Farleigh Dickinson Poll Finds Only 17% Of Americans Support Common Core

The support trajectory for Common Core drops dramatically:

As millions of students across the country prepare to take the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) exam or the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the most recent national survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds that the educational reform behind these standardized tests remains a mystery to many Americans and faces widespread disapproval.

 Currently, 40 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), often referred to as just the “Common Core,” with 42 percent who are unsure and 17 percent who favor the standards. The goal of the Core is to establish national standards for learning so that all students, regardless of where they live, leave high school with the skills necessary to enter college or the labor force.

Reformers will use this as pushback:

The survey finds that most Americans say that they don’t know very much about the Common Core standards, and they seem to be right: misconceptions about the content of the standards are widespread – almost half of Americans (44%) think that sex education are part of them – and are strongly connected with opposition to them.

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A lack of information is evident from misconceptions about what topics are included in the standards. In the survey, Americans were also asked if four specific topics – sexual education, global warming, evolution, and the American Revolution – are included in the Common Core. In reality, none of these are part of the Common Core standards, which only include topics in math and reading. Still, two-thirds of Americans say that at least one of these is in the standards, with 37 percent saying that three or four of them are.

But who's at fault for the "lack of information" around Common Core?

Deformers thought they could shove through dramatic eduction reform without the public being clued in - new standards, new tests, teacher evaluations tied to those tests, all in some way connected to the stimulus package, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind waivers - so if there are widespread misconceptions around the Common Core, well, then next time don't shove all this stuff through at once without public discussion and buy-in beforehand.

Elites think they know best but one thing they don't seem to know anything about is how the rest of us respond when shit gets shoved down our throats.

Quite frankly, I don't care if the Core is killed for the right reasons or the wrong reasons anymore.

I just want to see the Core killed.

And with so many people against Common Core, so few in favor and Common Core proponents seemingly unable to persuade the "Don't Know Enough" categories despite all the money they throw into their propaganda, I'd have to say the Common Core is going to die an early death.

Alas, like so many of the zombie lies that pervade education reform (schools are in crisis, teachers are lazy, merit pay works), the Core may re-emerge later on with a new name and new branding.