The Fall issue of AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice includes a commentary of mine on the common core standards. This article gives me more space to lay out my views and bring evidence to support them than the Op-ed piece published in Detroit Free Press. The issue also includes a thoughtful editorial on standards. You can read the entire issue here and my article starts from page 46.
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I have been waiting for a serious conversation about the sensibility of the Common Core State Standards Initiative with its staunch supporters. I am thus very pleased to read Marc Tucker’s response to my five questions about the Common Core. I am honored that Tucker considers my questions worth responding to. His response, while thoughtful and more nuanced than the usual slogan-shouting, emotion-arousing, and fear-mongering evidence-deprived commercials put forth by some instigators and supporters of the Common Core like this one, did not really answer my questions.  But it did …

If you are reading this, you know the world didn’t end in 2012. But the world of American education may end in 2014, when the Common Core is scheduled to march into thousands of schools in the United States and end a “chaotic, fragmented, unequal, obsolete, and failing” system that has accompanied the rise of a nation with the largest economy, most scientific discoveries and technological inventions, best universities, and largest collection of Nobel laureates in the world today. In place will be a new world of education where all …

A number of people have asked me about my brief encounter with New York Commissioner John King at the NYSCOSS Fall Leadership Summit on September 24, 2012. Here is my recollection.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the honor to listen to New York Education Commissioner Dr. John B. King, Jr. at the 2012 Fall Leadership Summit New York State Council of School Superintendents(NYSCOSS) in Saratoga Springs. Addressing a standing-room only audience of NY school leaders, Dr. King covered a wide range of topics from the Common Core to APPR …

The wonder drug has been invented, manufactured, packaged, and shipped. Doctors and nurses are being trained to administer the drug properly. Companies and consultants are offering products and services to help with the proper administering of this wonder drug. A national effort is underway to develop tools to monitor the improvement of the patients. The media are flooded with enthusiastic endorsement and euphoric predictions.
This cure-all wonder drug is the Common Core, short for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Cooked up by the National Governors Association and the Council of …

Can you be globally competitive by closing your doors and raising test scores?
“Can America be globally competitive by closing its doors and raising test scores in math and reading?” asked an educator from the Netherlands at an international education conference recently. The question was directed at a speaker from the U.S. who had been telling the familiar story of how miserable American education is compared to other countries such as China, India, and Finland.
The question was meant to be rhetorical because the answer should obviously be “no,” at least to …

On October 28, the New York Times reported a federal study that finds that nearly a third of the states in the U.S. lowered their academic standards in recent years, a phenomenon called  “Race to the Bottom” by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. A day later, the same paper reports a story about a New York City school principal being accused of tampering with student grades in order to boost graduation rates in the school. Stories like these are not new. There have been many other reports about schools, states, …

With the release of the official public draft of the college- and career-readiness standards in English-language arts and mathematics by the NGA and CCSSO’s yesterday (September 21, 2009), the U.S. is moving closer to national standards. Incidentally I read a study published in a recent issue of the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) that expels the other myth that has been used to support national common standards.
Proponents of national common standards have basically used two myths to support their efforts: the international achievement gap and the domestic achievement gap. I …

On August 6th, the Missouri State Board of Education voted to join the Common Standards Initiative. This means that only three states (Alaska, South Carolina, and Texas) are not part of this national movement. Unless something happens right now, the U.S. will enter a new era of education marked by standards. The traditional strengths of American education, which have already been eroded by NCLB, will be further damaged by these standards. And the damages may not be reversable.
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It seems that the U.S. will soon have national education standards that will be adopted and implemented in most of the nation. This is a very significant political victory for the national standards proponents, who have been working on it for over two decades. The first President Bush and President Clinton tried it but failed. Now President Obama will have it without even having to convince Congress or the nation, as he is trying with health care reform. This is the part that is strange and not right—something that will …