(Continued from page 4)

and skills needed to earn a diploma and the knowledge and skills to actually be prepared for education and training after high school," according to a PowerPoint presentation given out by the nonprofit group Achieve the Core, whose founders were involved in writing the Common Core standards. High rates of remediation, including at Dakota colleges, result from that.
• Third, these different standards are especially difficult for children who move from one state to another. About 13 percent of children move across state lines each year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and those children are likely to be from low-income, military or immigrant families. "Many of them lose their place in the educational order and never recover," writes Bill Keller in the New York Times.
• This is part of the reasoning that prompted the states, along with teachers and experts, to work together to form new standards.
• The federal government had no role in the standards' development and did not mandate their adoption.
• There were some "carrots" from the federal level that might have encouraged states to adopt the Common Core: The Race to the Top initiative, which was from the federal level, encouraged states to develop higher standards as part of the competition for more funding. Some states applied for waivers to the No Child Left Behind requirements, which were more likely to be granted if states raised their standards. But neither of these programs was mandatory, and neither required that the higher standards be the Common Core Standards.
• Neither Dakota is a Race to the Top state; South Dakota did receive a No Child Left Behind waiver in 2012. South Dakota adopted the Common Core Standards in 2010, and North Dakota did so in 2011.
•
• The goals, and how to reach them
• Some of the critiques of Common Core have centered on the idea of standards in general. The pro side argues that standards allow everyone to know the same thing when they graduate from high school. The con side is that standards force everyone (no matter their beliefs, plans after high school, or ability level) to be taught the same thing. In a nation that prizes freedom and individualism, that doesn't always go over well.
• Townsend explained that there is a clear difference between "standards"--what a student is expected to know at a certain point in his or her education--and "curriculum"--the methods a teacher uses to make sure a student gets to that standard.
• Townsend offered this example: If one of the standards included the topic of soil

(Continued on page 6)