TN Note: Common Core Education Standards should be banned everywhere, and control over education passed 100 percent back to the states. The co-founder of Technocracy, Inc. in 1934 was M. King Hubbard. His view of education is very descriptive of Common Core today. As he stated in the Technocracy Study Course (1934),

"A continental system of human conditioning will have to be installed to replace the existing insufficient educational methods and institutions. This continental system of general education will have to be organized as to provide the fullest possible conditioning and physical training… It must educate and train the student public so as to obtain the highest possible percentage of proficient functional capacity. "

Thus, conditioning to prepare students for entering the Technocracy work brigades was the primary goal. Critical thinking skills were anathema, unless it was possessed by the elitist Technocrats like Hubbard.

More than 100 education researchers in California have joined in a call for an end to high-stakes testing, saying that there is no "compelling" evidence to support the idea that the Common Core State Standards will improve the quality of education for children or close the achievement gap, and that Common Core assessments lack "validity, reliability and fairness."

The California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education,  a statewide collaborative of university-based education researchers, recently released a research brief (see in full below below) describing concerns with the Common Core standards and the assessments being given to millions of students in California and other states around the country this spring.

The researchers, from public and private universities in California —  including Stanford University, UCLA, and the University of California Berkeley — say that the Common Core standards themselves do not accomplish what supporters said they would and that linking them to high-stakes tests actually harms students. The brief says:

 Although proponents argue that the CCSS promotes critical thinking skills and student-centered learning (instead of rote learning), research demonstrates that imposed standards, when linked with high-stakes testing, not only deprofessionalizes teaching  and narrows the curriculum,  but in so doing, also reduces the quality of education and student learning, engagement, and success. The impact is also on student psychological well-being: Without an understanding that the scores have not been proven to be valid or fair for determining proficiency or college readiness, students and their parents are likely to internalize failing labels with corresponding beliefs about academic potential.

More specific to California: a recent study on the effects of high-stakes testing, in particular of the CA High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE), found no  positive effects on student achievement and large negative effects on graduation rates. The authors estimated that graduation rates declined by 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points as a result of the state exit-exam  policy, and also found that these negative effects were "concentrated among low-achieving students, minority students, and female students."