Jeb Bush Is Right About Common Core

As a country, we’re lagging behind — and our public schools, and parents, need to step up

Earlier in the summer, not too long after my kids put down their school books, I set out to buy them some more. Every summer in their young careers as students, I buy them workbooks to keep them busy, and to keep their minds sharp. I used to buy them books on the street, from a guy who set up shop on Lexington Avenue in New York City, across the street from Grand Central Terminal. His books were cute: they featured a little mouse named “Smart Alec.”

Alec always had too many apples, and was giving them away to his pals, and we had to figure out how many he had left. Other times, our friend The Mouse wanted us to write a sentence about his apples.

All of it looked legit to me, even though I was buying them at a deep discount on the street, next to the guy selling socks and cell phone cases. But in the kids’ second or third week of summer last year, I noticed they had burned through all of Alec’s adventures, and were back in front of their iPads. It was time to step up their workbook game.

So this year, we took a stroll down to a locally-owned educational materials shop, where I asked the owner if she had any Common Core workbooks. We live in New York, and our schools follow the core curriculum. The owner took me to a set of shelves that stretched along the entire back wall, to a set of much more serious looking books.

Good ol’ Smart Alec was nowhere to be seen. There were no cute mice at all — just facts and figures. The kids gave the books the once-over, pouring over them with scowled faces and burrowed brows. They knew something was up. “These are REAL school books!” they cried, shocked and dismayed that their dad would do something so heinous to their summer break.

Meanwhile, I wondered about something else. I knew the mouse was missing — but where were the words “Common Core”? How was I to know if this was a legit Common Core book? I inquired at checkout, and the owner smiled, confiding to me that the publisher, Scholastic, no longer put the words “Common Core” on the workbooks. “Too political,” she added.

Jeb Bush must feel the same way. Long-known as an advocate for education reform including Common Core, he too seems afraid to use those words, opting for the more benign “higher standards.” This is what he said in a recent educational forum: “If people don’t like Common Core, fine. Just make sure your standards are much higher than the ones you had before. We can’t keep dumbing down standards.”

I believe Bush is as right about Common Core/higher standards as he is as about school choice and vouchers. We know, as a country, we lag behind other nations. We know other countries are filling our best universities and best tech jobs. Why shouldn’t all of our schools teach basic math, reading and writing principles? Shouldn’t all schools mandate reading of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?

Sure, the Obama administration, in it’s continuing quest for federal control, dangled money in front of states considering the adoption of new standards. That was wrong. State leaders helped designed the core curriculum, and it should have never even had the appearance of a federal mandate.

My children didn’t finish their Common Core workbooks this summer, and I never expected them to. There are just too many pools, beaches and roller coasters to compete with. However, they did make serious progress on grade level books for the school year they are entering. I challenged them to use what they’d learned in the school year prior, to see how far they could get into material designed for the grade level they are entering this fall. In the end, I think they surprised themselves.

Parents should challenge themselves, too. I believe much of the opposition, aside from belief in the many myths surrounding the program, comes from parents who don’t understand their children’s homework. ‘It looks confusing, so it must be bad,’ they think. It’s crucial to make the time to see what the standards and methods are all about. Support the efforts of teachers who are also learning new ways to lay the foundation for higher concepts.

And maybe support Jeb Bush, who might be afraid to say “Common Core” too often these days, but is miles ahead of the Christie’s of the world who now run from their earlier support because it’s the politically correct thing to do.

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