Common Core and American Education

            For a long while now, America has underperformed in education on the world's stage, slowly losing much of its academic rigor over time. This problem spawned the now infamous No Child Left Behind Act, which created more problems for teachers then it was solving. Students were suffering the constant teaching to the test that this act inspired, and turned education into a formulaic memorization game. It is in light of this failure that new standards had to be made. Fast forward to 2010, when the Common Core standards were adopted by many states as part of Race To The Top, a new program dedicated to raising standards in education to be more college ready, (The Week). This new initiative granted states funding for schools and more importantly, waivers for the No Child Left Behind Act. As part of the conditions states had to implement the Common Core standards or standards closely aligned with them. With bipartisan support, these stipulations were agreed upon in turn accomplishing serious education reform. But fast forward to the deadline of 2014, when the national Common Core aligned tests are going to be taken to determine whether or not states were successful in implementing these new standards, and you'll find a nation in panic mode. (The Week).
             The new Common Core standards have been a detriment to student's education according to Brian Farmer, a writer for the right wing magazine The New American. Fundamentally against the way in which Common Core has steered the education of our youth, in his article, "Common Core is ROTTEN TO THE CORE," he accuses it as a way to indoctrinating the youth to become candidates for the workforce of tomorrow. His quotation of John D. Rockefeller's hope for educating the youth as he, "[did not] want a nation of thinkers, [but] a nation of workers," brings into consideration what the purpose of these new standards were, (Farmer 21). He even goes on to accuse the creators of the Common Core aligned questions of writing them in such a way as to alienate a majority of parents so that they wouldn't be able to help their children with their homework.