Central planning sucks.

Robby Soave|Jul. 8, 2015 7:12 pm

DreamstimeStates that adopted the Common Core national education standards still can’t provide textbooks that actually teach what the standards require. That’s a big problem for students who have to take Core-mandated standardized tests that are misaligned with their teachers’ instructional materials.

An eye-opening investigation by Matt Collette of The Daily Beast reveals that most textbooks don’t fully meet the standards, despite advertising themselves as Core-aligned. Collette consulted EdReports, a non-profit that evaluates textbooks; the group recently reviewed more than 80 textbooks and found that only 11 of them matched Common Core requirements.

Most damning of all was the fact that Pearson—a publishing giant with significant Common Core ties and exclusive contracts to develop testing materials for some Core-compliant states—“had zero textbooks evaluated as being aligned with the Common Core,” according to Collette. This means, in a sense, that the gigantic corporation making the tests is also producing textbooks that don’t teach to those tests.

Additionally ironic—and certainly noteworthy—is the fact the EdReports is funded by the Gates Foundation, an organization that funded and developed the Common Core and lobbied for its widespread adoption. I would thus expect EdReports to air on the side of favorable coverage for Core-related matters. That even a Gates-funded endeavor has serious concerns about textbook compliance suggests to me that concern is indeed merited.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/07/08/common-cores-corporate-backers-admit-wid