Changes in the SAT, announced on March 5 by the College Board, adjust the test to the ongoing decline in the nation's public schools. The new test lightens vocabulary and math and eliminates the penalty for bad guessing. The new SAT grows out of and accommodates the Common Core State Standards, the controversial set of K-12 standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
The Common Core's standards amount to an assault on the college curriculum. That's because colleges will have to adapt to what the Common Core teaches—and what it fails to teach. It teaches a mechanical way of reading that is poorly suited to literature, philosophy, history, and the rest of the liberal arts. It also fails to teach the math students need to begin a college-level curriculum in the sciences.
COMPLAINTS
The Common Core has aroused a broad-based and sometimes furious reaction among Americans across the political spectrum. The furor, however, isn't yet focused on what the Common Core does to a college education. Rather, the complaints focus on the immediate harm to students and to schools. The arguments against Common Core have proliferated almost beyond counting, but the short version is something like this:
Read on and think about our children
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