Rotten to the Core

The Problem with the Common Core standards By Antonio Alvarado

I have always said that education is best left to Washington bureaucrats because, seriously, what do teachers even know about teaching? The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a national attempt to make education consistent across the states. These standards would lay out what all students from grades K-12 should know before they graduate. The Common Core standards take away even more freedom from teacher’s curricula and force them to use a cookie-cutter, one-size fits all method to teach students. In an education system already choked by red tape and bureaucracy, it seems ridiculous that we would want any more.

As much as this issue appears to be a left versus right issue, it’s actually more complex. Different groups from both sides of the aisle are coming out against the implementation of these standards. According to Stephanie Banchero of the Wall Street Journal, “the Common Core has come under attack recently in at least a dozen states by an unlikely coalition of conservatives, who see them as an intrusion into local control, and teachers-union leaders, who say their implementation has been botched.” Big business Republicans on the right are overwhelmingly for these standards whereas grass roots Republicans are overwhelmingly against it.

The American school system needs educators who are not confined by onerous regulation, but are free to educate their students as they see fit. If teachers are doing a bad job, they do not need the state holding their hands along the way, they simply need to be fired. Because of all the red tape, some being the government’s fault and some being the union’s fault, it is very hard to get rid of bad teachers and very hard to let good teachers continue to excel in the classroom. Although those behind the Common Core may have good intentions, they end up punishing everyone in an attempt to fix the slackers.

I feel that the Common Core contributes greatly to the poor shape of American public school system and distracts us from the real solution: school choice. Under the current system, the poor have very few options when it comes to deciding where they send their children to school. In most cases, they send their kids to bad schools that do not educate their students effectively, only perpetuating the vicious cycle of poverty further. With school choice, the poor have more options when deciding which school to send their children to, which forces the bad ones to either change or go out of business. With more school choice and voucher programs, we can help the poor more concretely than the wild ambitions and micromanagement of government bureaucrats, which are typified in these new standards.

Speaking plainly, the Common Core initiative is a plain bad idea. Education is a unique collaboration between each individual teacher and each individual student. In the end, perhaps the biggest problem with this initiative is that at our core everyone is not common but, in fact, uncommon; every set of students have different needs and every teacher has a different vision or skillset.