the 90+% range. In the ELL and sped populations the three year failure rate in math and ELA is at 95+%. This “institutionalized” (and artificially inflated) mass failure was willfully produced by the USDOE and NYSED, with the full and explicit consent of the NY Board of Regents. This act of shear meanness, in the name of “rigor”, was perpetrated on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged students in our state. The damage to the pysches of these young people is academically debilitating and will be impossible to undo. This damage was inflicted using tests so fundamentally flawed that it is clear to me, that they were intentionally designed to trick and to trap and to confuse and to frustrate students into failure. And what has unfolded here in NY is a preview of what is about to happen nationwide. An education disaster on a scale that is unimaginable. And what should be a national scandal is being celebrated (yes, cheered on!) by some, as the start of a new civil rights movement. The reformers have perpetrated a fraud on the taxpaying citizens of our country using lies, bogus claims, bad tests, false ideas, and vaporware. And all for what?
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We caught you knockin’
at our classroom doors
Test them, baby,
with your Common Core
Ooh, ooh, the damage done.
You hit the cites
all across the land
With your testing
and your voodoo VAM
Wrong, wrong, the damage done.
We sing this song
because we hate your plan
We know that most
of you can’t understand
Why most kids
will be op-ting out.
We’ve seen the testing
and the damage done
We want ant no part of it for anyone
But this reform
like a settin’ sun.
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