Recently, Troy Senik suggested that Common Core has the potential to be the sleeper issue in the 2016 Republican presidential primary race. Common Core, which effectively establishes uniform educational standards for English and math on a national level, is deeply unpopular among elements of the Right and it certainly has the potential to be a major factor in the selection of the next Republican presidential candidate.

Honestly, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the issue until now. I don’t have children, my own education was largely private, and is, in any case, completed. That said, Common Core is going to be a major issue facing our nation as a matter of both politics and policy. Consequently, I’ve been trying to determine my own position on the matter.

I have to say I’m conflicted. I have serious principled concerns about the extension of federal involvement in the education, but at the same time I have to say that I find it hard to believe that a program which is both opposed by the NEA and supported by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee is an unambiguously bad idea.

As a matter of general principle I’m skeptical Common Core on grounds of both limited government and federalism. I don’t really think the state should be providing education at all, but if it’s going to do so it seems to me to be a matter constitutionally left to the states. Since Reagan, the GOP has fantasized about doing away with the Department of Education and the establishment of a national curriculum via Common Core is certainly a step away from the realization of that goal. On a more practical level I’m concerned the Common Core will lead to less accountability on the part of educators, as it will inevitably entail greater layers of bureaucracy and less responsiveness to the concerns of local constituencies and parents. I also disapprove of the way Common Core is being used as a Trojan horse to achieve a national curriculum when there is no political mandate for one.

As far as the substantive elements of Common Core go, I’m not sure where I stand. Criticism of the Common Core standards has come from both directions. Some critics claim that Common Core standards are not stringent enough and that will lead to a dumbing down of American public education. Others assert, just as strenuously, that the standards are unreasonably high, placing impossible expectations upon already overburdened students. Based upon my own cursory research it seems as though neither criticism is wholly valid or wholly without merit. The expectations set by Common Core appear to be less stringent than those found in our high-performing public schools, but dramatically more demanding than those found in low-performing schools.

This brings me to where I see the potentially positive arguments for Common Core. Setting aside my principled objections to public education in general and and federal involvement in education specifically, there is a very practical question of how we best educate our nation’s children.

America’s public education system is nowhere near as good as it should be, but neither is it the unmitigated disaster that many people claim to be. We don’t stand atop the PISA rankings, but we’re not at the bottom either. Compared to his peers in comparable countries the average American student is mediocre.

However, evaluating American education based on average PISA scores masks the true problem with our educational system. The problem is not that the average American student is mediocre when compared to his peers around the world. It is that our lowest-performing students fare much worse than their international peers. American education isn’t uniformly bad, it’s just that where it is bad it is spectacularly so. It is in its potential to improve the education of our poorest performing students that I think Common Core has merit.

Two of the most frequent criticisms of Common Core which I have encountered are 1) that it eliminates the ability of local school boards to tailor their educational approaches to best fit their students’ needs, forcing them instead to “teach to the test”; and 2) that it diminishes teachers’ accountability to the parents of the students they are educating. I don’t find either of these criticisms particularly compelling.

I simply do not see why locally-established curricula are necessarily preferable to national standards on a practical level. As I see it, the more relevant question is whether the standards applied are appropriate and the curricula effective. One of the major reasons so many of our schools, particularly in the Democratically-controlled inner-cities, perform so poorly is that the standards set in place by the local school boards are simply too low. Imposing the higher standards established by Common Core would seem to me to be an improvement.

I also don’t find much merit in claims that local educational authorities need flexibility to tailor their curricula to their particular student bodies in order to educate them effectively. It’s undeniably true that we live in a vast and diverse country, but the techniques needed to successfully teach children to read, write, and do sums should not vary dramatically based on locality. (There is not a particularly Southern Californian method of long division.) Furthermore, I have genuinely never understood the objection to “teaching to a test.” If the goal is to teach children to read, write, and do sums what is wrong with teaching to a test of a student’s ability to read, write, and do sums?

I am more sympathetic to concerns that Common Core will reduce accountability to parents. Parental involvement is crucial to the successful education of children. That said one of the main problems with our low-performing schools is that they are in impoverished communities where the level of parental involvement is low and teachers face little accountability in practice. In such cases, federal accountability, though by no means ideal, is preferable to no accountability at all.

As you may have noticed, most of my analysis of Common Core has been focused on its effects on low-performing schools. This is because I think the practical effects of Common Core will largely be on low-performing schools. In middle-class and affluent communities with comparatively high quality public schools I do not think the effect of Common Core will be particularly significant.

It’s true that the standards established by Common Core will often be lower than those currently in practice at quality public schools, but that will not necessarily lead to a lowering of the caliber of the education those schools provide. As things currently stand, high-performing schools provide an education which exceeds the standards established by state and local authorities. I think it likely that where Common Core standards fall below those currently in place they will have little effect, much the way the minimum wage has little effect on the income of doctors or lawyers.

Similarly, I think Common Core will have little effect on teacher accountability to parents in high-performing schools. Accountability is largely a factor of parental involvement and I don’t think parents who currently taking an active role in their children’s education will cease to do so as a result of Common Core.

So here’s where I’m at:

I think the Common Core is likely to improve the education of students in our lower performing schools while not having much effect on their peers in better performing schools. I’m rather ambivalent about the practical merits of local control of education, but I have a strong principled inclination to favor it and I strongly disapprove of the extra-democratic means by which Common Core is being implemented. I’m still not sure where I ultimately come down on the issue.

Can anyone on Ricochet help me out?