Over the past year, The Common Core State Standards—"a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy," according to its official website—have become a big news story.
The US Department of Education, Wall Street financiers, media pundits, Silicon Valley moguls, politicians from both parties, and education administrators at the state and local levels support it as a way to prepare American public school students for "college, career, and life." But a growing amount of teachers, child development experts, and parents are questioning the Common Core's promises, cost, and usefulness.
Why are the architects and supporters of the Common Core and its associated standardized PARCC test (which aims to measure student comprehension of the Common Core as well as the effectiveness of teachers who teach it) facing such opposition?
What Went Wrong
My theory is that the Common Core's proponents didn't perform their due diligence. They seemed to be more focused on putting the initiative into practice and "disrupting" public education rather than bulletproofing its content, perfecting its pedagogy, and proving its value to implementers (teachers) and end users (students, and by extension, their parents).
Resistance to the Common Core could have been significantly reduced if its designers borrowed examples of how some of America's most successful companies have been configured, launched, and marketed.
What Could Have Helped Pitch the Common Core
Here are five lessons from leading brands that the Common Core should have emulated prior to its introduction. In doing so, the Common Core would have improved its acceptance among educators, students, and parents:
1. Inspire bottom up innovation
When Mark Zuckerberg and his buds at Harvard began devising Facebook in 2003, their goal was to create a new social media experience that didn't exist in the marketplace. Their revolutionary ideas weren't mandated by a supervising body; they were discoveries that Zuckerburg and his partners envisioned and perfected.
If the true goal of the Common Core's architects was to devise high-quality academic standards that prepared public school students for college, career, and life, they should have enlisted teachers to formulate, test, and refine such standards themselves that were appropriate for their respective grade levels.
Upon construction, the new standards' effectiveness would then have been vetted by education researchers as well as parents. This kind of bottom-up approach would have gained traction among implementers and end users. Once finalized, the approved standards could have been rolled out on a national level.
2. Disrupt productively
In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the idea for AirBNB as an economical bed and breakfast-type solution for attendees of a San Francisco business convention who were unable to book sold-out hotel rooms. The company's conversion of personal residences into rentable short-term living quarters offered creative new lodging alternatives, filled a need in the marketplace, and productively "disrupted" the hotel business by challenging its status quo.
Whether the Common Core's disruption of public school academic standards is productive or unproductive has yet to be determined. If it delivers the benefits that it promises, then that's a good thing. But if the disruption that the Common Core is bringing to school systems, teachers, and students is more of a damaging disturbance, then it's a detriment (and the term "disruptive" would take on a less constructive meaning than the Common Core's architects and supporters intended).
