Education Next – Michael J. Petrilli
“But reform critics aren’t any better when it comes to playing games with the new standards. Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss, for example, continue to peddle the notion that the Common Core is developmentally inappropriate because it expects all students to be able to read simple passages by the end of kindergarten. Perhaps without knowing it, they’re making the same mistake as Moskowitz and others: misunderstanding the standards’ aspirational nature. The core problem is the assumption that, by simply setting standards, policymakers expect “all students” to meet them. That might have been the case in the past, when we set the standards bar at an extremely low level—and yes, it was signaled by NCLB’s crazy declaration that all children would be “proficient” by 2014. But it certainly should not be the case now, or for the foreseeable future.”(more)