School Standards’ Debut Is Rocky, and Critics Pounce

The Common Core, a set of standards for kindergarten through high school that has been ardently supported by the Obama administration and many business leaders and state legislatures, is facing growing opposition from both the right and the left even before it has been properly introduced into classrooms.

Tea Party conservatives, who reject the standards as an unwelcome edict from above, have called for them to be severely rolled back.

Indiana has already put a brake on them. The Michigan House of Representatives is holding hearings on whether to suspend them. And citing the cost of new tests requiring more writing and a significant online component, Georgia and Oklahoma have withdrawn from a consortium developing exams based on the standards.

At the same time, a group of parents and teachers argues that the standards — and particularly the tests aligned with them — are simply too difficult.

Those concerns were underscored last week when New York State, an early adopter of the new standards, released results from reading and math exams showing that less than a third of students passed.