States Gearing Up For Unified "Common Core" Curriculum

A front-page story in the New York Times (4/25, Santos, Subscription Publication) reports on an experimental program at 100 schools in New York in which students are taught "new curriculum standards known as the common core. Forty-two states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have signed on to the new standards, an ambitious set of goals that go beyond reading lists and math formulas to try to raise the bar not only on what students in every grade are expected to learn, but also on how teachers are expected to teach." The Times adds that the prior "hodgepodge of state guidelines" the common core is replacing are considered to be the weakness in NCLB, noting that many states "lowered standards in a push to meet the law's requirement that all students reach grade level."