Every state has some sort of standards for specific grade levels, and they have for some time. Ideally, teachers haven't just taught whatever they want. Teachers in every state should be teaching the standards put in place by their state. Every state should have their standards available for public use on their Dept of Ed website.
Common Core standards are an attempt to get everyone on the same page in regards to broad grade level concepts that are taught across the country. While I understand that centralization is generally not a great idea, in today's more mobile society, there is some logic to this.
Common Core applies to Math and English/Language Arts only. There are not CCSS for government, history, science, and so forth, although many of the language arts standards deal with non-fiction.
The CCSS direct what broad ideas should be mastered at grade levels, but it does not specify curriculum nor methodology. They are not, so far as I can tell, politically charged in any way.
Example of specific standards:
8th Grade English/Language Arts: Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.
4th Grade Math: Solve word problems involving addition and subtraction of fractions referring to the same whole and having like denominators, e.g., by using visual fraction models and equations to represent the problem.
These are not radical, Marxist ideas. The problem is what it has always been... the curriculum selected to implement the standard. For example, in the E/LA example above, the standard does not specify a particular book. A Tale of Two Cities would fit the standard, but so would a book glorifying lesbian marriage.
The Common Core State Standards for all grade levels may be found at this website: http://www.corestandards.org
As a teacher, one of the things I like (and lazy teachers don't) is that the dreaded achievement tests follow the standards exactly. As a teacher, if I've taught the math standards properly, my students will do fine on the test and will be ready for the next math class where more complex material will be introduced. Student achievement on these tests form the bulk of my annual evaluation score.
I appreciate your willingness to wade through a long post.
I understand that some don’t support public schools.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I am one of those people who does NOT support FORCING godlessness on captive children and using POLICE THREAT to force citizens to pay for this abomination.
I do not support a system that FORCES children into a socialist-entitlement environment where the children risk learning to be comfortable with the socialism that the voting mob has given them. I don’t support using police threat to FORCE citizens to pay for this EVIL, either.
Let’s call it what it is: EVIL!
The English standards could fairly be seen as a Trojan Horse for government propaganda.
One of the big changes that they impose is to require a majority of the material studied to be informational rather than literary. That ‘informational’ reading spans history, science, etc., and is generally set at the state level. The states are banding into various large consortia, however, with up to 25 states so far in each consortium. Also, there is a dogmatic push to study only the actual material in these informational texts, rather than to invite or allow critical reading through augmentation with external sources.
Thus, more than half of students’ time studying English has become devoted to the narrow reading of government provided ‘informational’ texts on environmentalism and other typically slanted documents. It truly does take propaganda in schools to unprecedented levels.
Also, though there’s all sorts of justification for these standards assuring that all students achieve at the prescribed levels, they also provide ‘scaffolding’ such that students reading way below the level of the texts can be helped to limp along through the process even though they’ve not necessarily achieved mastery at any level.