Is Common Core a "Disaster"?

It's not often that I see an article so wrong in so many ways. But this New York Times article ("Common Core Curriculum Now Has Critics on the Left") fundamentally misunderstands the Common Core State Standards, conflates standards with their implementation, and attempts to force a debate about education policy into an ill-fitting political right-left framework.

Carol Burris, an acclaimed high school principal on Long Island, calls the Common Core a “disaster.”
“We see kids,” she said, “they don’t want to go to school anymore.”
Leaders of both parties in the New York Legislature want to rethink how the state uses the Common Core.
The statewide teachers’ union withdrew its support for the standards last month until “major course corrections” took place.

Why don't Carol Burris's students want to go to school anymore? The article doesn't say. It surely implies, though, that it's because of the Common Core State Standards. The next two sentences, however, are not about the standards, but about New York State's implementation of the standards. In fact, if you follow the third link in the quote above, you will see the entire statement, conveniently abridged in the Times article:

NYSUT's board also withdrew its support for the Common Core standards as implemented and interpreted in New York state until SED makes major course corrections to its failed implementation plan and supports a three-year moratorium on high-stakes consequences from standardized testing.

It's not Common Core that the teachers' union opposes: it's how it has been implemented in New York.

Next, the Times tries to force a "red-state / blue-state" dichotomy, quoting Governor Cuomo's criticism of the execution of the standards, then quoting a possible Republican challenger in the next gubernatorial election. While Republicans and Democrats disagree on many policy issues, Common Core is one of those topics on which the usual distinctions do not hold. It's as if the Times had to figure out a way to work in some political angle into the headline. But the headline doesn't match the content of the article.

Here is what really made my jaw drop, though. Those of us working on Common Core transition, and others who are knowledgeable about the standards, understand that CCSS replaces the "mile-wide, inch-deep" existing standards with deeper inquiry into fewer subjects. CCSS focuses on skills as well as content; it is more than just a laundry list of facts for students to learn and regurgitate on standardized tests. So what "Common Core" curriculum does the Public School 253 use to meet these standards?

The school chose one of the country’s most popular Common Core curriculums, called Core Knowledge. It is based on the ideas of E. D. Hirsch Jr., whose 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” argued that mastery of a common set of facts was critical to learning....
Mr. Hirsch and other defenders of the Common Core say children in early grades need lessons in history, civics, science and literature to build vocabularies and thrive.

Wait, I don't think I read that right... <blinks, rubs eyes vigorously>

E. D. Hirsch Jr., whose 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,”

In what universe is E. D. Hirsch a basis for any kind of Common Core curriculum? Cultural Literacy is the nadir of the Reagan-era "A Nation at Risk" back-to-basics lets-make-kids-memorize-the-Greek-city-states educational idiocy. If you are a school attempting to implement CCSS, and you choose anything based on the work of E. D. Hirsch, you are doing it wrong. Does the author of this article even understand what Common Core is all about, beyond platitudes about "rigor" and "more challenging"? There's no textual evidence to support that conclusion.

There are those who criticize CCSS for ridiculous reasons; among the non-ridiculous critiques is the (accurate) observation that the standards are not perfect. However, our choice is not between CCSS and some hypothetical Utopian Set of Standards That We All Agree On. Our choice is between CCSS and existing standards. In California, that would mean our laundry list of facts that we have called California Content Standards for the last 15 years. Given those options, I enthusiastically choose CCSS. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than what we have now? Absolutely, definitively yes.