Dabbling in the Common Core debate

I watched the debate over the "Common Core" national standards unfold while I was at Heritage. I didn't take a public position at the time, but I never understood the motivation for a having a single uniform standard. I recently wrote two blog posts on The Corner elaborating on that a bit:

Politico ran a piece earlier this week on Jeb Bush’s education legacy in Florida, wondering whether the former governor’s support for the “Common Core” national education standards would be a liability to him in a 2016 presidential run...

I hope endorsing the Common Core becomes a liability for every politician. National standards run counter to a central argument for school choice, which is that parents should be able to pick a curriculum and learning environment that best matches their children’s abilities and interests.

Read the whole thing here.

In the second post, I addressed the argument that national standards would ensure that children who move between states are still taught material in the same sequence: 

This argument for national standards is an illustration of how politicians recommend more centralization as a way to fix problems caused by centralization. The public-school monopoly is what limits choice and creates the potential curriculum conflict. If parents had adequate choices in the first place, then interstate migration would not pose a major problem — parents could likely just choose a school in New Jersey whose curriculum is most similar to the child’s previous school in Alabama.

Read the rest here.