Advanced Common Core Kremlinology

Me, in comments:

A few points, Mercedes.

I think the copyright to the standards angle is a red herring. Standards shouldn’t be controlled by private copyright, I agree, but the way NGA & CCSSO set this up — including splitting control over two politically complicated organizations, and using a sort of, almost open license — does not indicate at all that they intended to aggressively enforce their copyright control. Certainly if they were going to, Indiana would be on its way to court already, and as far as I know they are not.

I still think you’ve got ADP’s role in the sequence flipped. The important and pointed question is more “Why *didn’t* they use ADP?” Common Core isn’t based on ADP, despite the fact that Achieve literally published a set of “Common Core” standards based on ADP in July 2008 — http://achieve.org/OutofManyOne Knowing exactly what happened between 2008 and 2009 to write that document out of history would tell us a lot. What was thought to be wrong with the ADP Common Core?

I’ve always thought that we needed new standards because the powers that be wanted new *tests* and more numbers for VAM. The standards are just a formality. If they could write new tests without writing standards at all, they would. So the standards were written to fit the way they wanted to write tests and provide at least tidier looking VAM numbers (by having everything in K-12 ELA based around the same skill based anchor standards, mostly).

Anyhow, these are relatively obscure points of Kremlinology.