David Pearson was a key participant in the development of the Common Core State Standards for public schools, a voluntary effort to increase opportunities to learn for all students.
David worked on the validation committee charged with assuring alignment between the standards and the wisdom of scholarly research and endorsed the Standards before they were published (NOTE: I wrongly refer to this committee as the “visioning panel” in the podcast—please correct this mistake for me as you listen). Elements in the design of the Core held much promise in David’s mind; indeed, the validation panel as a whole approved.
But things didn’t work out as planned. What David perceived as a positive step forward during the standards’ writing process turned out to fail with a whimper over the years after the debut in 2010, primarily because of an utter lack of attention to implementation.
David’s unique position as an educational scholar and researcher in reading for the past fifty years positions him to bring us important insights into our most recent reform attempt, the Common Core, an attempt that today is in limbo.
In conjunction with his remarks in an earlier ltRRtl podcast on the Whole Language movement, David analyzes the rise and fall of two national reform projects over the past five decades. It seems as though the time is approaching for another run at school reform as a part of rebuilding the system in a post-pandemic world with a deeper understanding of the role technologies might play in renewal and in the light of the emerging field of implementation science.
Share this post