So what is the common core?
It's a very simple thing.
It's a written explanation of what knowledge kids should achieve at various milestones
in their educational career.
So it's writing down in sixth grade which math things should you know, in ninth grade
which math things should you know, in twelfth grade which math things should you know.
And you might be surprised to learn how poor those, I'll call those "standards."
But to be clear, it's not curriculum.
It's not a textbook, it's not a way of teaching, it's just writing down, "Should you know this
part of algebra?
Should you know trigonometric functions?
Should you be able to recognize a graph of this type?"
And doing that very well is hard, because there's certain dependencies, if you teach
it in the wrong order, if you try and teach too much at once, too much too early, which
the U.S. was doing a lot of that, it can be very, very poor.
And if you compare, we had 50 of these things, and there was quite a bit of divergence.
Some states had trigonometry, some didn't.
Some had pie charts, some didn't.
And so ironically, what had happened was the textbook companies had gone in and told the
committees that make these things up that they should add things over time.
And so we had math textbooks over double the size of any of the Asian countries.
And we had the ordering, in almost every one of our 50, which is strange, you'd think if
you had 50, one of them would randomly be really, really well-ordered.
Some were more ambitious than others.
So for example, being high, that is, having the twelfth grade expectation be high, there
were a few like Massachusetts who were quite good in that respect.
And so when kids from Massachusetts take international tests or SAT, anything, they do better.
Better than the rest of the country.
And so often when you see those country rankings, they'll take Massachusetts and show you where
it would be if it was a separate country, and it's way past the U.S. that now is virtually
at the bottom of any of the well-off countries, with the Asian countries totally dominating
the top six slots now.
Finland had a brief period where they were up high, and now they're not even the European
leader anymore.
So a bunch of governors said, "Hey, why are we buying these expensive textbooks?
Why are they getting so thick?
Are standards high enough or quality enough?"
And I think it was the national governor's association said, "We ought to get together
on this."
A bunch of teachers met with a bunch of experts, and so in reading and writing and math, these
knowledge levels were written down.
And at some point, 46 states had adopted that.
Curriculum, a variety of competitive curriculum now that small companies can get into it because
it's not just doing a book for Florida, and so the barrier to entry that was created by
the large firms there goes away.
The idea that those committees rev it so you can't use the old textbooks, that idea will
go away, because in math, this can have real durability.
Changing your math standards, it's not like some new form of math is being invented.
And there has been in a sense, a national expectation.
When you take the SAT test, it has trigonometry on it.
So if you're in a state that doesn't have that, you're going to get a low score.
And they use a certain notation in the way they do the math, and certain states were
different than that, so you're screwed.
If you move from state to state...
Arthur: In the vernacular.
Bill: ...you experience discontinuity because of this.
And it's made it very hard to compare things.
And this is an era where we have things like Khan Academy that are trying to be a national
resource, and yet they, you sit down, it'll tell you, are you up to the sixth grade level,
are you up to the ninth grade level, are you ready to graduate from high school?
And so this common core was put together.
If somebody want...and states will decide this thing.
Nobody's suggesting that the federal government will, even in this area, which is not curriculum,
will dictate these things.
States can opt in, they can opt out.
As they do that, they should look at the status quo, which is poor, they should look and find
something that's high achievement, that's got quality, and if they can find something
that's that, if they have two they're comparing, they ought to probably pick something in common.
Because to some degree, this is an area where if you do have commonality, it's like an electrical
plug, you get more free market competition.
Scale is good for free market competition.
Individual state regulatory capture is not good for competition.
And so this thing in terms of driving innovation, you'd think that pro-capitalistic market-driven
people would be in favor of it, but somehow it's gotten to be controversial.
And states will decide.
Whatever they want to decide is fine, but at the end of the day, it does affect the
quality of your teaching, it does affect when your kids go to take what are national-level
tests, whether they are going to do well or not do well.