Diane Ravitch has finally put her foot down. In this article, she explains that although she had long advocated voluntary national standards, the Common Core doesn’t meet the hope she had for them; the CCSS process is fundamentally flawed in the way these standards were foisted upon states and in the way that they can just as easily be doing harm, as doing good, to public education.
I have thought long and hard about the Common Core standards.
I have decided that I cannot support them.
In this post, I will explain why.
I have long advocated for voluntary national standards, believing that it would be helpful to states and districts to have general guidelines about what students should know and be able to do as they progress through school.
Such standards, I believe, should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government; before implemented widely, they should be thoroughly tested to see how they work in real classrooms; and they should be free of any mandates that tell teachers how to teach because there are many ways to be a good teacher, not just one. I envision standards not as a demand for compliance by teachers, but as an aspiration defining what states and districts are expected to do. They should serve as a promise that…
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COMMON CORE 
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