(19) Clearly a biased source, the justification for opposing the Common Core here is largely conspiracy driven. It seems that a lot of opposition to these new standards have been in fact knee jerk reactions to small bits of information that have made it to the news. This article, catchy as the title of it is, seems to want to provoke conflict, cause outrage, or more specifically make their readers feel something. In researching this topic, it seems that opposition is largely guided by simple headlines such as, "Common Core is ROTTEN TO THE CORE," losing any sense of journalistic integrity by trading balanced accounts of an issue, with emotionally charged speech that diverges greatly from the topic at hand: will it make our children smarter?.
According to Dr. Lucy Calkins, a Robinson Professor of Literature and Writing at the Teachers College of Columbia University, the Common Core will better set up our kids for learning more complex ideas later on in their educational careers, including college. Calkins describes the current conversation of the topic as toxic to progress in understanding the Common Core. Lucy Calkins' initial strategy is to have everyone in the audience turn to the person next to them to complain about what they dislike the most about the new Common Core standards. This was done in order to illustrate the fact that trying to understand the Common Core will never be accomplished if approached with negativity, (Calkins). The reiteration that the Common Core is not a curriculum, but is instead a set of standards, is imperative in explaining how these standards affect tomorrow's classrooms. As a base for her argument in favor of Common Core, this is a detail that many of the Common Core's detractors tend to miss or misinterpret. Calkins explains the changes being made to the way Reading and Writing is taught as a step in the right direction. Common Core puts an emphasis on not only reading both fiction and non-fiction, but also informational writing as well as narrative writing.