North Carolina’s Academic Standards Review Commission is doing a serious job of examining Common Core.
That’s a relief after the Dump Common Core efforts led by Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and fueled by people who seemed to think the national academic standards were an invention of Barack Obama and intended to indoctrinate North Carolina children with socialist propaganda.
In fact, the Common Core standards were developed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the National Governors Association. They were embraced by the Obama administration, but also by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. American businesses want American children to be better educated because a competitive workforce will build a stronger economy.
Common Core, already implemented in North Carolina classrooms, prompted some irrational fears but also legitimate concerns about whether expectations were age-appropriate, set out in a logical progression and clearly articulated.
The legislature last year passed a bill to replace the standards, directing the State Board of Education to reject “usurpation and intrusion from federally mandated national or standardized controls” — language sure to appeal to conspiracy theorists. Yet, the bill also hinted that modifications of Common Core standards would be acceptable as long as they were rebranded as North Carolina standards. It created a review commission to make recommendations.
The commission’s preliminary report, published last week, identifies many technical problems with Common Core standards — but no federal usurpation. And the commission looked outside North Carolina for guidance. For example, the subgroup reviewing K-8 math thought it would be a good idea for North Carolina to simply adopt wholesale the standards in place in Minnesota: “Converting from Common Core to Minnesota’s standards should be smooth as many standards are similar,” it said.
One recommendation legislators probably didn’t anticipate is to provide more summer classes to help struggling readers catch up, enough teachers and teacher assistants and more textbooks. All of these things will cost money. The legislature properly has demanded that all students read at grade level by the end of third grade, but it never provided enough resources, starting before kindergarten, to help children learn.
The commission is supposed to present a final report to the legislature by the end of the year. It has a lot of work still to do. It must make sure that North Carolina has high standards that align with national standards, no matter what they’re called.
North Carolina children can’t be insulated from the rest of the country and world. Families move from one state to another and shouldn’t have to place their kids in schools that are years ahead or behind. North Carolina high school graduates must compete for college admission with graduates from other states and deserve to have a strong academic background.
With this legislature spending tax money to send children to private schools that don’t have to meet any standards, it’s easy to worry it will water down public school standards, too. Fortunately, the review commission is taking its assignment seriously and is working to come up with meaningful academic requirements to put North Carolina children on par with the nation.
