The Common Core set of standards is here:
Home | Common Core State Standards Initiative
It would be helpful to me if the critique was more specific. When you say that Common Core is lowering the standards, can you give some specific examples? Is there a specific skill or subject that students should (say) learn by 4th grade, but the CC delays it until 6th grade? Or is there a specific math skill that students should have that would make them ready for college-freshman-year calculus that they don't have? It's not clear to me how CC is a "dumbing-down"; perhaps you can help me see it.
It's more of the failure of students to achieve the higher standards of Common Core. The premise is badly flawed: Raise the standards, and (thus) level the playing field for all students? How can making courses more difficult for marginal students 'level the playing field'? It seems to me that this would only widen the achievement gap.
Also one of the goals of CC was to prepare kids for "living" as well as for college and career. What does that even mean?
Common Core: Higher Expectations, Flat Results : NPR
"The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, assesses students across the country, and in the past 10 years, the national scores have not changed much either. Several states that adopted Common Core early on dropped the standards and the Common Core tests. Many of their scores remain flat as well. Loveless said when you look nationally, it's hard to know if Common Core is actually working."
Common Core Has Failed America's Students - Pacific Research Institute
"But a new large-scale study by the federally funded Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) has
found that since the adoption of Common Core there has been a decline in key test scores.
C-SAIL researchers analyzed changes in student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, from 2010 to 2017.
They had assumed that Common Core would raise student performance on the NAEP exam, but they were in for a surprise.
“Contrary to our expectation,” they reported, the data revealed that the Common Core standards produced “significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards.”
When analyzing the results of a selected group of states, fourth-grade reading achievement would have improved more “had the states continued with their old standards, thus reflecting negative effects of the new [Common Core] standards.”
In other words, if those states had ignored the entreaties by Gates, Obama, et al., they would have been better off.
In addition to the decline in reading performance among fourth graders, the C-SAIL study also found that Common Core “had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement.”
What’s more, the performance of students declined significantly in specific reading and math categories, such as literacy experience and numbers properties, the longer Common Core was in effect.
Study co-author Mengli Song
said: “It’s rather unexpected. The magnitude of the negative effects [of Common Core] tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”
Actually, it’s extremely troubling.