Alexander Russo at Scholastic remembers all the negative reactions to the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and predicts that the current ruckus over the Common Core State Standards will similarly lose steam:
If the history of NCLB is any guide, the vast majority of the current efforts to reconsider or roll back the Common Core will lose steam or result in some relatively minor accommodation well short of opting out. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on where you stand.
Russo's right about this. Heck, there's practically a playbook out there: implementation of some national initiative (health care, education, whatever); initial celebration; swell of protests and rending of garments over untoward federal interference and general incompetence of process; ebb of protests; acceptance.
I don't mean to go all Kubler-Ross on you, but don't you see the pattern? Perhaps Monday's "National Day of Action"sponsored by AFT was the crest of the wave. Maybe not. But, in New Jersey at least, by the end of this school year, the Common Core will most likely start feeling less like a militantly-imposed assault on teachers' rights and more like a commonsensical set of standards intended to address student weaknesses in critical thinking skills.