K-12 education in the US most definitely needed "fixing" in a huge number of areas. The research on K-12 math, in particular, is abysmal [0][1]. A huge percentage of students have trouble understanding fractions, moving beyond rote use of formulas (binomials and the stupid over-emphasis on the FOIL method offer a great example of how you students can get stuck because they don't understand the concepts behind those formulas), and when they start learning algebra, there's a huge drop in performance as fundamental problems start to boil to the surface. Then they give up and try to find a way to skate through their remaining math courses. Look at how common the sentence "I'm not a math person" is in contemporary America. There's literally no such thing [2], but millions of Americans believe it to be true and fall prey to a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy. Or look at how common the ridiculous notion that "Asians are better at math" is. The evidence of how problematic this is can be found in the proliferation of remediation at both community and four-year colleges. Even tier-one schools that, on average, admit higher-achieving students have to deal with the consequences. And then there's the geographic and socioeconomic disparity in achievement in math, writing, and other areas.

I hated math in high school, mainly because of how it was taught to me. Even as someone who was a proliferate reader and was quite inquisitive, I never realized just how much I was missing until college. By the time I experienced math and got the chance to see the beauty in its concepts, I had effectively wasted years dealing with formulas and memorization. Even now, I get angry when I think about how poor my math education was and everything that I didn't get a chance to enjoy at the time. And that's coming from what was a pretty good school district. I shudder to think how much worse my experience could have been at a bad one.

Anyhow, what are you talking about with Common Core? CCSSI wasn't written by politicians. It was written by subject field experts. Teachers had a great deal of input, but in general, teachers can only offer anecdotal data. You need to take that anecdotal data, combine it with findings from educational researchers who have undertaken rigorous research using the scientific method, and use that data to guide subject field experts in developing educational standards. Especially for elementary education, where teachers have to--by definition--be more generalists than anything else. Common Core did that, and every analysis I've seen over the past few years supports the conclusion that they're a significant improvement over previous state standards.

Most of the arguments against Common Core are either largely political themselves or significantly misinformed about what Common Core is. The ones against the math standards in particular can largely be summed up as "you're doing it differently than I learned it." No shit. That's the point. And the arguments against state and national standards are particularly amusing, as if fucking math changes based on the state you're in.

0. http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/report/final...

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-...

2. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myt...