Paul Horton is a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School.

He writes:

The Cure for the Common Core

The Common Core is like that insidious commercial that creeps into the darker recesses of our short-term memories: the jingle that we wake up hearing; the embarrassingly male enhancement ad that we wince at; or the little message that penetrates the space between the paragraphs of every online news story we read. It has become the unintentional trope of market driven education: the separation of learning from creative, non alienated interaction between two subjects: the teacher and the learner. The Common Core Standards seek to reify the learning and assessment processes into code intended to objectify and operate skilled 21^st century workers.

Stephen Pinker could not explain its staying power!

Readers of New York Times editorials who read nothing else about “The Core” tend to be down on…