Removal of Common Core

Man, I'm so tempted to begin my rebuttals already. But I'll hold off. Contention 1: Critical thinking Education is going through a critical and innovative step moving from memorization to critical thinking. Common Core standards. Common Core is playing an important role in that step in making that change. New Common Core standards are setting basic standards of thinking that need to be reached. (1) While far from perfect, Common Core is good because it ensures standards that MUST be reached. Without such a system there is no way to ensure that students learn even the are minimum. Without Common Core we don't have a way to ensure that even the bad teachers and bad schools reach the level of thinking that must be taught. Contention 2: A better education system Now let me clear up something about Common Core and it's goals. Historically Common Core was created for a few reasons. One of the reasons is stated in the name, to create common national standards that creates common ground to understand to the education system. One of the reasons this was so critical was not having common standards gave room for manipulation of reality to deceive. For example, someone in one state/area could have the standards lowered to have the area appear to have a better education. Take this example. School A has more educated/smart students than school B School A has very high standards and about 70% of students meet/exceed those standards. School B sets very low standards to make their school appear better, about 85% of students meet/exceed standards. This was an issue that was fairly common and was a large part of the reason Common Core was formed. (2) Without having those common standards we cannot accurately understand where we are succeeding and where we are failing dooming efforts to improve education. Another reason that Common Core is here to improve education is it is the first step in improving national standards of education (2). Allow me to explain, in order to form high standards we first need to establish common standards. That's another part of why Common Core was created. It's like the first step to creating high national standards. The idea is to start with relatively low standards and work it up to higher standards. For example, in Florida Common Core was recently altered to make higher standards for calculus. By removing Common Core you will set efforts to improve education back years. Contention 3: What's the alternative? Without Common Core we have no agreed upon standards or structured education. Common Core is there to give students basic core knowledge that they need to advance their education and succeed in the market. If you take away Common Core what do you replace that system with. We 1. Do not know if what replaces Common Core will be an improvement. 2. Will temporarily/permanently lose the common ground that educators have to work with. What most of the critics of Common Core do is simply point out it's flaws or issues and say it should be abolished, yet most of them get stumped when you ask them what we should have instead of Common Core. The system isn't perfect, but it's the best we have. Instead of ditching a good idea we should perfect it and turn a good but flawed system into a system as perfect as we are capable as making it. 1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com..., Accessed 7-6-15 2. http://www.cnn.com...