The idea of national standardization sounds great, especially in struggling Mississippi school districts. However, there are negative implications that follow standardization, such as current teaching practices, ways in which students learn, various states having a wide range of different reactions and high-stakes testing.
   Many veteran teachers will not respond well to having to teach one particular way with a particular curriculum. There may be a high turnover rate for more experienced teachers, and new teachers or future teachers will only be exposed to one way of teaching with one curriculum. Teachers should be trained to learn how to teach rather than given universal content to teach. Common Core Standards is a curriculum middle ground in the United States. For struggling districts in Mississippi, this is good. However, many quality school districts are having their curriculum watered down. This transition will also be a slow process with teachers, upgrading technology and finding new textbooks and other resources.
   With CCSS, students are being prepared for universal testing. This has many negative implications. Students, rather than learning how to learn, will have to do more test memorization in the mathematics area. The English Language Arts CCSS does have a good focus on critical thinking, but teachers will not have as much freedom of teaching their material in different ways. Students don’t all learn in the same ways, and since everything is based on high-stakes testing, students are being judged on standardized scores. Those are not always representative of how much the student knows — especially not how the student is able to learn. To survive at the collegiate level and in the workplace, students need to know how to learn and think, not memorize facts to score well. Students will have a much harder time adapting.
    Of course, this is all just general; there will certainly be some teachers who thrive with CCSS. But CCSS presents even more of a danger in memorization versus learning how to learn. Besides, many teachers do a poor job of teaching their students how to learn with or without curriculum standardization, so schools have to start somewhere. But CCSS should just be a stepping stone to providing better teachers and better teaching practices rather than being the end all, be all.
   Having high-stakes testing as such a primary aspect can be problematic. The CCSS assessment does not have an equivalency test for students with special needs. Many states have modified versions, but there is no modified test within CCSS. Without being able to take students with special needs into account, the numbers reported with CCSS won’t necessarily be representative of that school’s student body. CCSS does have a good push toward inclusion and offers good support services and assistive technology, though the practical implementation of that is limited and vague.
   Despite various strengths and weaknesses of students in terms of assessment, they will all be held to the same test. Even for students without special needs, these standardized tests will not necessarily be representative of their academic capabilities. Both learning styles and testing styles vary, which is why teachers present material in different ways and give numerous types of assessments — whether papers, tests, projects, presentations, etc. CCSS limits the teacher’s ability to vary these. The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is still more limited, though a push in the right direction.
   CCSS only exists for English Language Arts and mathematics right now, so individual states are responsible for social studies and science standards, though CCSS provides suggested reading in those areas. There will be a difference between the ways in which students are taught, tested and evaluated in CCSS classes versus others. Obviously, every subject is taught differently, but having different methods of assessment and accountability can hurt the way students approach each subject. It could also mean that some schools will only be strong in the CCSS classes, or vice versa.
    The practical application beyond school is negative. Students coming through CCSS will have spent so much time focused primarily on standardized test scores that they will struggle with measuring their work in the workplace, will not know how to adapt and will not feel as if they are being held accountable if there are no test scores goals.
    CCSS has the potential to do a lot of good for Mississippi, but school should not be all about test scores. People need to know how to think and process, not just in school or the workplace, but in life in general. If teachers simply relay facts so students bubble in the right letter on a national standardized test, then upcoming generations will have some serious issues in college and in the workplace. In order to avoid these negatives, teachers should expand teaching strategies within the Universal Design for Learning, use more creative thinking when presenting the curriculum and be actively aware of the tendency of standardized tests to be wrapped up in test-score performance.