The Every Student Succeeds Act has generated a rapidly increasing level of interest and enthusiasm on the part of educators and citizens since President Obama’s “Christmas Miracle” announcement in December of last year. Teachers and education officials throughout the country have been busy dissecting ESSA and discussing what has changed, what has remained the same and what is open for debate.

Among the many liberties ESSA grants is the license to call into question the Common Core State Standards that most states, including Hawaii, have been beholden to for the past several years. This could and should lead to a lively and productive, if heated, discussion.

Indeed, as DOE Deputy Superintendent Stephen Schatz remarked at a recent Board of Education meeting, opinion on Common Core varies widely among teachers, some wanting to leave it as is, some to refine it and some to discard it altogether.

My own experience as a high school language arts teacher echoes Schatz’s remarks. I was an enthusiastic supporter of Common Core when I first studied it in 2010. This was due in large measure to the fact that it was so much more detailed and apparently “rigorous” than the standards that language arts teachers in Hawaii were using at the time.

However, my enthusiasm quickly waned as I slowly learned of the dark and complicated politics behind the construction of Common Core, and as I became aware of the fact that most of what is good in the new standards was available to teachers in previous documents, from which the content of Common Core was culled and repackaged.

It is incumbent on the DOE, in the renewed examination of its strategic plan that is currently underway, to question its ongoing commitment to Common Core.

It appears highly likely that Common Core will not withstand for much longer the onslaught of informed, expert opinion against it. Criticisms have come from multiple and various sources. Among the most significant is a 2014 history of the Common Core by Mercedes Schneider (Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?), which documents the shady manner in which corporate-financed “think tanks” worked together with Bill Gates and the National Governors Association, during the height of “the Great Recession,” to foist on public schools a set of standards that would serve the needs, not of students and their teachers, but of educational Big Business.

More recently, a “research brief” signed by 100 education professors in California attacks Common Core content itself, calling into question its claims of “rigor,” its pretense of fostering critical-thinking skills and the obsession with standardized testing that has emerged as its invidious byproduct. The researchers argue that, ironically, over-testing has likely contributed to the recent drop in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, the most valid and reliable standardized assessment from which information on student learning is currently collected.

The architects and proponents of Common Core have yet to mount a sustained counterargument to these and other criticisms, seemingly insulated against news of the damage Common Core has done and is currently doing.

It is incumbent on the DOE, however, in the renewed examination of its strategic plan that is currently underway, to question its ongoing commitment to Common Core. Instead of trailing the nation, let’s place ourselves in the vanguard by putting a halt to this failed experiment in early-21^st-century education.

All educational stakeholders should work together to develop shared understandings that will lead to genuinely high standards of teaching and learning instead of standardized tests, and to the true rigor of teacher-developed curriculum, instruction and assessment instead of the rigor mortis engendered by educational corporations that have been the ultimate beneficiaries of the Common Core State Standards.