Common Core Strengths and Weaknesses
The Common Core State Standart Iniciative is rather specific therefore its implementation in U.S. education system causes controversy which is made even more complicated by political component.
On the one hand, unification of the education system creates equal standards for students all over the country. Common demands help to develop skills that can be applied and measured in one way so it should be easier to achieve common purposes for us as a society in modern knowledge-economy and further in the future.
On the other, there some aspects of Common Core are ineffective if not harmful. Tests take lager place in education process then they should in order to be effective. For instance in literature the criteria for evaluating which text is more complex for functioning of increasingly complex test to work does not seem to be objective and clear.
There is, actually, less space left for the teacher to use individual approach and creativity. Especially it concerns art and literature, as the value of those subjects is in creativity and imagination that must be used and developed in the learning process. It also eliminates pleasure of reading because proposed reading techniques and tests cannot match great amount of texts that are valuable in their moral and artistic characteristics. Moreover Common Core emphasizes on reading more informational text and finding explicit meaning, but literature is providing information about the world and society, often in a ways more appropriate for child to percept.
For example such texts as “I Was a Rat” and “The Snow Woman” cannot be appreciated properly using “looking for clues” and “explicit meaning”, as well as any text with strong poetic and symbolic dominant, because understanding “The Snow Woman” is to be personal and individual and cannot be measured by standard. The explicit and logical component of those texts is rather poor. Folklore texts like fairy tales or their stylization are meant to be perceived not explicitly as well as poetry
So, the Common Core is hard to imply for teacher and difficult for child to percept, but the idea of unification U.S. education system is useful in …
