When Common Core is not Common Core (and more importantly, vice versa)

One commenter said in response to this video:

Go to the standards and see if you see the requirement for this kind of deadening scripted teaching strategy. I’ll save you the trouble: you won’t find it.

Many other states have not found this necessary. And, as someone else pointed out, this is a strategy used in many charter schools much before CCSS.

A state like NY is reduced to this kind of scripting when it is running the good teachers out with punitive testing and privatization and replacing them with TFA and other inexperienced teachers who don’t know any better.

This brings up a serious point. Lots of us, myself included, have discussed Common Core in fairly broad terms. Others, like this fellow, would argue that CC is just the list bare-bones topics listed in the actual curriculum. Who's right? We both are, or, put another way, some questions work better with the first definition; others work better with the second.

When is "not Common Core" Common Core?

Though the dividing lines aren't always clear, what we refer to as "Common Core" is generally a relatively coherent set of proposed changes to the topics we teach, the way we teach them and the standardized test we use to measure them. These changes tend to have common origins, objectives and underlying assumptions. More importantly, the topics, methods and metrics were designed to compliment each other and there is considerable pressure to adopt the lot.