Why Common Curriculum Won’t Help

• The Common Core State Standards Initiative represents the increasing trend of national homogenization of student learning in the world. Enforced with high-stakes assessment, these common standards and curricula in essence push teachers to ration learning to all students and homogenize children’s learning. Subjects that carry the most stakes for students and schools are the ones that receive the most attention and resources. Other subjects become peripheral and disposable as the curriculum narrows.
• For those in developed countries to be globally competitive, they must offer something qualitatively different that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries. That something is certainly not great test scores in a few subjects. The efforts to develop common curriculum, nationally and internationally, are simply working to perfect an outdated paradigm. The outcomes are precisely the opposite of the talents we need for the new era.

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