Further Evidence That Common Core Did Real Harm To U.S. Education

Critics of the Common Core initiative have long argued that it’s not just what the standards focus on, but what they don’t focus on, that has damaged U.S. education. Now a working paper from the Harvard Kennedy School offers further confirmation of what most classroom teachers already knew.

The Common Core standards, rather than encompassing all of education, targeted only two subject areas—math and English Language Arts (ELA). That narrow focus was further exacerbated by policies requiring a Big Standardized Test that focused on only those standards. History, science, the arts and other subject areas were ignored by both the standards and the standards-linked tests.