Common Core: 5 Quotes From University Officials on Heated Debate

As with any issue, there are outspoken people both for and against Common Core, which has introduced national standards into schools for language arts and math subjects.

The following five quotes show how some university officials feel about the impact the standards will have on the education system:

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1. Dr. Anthony Esolen of Providence College, Rhode Island, came out against Common Core saying, "What appalls me most about the standards ... is the cavalier contempt for great works of human art and thought, in literary form. It is sheer ignorance of the life of the imagination. We are not programming machines. We are teaching children. We are not producing functionaries, factory-like. We are forming the minds and hearts of men and women ... to be human beings, honoring what is good and right and cherishing what is beautiful."

2. In a paper by Drs. Edward Frenkel and Hung-Hsi Wu of UCLA Berkeley, the two declared, "The only way to combat the current lock-step march to the bottom of international student performance in math and science is to implement rigorous national standards. That is why parents, teachers and policy makers should oppose efforts to scale back the hard-won and necessary Common Core State Standards."

3. According to The Washington Post, Gerard V. Bradley, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, expressed his opinion about Common Core in a letter that included 132 scholars signing on. Bradley sent the letter to every Catholic bishop in the country. In it, he railed against Common Core standards, saying, "They are contrary to tradition and academic studies on reading and human formation," and accused Core proponents of seeking to "transform 'literacy' into a 'critical' skill set, at the expense of sustained and heartfelt encounters with great works of literature."

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4. Marina Ratner, an education expert and professor emerita of mathematics at UCLA Berkeley, maintained Common Core would harm math education in the U.S. and shift it "even closer to the bottom in international ranking."

Ratner went on to say Common Core's "deeper" and "more rigorous" standards will actually replace math "with some kind of illustrative counting saturated with pictures, diagrams and elaborate word problems," reports Breitbart.

5. Kay Persichitte, dean of the University of Wyoming's College of Education, said, "It only makes sense that we have some platform of expectations in terms of rigorous common standards in core subjects across this nation if we're going to be able to reasonably compare achievement, progress, and learning."

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