Yesterday, I wrote about the The Infamous “10,000” Comments On Common Core. To quickly recap, the CoreStandards.org site took public feedback prior to the standards being published. Those comments were sold around the country as proof of transparency and vetting and are known by most as the “10,000 comments”.  I received a copy of the comments from North Carolina residents along with an overall total from all respondent locations. It was not 10,000, but 8,731. North Carolina’s total was 195.

I said I would publish the comments once I had a suitable format for doing so. The document is an excel sheet, so transferring the data is going to take time.  The excel sheet has multiple categories beyond overall comments dealing with K-5 ELA and math, grades 6 and up ELA and math, history/social studies, architecture of the standards, the appendices and more. It is a lot to sort through.

I have compiled the overall comment section with identifiers of the type of respondent for North Carolina. Not all respondents gave input in the overall feedback column, which is why I will have to publish multiple sections.

In order to make all the comments visible due to text limits per cell, I ended up having to add cells in some cases. Also, the text in the excel document had of some types of punctuation show up as non-related characters like “—.  I believe this was the case for apostrophe’s and quotes.

Some Quick Points
The idea that health issues should be addressed using the Common Core was in several comments. Frankly, that ought to scare the crap out of everyone. One such comment opened like this and the typo is not mine:

“I think it is important ot have health education in the achievement of the goal of these Common Core State Standards“ which is to prepare youth for college and the workforce.  Young adults will not succeed in higher education or in the workforce and society at-large if they are not health literate. “

Parent input was overwhelmingly negative and opposed the standards. The large majority of them opposed a national set of standards and expressed concerns over government and federal intrusion. Quite a few of the teacher comments also reflected a concern over too much government intrusion. An example of a teacher’s feelings on said intrusion:

“I believe that education control should remain under local/state control, not federal control.  I oppose these national standards since they are a move toward federal control.  Parental control and involvement is imperative to success, not control by the federal government.  We need better pay for teachers and fewer education adminstrators telling teachers what to do.  We need to get rid of any labor unions that are more interested in protecting teachers jobs than in educating students.  Principals need to also be given the authority and freedom to easily fire non-performing teachers and likewise to financially reward good teachers.  Private and internet based schools need to be given freedom to find better ways to education students.  The competition is good and the students win with more educational options.”

Many parents commented that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach was undesirable. An example:

“Children are not cookies and don’t ever come in a cookie cutter package. Standards for education needs to be based on the child not a pre-package idea.”

Many comments from self-identified K-12 teachers called the K-5 developmentally inappropriate. Many called out the K-3 specifically as being both age and developmentally inappropriate and one called for them to be scrapped altogether.

These are a few excerpted examples:

 Pre-K teacher/Social Worker
“I would like to see these standards discarded and have standards created that are appropriate for young children, based on play and hands-on learning with a strong focus on social and emotional development.”

 K-12 Teacher/Parent
“The Common Core State Standards even though currently voluntary seems to set the stage for future mandatory (federal money contingent) National Standards for the entire United States in the future. This type of move would result in more standardized tests and the elimination of local school board and parent control over the curriculum of their children. I believe this would be making a grave mistake concerning our children’s education. First of all, it turns upside down the natural order of who should be raising our children, parents first, then schools, then our government. The continued move towards National Standards and Federal Government control places the Government as the primary parent over our children, and erodes parental rights. This cannot be allowed.”

K-12 Teacher
“I’m sick of the syndrome of pushing curriculum down into lower and lower grades just because they don’t get it in the upper grades and some “genius” thought that if they just got some of it earlier — we at the upper grades wouldn’t have such a hard time.  Well, has anyone thought that maybe the curriculum shouldn’t have been covered up at that upper grade level to begin with.  I find that many concepts we are forced to teach are not developmentally appropriate for 1/2 of the students or even higher — sometimes only 10% of my students are able to get certain concepts.”

View all the overall comments here.