The Appearance of Rigor

How Common Core and classroom systems shaped the wrong habits, and why the Supreme Court’s decision opens the door for change.

The Supreme Court just cleared the path to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. In a 6–3 decision, the Court lifted a block on the federal government’s effort to lay off nearly half the agency’s workforce. While it didn’t abolish the Department outright (that will require Congress), the ruling allows cuts to federal education staff and oversight mechanisms.

Even before the Supreme Court’s decision, education in America had been stripped of its most essential purpose: teaching students something meaningful about the world. Personally, I see this decision as an opportunity. Not because I think the problems in education will magically fix themselves at the state level, but because the federal system has failed to build effective education systems for decades. Moving authority back to the states could create the space we need to do something different, if we’re willing to confront what we’ve been reinforcing all along.

A System That Forgot What It Was For

In The Knowledge Gap,

Natalie Wexler

lays out the truth. For decades, our schools have focused on teaching reading skills, such as “finding the main idea,” “making predictions,” and “text-to-self connections,” rather than building students’ understanding of the world through history, science, and other core content.

Our education systems didn’t build their background knowledge. We didn’t teach them history, science, civics, or coherent stories about how the world works. As Wexler pointed out, comprehension doesn’t come from generic skills; it comes from what you already know. And what happens to the students who walk into school without much prior knowledge? They fall further behind. Not because they’re less capable, but because they were never given the content that makes comprehension truly possible.

What We Got Wrong

What gets rewarded in U.S. classrooms, especially since the rise of standards-based reform, is learning that does not last. It is fast task completion, visible compliance, and correct answers for short-term performance. These behaviors are easy to observe and measure, but they don’t always reflect true learning. The real learning, the kind we should be measuring, takes time, background knowledge, and the ability to apply ideas in new contexts. That’s harder to see in the moment, but far more important in the long run. These aren’t teacher choices; they’re systemic contingencies.

Common Core was supposed to shift that. It claimed to prioritize thinking and text complexity. However, its skill-based structure, especially in ELA, left a vacuum where knowledge should have been.

What Is the Common Core, Really?

For those outside the education world: The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were introduced in 2010 as a set of national benchmarks for what students should be able to do in reading and math by each grade level. They were meant to raise expectations, promote critical thinking, and create consistency across states.

But in English Language Arts, the standards focused heavily on skills like "analyze the structure of a text" or "cite evidence to support a claim," without specifying the content students would need to practice those skills meaningfully. The idea was that you could apply these skills to any text.

It sounded neutral, equitable, and rigorous. But it quietly replaced knowledge-building with performance-based tasks. In practice, schools taught students how to do school, but not necessarily how to understand the world.

I’ll be honest, when the Common Core was first implemented nationwide, I loved it. They felt like a step forward: a clear, rigorous framework that emphasized higher-order thinking. I was all in. However, the more time I spent in classrooms and the more I learned, the more I realized over time that the skill-based structure contributed to the very problems we face now. It didn’t build knowledge. It built performance.

How Common Core fits into this

Instead of identifying what students should know and sequencing that knowledge over time, the Common Core focused on what students should do with texts, analyze, evaluate, and cite evidence, without guaranteeing they had the necessary background to make sense of those texts in the first place.

In theory, it elevated rigor. In practice, it reinforced habits: plugging evidence into pre-taught sentence frames, answering text-dependent questions stripped of context, and performing thinking rather than thinking.

Many districts responded by scripting lessons to meet the standards, warning teachers not to “front-load” content, and emphasizing the mastery of skills independent of any prior knowledge. The result was a system that rewards the appearance of complexity without the foundation to support it.

And it’s not just education. We’ve developed cultural systems that serve the same purpose, especially online. We reward performance over thought, reaction over reflection, and speed over understanding.

If you're seeing this pattern show up outside the classroom, in social media, in news cycles, even in your own thinking, you’re not imagining it. I’m teaching a free 3-part course for paid subscribers starting July 23rd: Reason Over Reaction: How to Think in a Digital World. It’s about rebuilding thoughtful habits in a culture that rewards outrage, speed, and noise, and learning how to reshape the reinforcement patterns that guide our attention and behavior.

This Is Where It All Changes

We’ve broken down the ruling, the standards, and the systems that got us here.
Now let’s talk about what comes next, what we should be teaching, measuring, and reinforcing if we want real learning to happen.