Common Core

I wrote a year ago about the Common Core: One More Year; that's the Common Core described as

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an education initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent education standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter two- or four-year college programs or enter the workforce.

My concern has basically been that well-intentioned centralization tends to have consistent results -- as Larry Cuban (teacher/superintendent/blogger) puts it in giving what I think of as a Common Core context, On Centralization

Teachers have felt pressured to drop student-centered activities such as small group work, discussions, learning centers, and writing portfolios because such activities take away precious classroom time from standards-based curriculum and test preparation.

That was in October; I didn't even realize that in October, our own Superintendent Bowers was testifying that with Common Core prep, We are heading into the storm. Interesting. The terminology she's using is from Tuckman's stages of group development:

The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. This model has become the basis for subsequent models.

Some of the fuss is simply the awkwardness of a big new set of mandates that will take time and lots of money to work out in detail; I doubt their value, I think the money (including the continuing expense of "performing") will be mostly wasted, but I wouldn't put too much stress on articles like Bizarrely complex Common Core math for America's children | The Daily Caller

Still, I do think Diana's phrasing showed prescience, and not just about the fact that we really don't know what we're doing (specifically we don't understand the world that we're educating our kids to live in): the storm has arrived, in more than Tuckman's terms. Common Core Curriculum Now Has Critics on the Left - NYTimes.com

Carol Burris, an acclaimed high school principal on Long Island, calls the Common Core a “disaster.”

“We see kids,” she said, “they don’t want to go to school anymore.”

Leaders of both parties in the New York Legislature want to rethink how the state uses the Common Core.

The statewide teachers’ union withdrew its support for the standards last month until “major course corrections” took place.

Centralized decision making might be great if the center had access to the necessary information. Perhaps someday it will, but I don't think we're there yet -- if we were, we'd probably be trying to develop something entrepreneur-oriented, something far from the Common Core as it now stands. For now, I'd just say that Hayek was right.