Within a few years of their 2010 rollout, the Common Core State Standards for math and English became a popular scapegoat for a host of perceived ills in K–12 education.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
Student effort is the secret sauce at Success Academy charter schools, says their founder and CEO, and they teach and celebrate it religiously. Indeed, after seventeen years of educating tens of thousands of students, careful analysis of homework, classwork, and assessment data has taught the Success Academy team that a large proportion of errors, up to 70 percent, don’t result from not knowing or understanding the content, but from a lack of care and attention to detail.
Noble is the desire to bend our system toward the needs of our most disadvantaged students—students who are disproportionately poor, Black, and Brown. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about this. Leveling up is the right way. Leveling down is the wrong way. Expanding access and opportunity is the right way. Lowering standards is the wrong way. Guess which way is gaining steam?
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast,
