Whether or not the effort is effective or even worthwhile is, I think, important. Certainly that’s what students are told by teachers. There are many educators who like Common Core and many who do not, all for what appear to be thoughtful reasons.
For my own part, I think the one thing we know for certain is that different kids learn different things in different ways at different times. So the effort to make all third graders in the country temporarily memorize the same arbitrarily chosen information for the purposes of testing them (while giving adults credit for possibly raising nearly meaningless test scores) is precisely the wrong way to go about the incredibly complex and difficult task of helping kids to learn.
