The Whats and Whys of the New Common Core

No doubt the biggest and most common question our parents have asked over the last year has been about the Common Core: what is it?

While it may sound confusing at first, the Common Core standards in practice and in principal are quite simple.

According to the official website, the Common Core aims to “establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade.”

So what exactly does that mean? And why are our schools doing it?

Let’s tackle the why part first.

During the last decade, test results across the country have shown that American students are falling behind in the classroom, compared with their peers in other countries. In areas such as math, technology, and reading comprehension, students in the United States are struggling to keep up with international students of the same age.

That’s not to say that our children are underperforming across the board. In fact, some schools and districts are doing just fine. We see the problem when we look at American classrooms as a whole. For every district whose students are performing very well, there is another whose students are not.

Of course, there are a lot of reasons for the performance gap in American classrooms. Schools in lower-income districts, for example, predictably struggle compared to those in more affluent districts. In other cases, schools may perform better because their curriculum is better suited to the skills a standardized test might test for.

This becomes a problem when we look at education systems in other countries, whose schools do not suffer from the same drastic achievement gap. It’s an important problem fix, too, as it only becomes more obvious as students grow older and begin competing with international students for college admission, scholarships and, eventually jobs.

So how do we plan to fix it?

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