Shane Cockrell is a father of two who grew up in a military family and is now in the military himself. Shane's not new to the fact that education standards between states are radically different: When he was a child his family moved from Connecticut to South Carolina, and his mom found the lack of challenging material in South Carolina schools so appalling that she put him in private school.
Now Shane's a parent, and his own children are subject to the drastic variations in education standards between states. His son was thriving in an accelerated education program in Missouri when Shane and his family moved to Oklahoma. But when his son started school Oklahoma, Shane realized that the "accelerated program" he had researched turned out to only consist of occasional library visits. "I'm angry with myself because I felt like I did him a disservice by moving," Cockrell says. His son is bored, and his grades have slipped.
It makes no sense for our standards to vary so drastically from state-to-state. That's why the Common Core Standards, clear and high standards for what every American child should know by the end of each grade, are a practical and effective solution for a system that now dooms some students to learn far less than their peers who happen to live in different states.
Read more common sense reasons to support the core (including hearing from a Teacher of the Year who moved states) in my piece in the Hechinger Report, and find more details here on what the Core means for your kids and schools.