Last week’s Atlantic article focused on suburban parents simply because of space limitations. I couldn’t deal with ALL the controversy in one tiny magazine article.

Let’s talk for a minute about the problems in creating a system of national standards in a hugely diverse country. (I could use some feedback.)

The Common Core website has a cute video describing the ideas behind the Common Core.

The Common Core is all about kids making uniform progress and culminating at a common endpoint. It assumes that MOST kids learn at the same rate. Of course, there are outliers. Procedures can be set in place to deal with the super quick and the super slow learners, but this program assumes that most kids can handle fractions in 5th grade, for example.

What happens when a huge percentage of kids going into fifth grade in certain schools never mastered fourth grade math? The Common Core is set up like a staircase with an equal number of steps and with steps of equal height. Can we set up a model like that in a country with such huge diversity?