Common Core: One More Year

I've mentioned Yong Zhao and his book, and his thesis that American entrepreneurial success (in business and in science) has been in substantial part a result of our schools' failure in the perpetual institutional quest to squelch creativity. He has Five Questions to Ask about the Common Core, and he fears that

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 American children are exposed to the same content, delivered by highly standardized teachers, watched over by their equally standardized principals, and monitored by governments armed with sophisticated data tools.

I doubt that the chaos will end, but he has convinced me that the Common Core is likely to do somewhat more harm than good. In educational practice as in home repair, it's all too easy to fix something so that it never quite works again.
Or then again, maybe not.