Common Core Standards are just for our schools; elite schools won't touch them

In a society where the middle class is rapidly being eliminated as more and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, it should come as no surprise that there is a double standard when it comes to education.

The people who are pushing Common Core Standards the hardest would not dream of having their children attend schools that follow Common Core. Let's face it- the standards are set up to enrich those in the technology, testing, and textbook companies...and to provide training for people to work at lower level jobs, when those jobs are not being outsourced.


An article in Good Magazine explores how far the curriculum is at the elite private schools that are attended by the children of most of those who are the most vocal about advocating Common Core Standards.

The article concludes in this fashion:

The problem is the public is force-fed these ideas of standardized curriculum, teaching, and assessment as the best tactics education science has to offer. They tell us that this is how we must educate our children. Wait, whose children are we talking about? Not the kids at Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—41 percent are in that Ivy/MIT/Stanford pipeline—or Philips Exeter in New Hampshire, which educated Mark Zuckerberg. As someone with more experience in education than those whose voices are most prominent, I can also assure you that mainstream reform ideologies are not the best anyone has to offer. In fact, they are the cheapest and easiest to control. That's it.

I can already anticipate the devil’s advocate argument: Parents pay a hefty sum to send their children to Roxbury Latin, so they get what they've paid for. And on that point I would agree with you—if we were talking about, say, automobiles. Yes, the financier who pays extra for the package with the mahogany inlays and heated seats certainly deserves his or her mahogany inlays and heated seats. The one who mops the financier’s office floor, well, he or she might manage to eek out a full-sized spare, maybe some nice floor mats or something.

But these aren't cars; they're kids. These are kids who've had the temerity to be born and this is how we’ve resigned ourselves to discuss their education. We give all to those who can afford better and the rest get, well, they get what they get—and no one is supposed to get upset about it.

This is nonsense. If the reforms mandated by Departments of Education and fawned over by upstart think-tankers were as fantastic as advised again and again, then you can bet that every single one of the country's best prep schools would be implementing them as rapidly as possible. They're not, and you shouldn't accept them either.

The author is right on all points. Common Core Standards and the unholy emphasis on testing are going to do nothing except provide a workforce that will never know enough to be able to take a role in the leadership of their society (that will be left to those whose children are not in the schools that use Common Core Standards) and will be prepared for the workforce when they get out of high school, if those who are making the decisions have any jobs for them.

The major point of the article and is one that few people are addressing- If Common Core Standards were the best way to provide an education, then the so-called best schools in America would be lining up to use them.