How Common Core Homogenizes Schools

When it was time for my wife and I to pick an education strategy for our son, we were pretty lucky. That's not because we live in an area with "good public schools"—an eternal mantra for some of my friends when they go house-hunting. In fact, the local district public schools are pretty mediocre at best, and they teach in the usual fashion, which works for some kids and not for others. But we have a good selection of charter schools representing a range of education philosophies, a decent Catholic school, and an international baccalaureate school launched by the district to compete with the charters. We also have homeschooling in all of its various flavors, and, in Arizona, unburdened by much in the way of red tape. That's a decent menu from which to choose, in a rural area or anywhere else. Except... much of that menu is at risk of being homogenized and standardized under pressure from new Common Core standards. Those standards, distributed nationally but imposed by state officials, are already changing the way students are taught at my son's charter school.