Local Control – A Figment of the Imagination

Our post yesterday generated a lot of discussion about standards vs. curriculum. Standards are meant to be the goal and the curriculum is what you use to get to the goal. That’s the theory anyway. The automatic response from most pro-CC folks is that curriculum is chosen locally so if parents don’t like what their school is using to get to the goal of the standards, then they should address it locally. This admonishment has fallen flat for two reasons. One reason is that most local school boards deflect any parental input into curriculum and defer to their curriculum experts when it comes to choosing a curriculum. Those folks in turn use metrics for evaluating curriculum that are often very different from the parents’.  The parents are almost never given the opportunity to affect change on curriculum that they don’t like locally.

The second reason has to do with those metrics that the local curriculum  specialist uses to evaluate potential curriculum that in fact, turn common core into a surrogate curriculum. Mercedes Schneider wrote a wonderful post on these pressures from CCSS that really do mean a loss of local control over curriculum. It is cross posted here in full.

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