NAS board member Sandra Stotsky makes the case in a debate hosted by The Boston Globe that Massachusetts should drop implementation of national Common Core standards, which are inferior to the ones Massachusetts already had in place. She writes,
Bay State students had already reached first place on 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in fourth and eighth grades in both math and reading and had stayed there. Moreover, all student groups had made steady gains in academic achievement through the 2000s. To this day, we do not know why the board voted to impose Common Core’s standards on the state. They had no track record for effectiveness anywhere and were not research-based, internationally benchmarked, or rigorous.
Massachusetts voters have a chance in next year's November 2016 elections to vote in a ballot to leave the Common Core; Stotsky urges that they do so, while her debate opponent, Kelly R. Clenchy, argues that they should not.
Readers interested in a longer critique by Stotsky of the Common Core should take a look at her chapter in Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core is Bad for American Education.
