ABSTRACT
The Common Core State Standards, among many other sets of academic standards, have been adopted widely throughout the country. Although there are pockets of resistance and reconsideration of adoption, their presence has changed the face of much of public education. That change may be less about these sets of standards themselves and more about the focus and energy that has accompanied the work to transform these standards into actual curricula, which in turn changes the content and delivery of direct instruction in classrooms. And, subsequently, there is the accountability factor (i.e., statewide mastery testing tied to teacher evaluation) that has, in large part, served to provide a landscape of distrust and stress that arguably has never been heard in such a unified and widespread national voice.
