Arne Duncan spoke to the American Society of News Editors yesterday, where he strongly defendedthe Common Core and caricatured its critics as extremists and fringe groups from the far-right.

An article about his speech on the Huffington Post says:

Duncan will give a full-throated defense of the Core in his ASNE speech. The Obama administration has been sensitive about the Core because its perceived closeness to the initiative can be seen as dampening Republican support. But Duncan is expected to relate what he calls the “powerful” Core to America’s future prosperity.

“Today, for the first time in American history a child in Mississippi will face the same expectations as a child in Massachusetts,” Duncan’s speech says.

This is an odd defense. There is already a common measure for children in Mississippi and Massachusetts. It is called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP shows that children in Mississippi are far behind children in Massachusetts.

His insistence that the federal government had no role in the Common Core is less than honest. He didn’t mention that his Race to the Top told states that they had to adopt something that looked just like the Common Core if they wanted to be eligible to win a share of the $5 billion prize. But since it is illegal for the federal government to attempt to influence curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools, Duncan must stick with his fiction about non-interference and having no role at all. The gentleman doth protest too much.

Other than treating critics of the Common Core as an assortment of rightwing nut-jobs, Duncan never explains how adoption of a common set of standards and tests will assure America’s future prosperity. How does he know? What is his evidence? Or is it only extremists who demand evidence before spending billions of dollars and leaping into new practices?

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?

On the PBS blog, economist Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute and American University expresses skepticism about the one-size-fits-all academic nature of the Common Core.

Lerman strongly supports youth apprenticeship programs.

Lerman is skeptical of Common Core for two reasons: One is that it lacks any evidence. In other words, as I have written repeatedly, Common Core has never been field-tested and we have no idea how it works in real classrooms, and how it will affect the students who are currently struggling.

The other is the dubious assumption that college and career skills are the same.

As he writes:

“…Two issues concern me about the debate. One is the lack of solid evidence about the effects of the curriculum on students. Education research, long a backwater of social science, has become more rigorous in recent years, backed in part by the federal government’sInstitute of Educational Sciences and its funding for rigorous experimental methods to test educational interventions. Yet, here is the same federal government encouraging a massive educational initiative without solid evidence documenting gains for student academic or career outcomes.

The second concern is justifying the Common Core on the highly dubious notion that college and career skills are the same. On its face, the idea is absurd. After all, do chefs, policemen, welders, hotel managers, professional baseball players and health technicians all require college skills for their careers? Do college students all require learning occupational skills in a wide array of careers? In making the “same skills” claim, proponents are really saying that college skills are necessary for all careers and not that large numbers of career skills are necessary for college.”

Lerman smartly traces back the origins of this astounding claim.

It is true, he says, that most employers identify certain skills they seek: “Nearly every study of employer needs over the past 20 years comes up with the same answers. Successful workers communicate effectively orally and in writing and have social and behavioral skills that make them responsible and good at teamwork. They are creative and techno-savvy, have a good command of fractions and basic statistics, and can apply relatively simple math to real-world problems like financial or health literacy.

But, he says, the Common Core misinterprets this consensus to mean that all students need the same level of academic preparation. He writes: “Employers never mention polynomial factoring. But what about the higher level math required by the Common Core? Consider algebra II, the study of logarithms, polynomial functions and quadratic equations. Many states want to make algebra II a requirement for graduating high school. Yet, a stunning finding produced by Northeastern University sociologist Michael Handel(cited in a recent Atlantic blog) indicates that only 9 percent of the work force ever use this knowledge, and less than 20 percent of managerial, professional, or technical workers report using any algebra II material.”

Trying to squeeze all students, regardless of their interest or wishes, into a common mold, he concludes, is a bad idea.