Education - Standards

    Can you imagine a place where teachers were given no guidelines as to what should be taught?   A student could go all the way through school and never learn fractions because the early teachers considered it too hard for their students and the later teachers considered it too basic for them to spend time on.  Students in one school would be pushed to work well beyond their peers in another school, yet they would all compete for the same colleges and scholarships.
     State standards were put in place to ensure students in all schools in a state were being taught a minimum level of material at each grade.  This worked well for many decades, however as society has become more mobile more and more kids are moving across state lines.  A middle schooler moving from Texas to Oregon would find themselves at the top of the class with nothing much to learn for a year or two.  Whereas a middle schooler from Oregon moving to Texas, could easily find themselves in remedial classes, even if they had previously been an A student.  This discrepancy between states paired with a much more mobile society created a need for a national set of standards for all states to follow.  Thus Common Core was born.
     Common Core is simply a set of standards that has been adopted by all but 7 states.  As example from 4th grade math is "Find all factor pairs for a whole number in the range 1-100. Recognize that a whole number is a multiple of each of its factors. Determine whether a given whole number in the range 1-100 is a multiple of a given one-digit number. Determine whether a given whole number in the range 1-100 is prime or composite." You can read all of them here:  http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/  They simply tell what a child should be able to do at each grade level.
     I understand that a lot of people don't like the federal government telling the states what should be taught.  I understand that there can be a lot of debate in what is appropriate for each grade level.  However I have been amazed at how a simple set of standards has come to represent everything people dislike about education.  I have personally heard common core blamed for: decreased recess time, too much homework, teaching evolution, and increased testing.
     First of all the standards only cover math and language arts.  They don't have anything to do with science, history, PE, music, or recess.  Second of all they just say what to teach.  The teachers themselves still teach.  There is not a specific set of worksheets or homework requirement that goes with common core.  Thirdly, testing existed long before common core.  The test have changed so that they address what the kids are learning but there is not more testing required by common core.
     I find it appalling that people have fallen for this smoke screen.  Schools, teachers, politicians and everyone in between have been blaming common core for all sorts of problems, that have nothing to do with common core.  It has become an easy target that is keeping everyone from looking for the real problems our education system is facing.  Common core is from the government which is a lot easier to blame than looking at the issues in our local schools.