In an Op-Ed published in the New York Times on Sunday, June 9, titled “Who’s Minding the Schools?,” Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and Claudia Dreifus, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, explained their concerns about the national implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which included the following:
1. Teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to annual Common Core assessments.
2. Common Core test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability.
3. The “radical” Common Core curriculum— one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents — was introduced with hardly any public discussion.
4. For all its impact, the Common Core is essentially an invisible empire. It does not have a public office, a board of directors or a salaried staff. Its web site lists neither a postal address nor a telephone number.
5. Anthony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, calls the Common Core a “one-size-fits-all pathway governed by abstract academic content.”