http://www.clipartlord.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/explosion6.png, Quotation from Star Wars 4: A New Hope, sourced from a favorite site, http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000002/quotes:

Han Solo: [sounding official] Uh, everything’s under control. Situation normal.
Voice: What happened?
Han Solo: [getting nervous] Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Voice: We’re sending a squad up.
Han Solo: Uh, uh… negative, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous.
Voice: Who is this? What’s your operating number?
Han Solo: Uh…
[Han shoots the intercom]
Han Solo: [muttering] Boring conversation anyway. LUKE, WE’RE GONNA HAVE COMPANY!

Our problem has never been lack of standards: Before the Common Core, we were awash in standards. We were drowning in standards. A few years back, my district and many others were creating “power standards,” a subset of the complete list of standards for each grade and for each subject. These power standards represented the state standards that the district decided were the most important standards, since there was no way to teach all the state standards. In poor and urban districts failing to make test targets, “power” standards tended to be picked based on a bang-for-your-buck on spring test scores. More affluent, higher-scoring districts had greater discretion, and could pick their power standards based on what they hoped students would know in the long-term.

A huge issue was raised in my last sentence, one still flying too often below the radar. Listening to the news, one might think America was suffering from a large educational reactor leak, very dangerous. It’s not. In many zip codes, we remain absolutely competitive internationally. These districts do not need the reformed standards and tests that keep coming at their schools like Imperial Storm Troopers. They pay a great deal less attention to the implied threat of those tests and troopers, too.

The negative effects from America’s testing barrage are impacting our poor and urban districts far more fiercely than they are impacting higher-scoring, financially comfortable districts. Administrator turnover in academically strong districts remains considerably lower than in disadvantaged counterparts, allowing these already-stronger schools to develop cultures and stability while they work on whole-child education. I taught a middle-school Spanish maternity position recently where students are sometimes excused from class for band and drama activities. In the low-scoring district from which I retired, students were never excused for nonacademic reasons. In the last ten years in that low-scoring school, six principals came and went (one great guy stayed four years until a government grant forced him out) at the head of that district’s middle school, and I may have missed one from the start of the decade. During that time, in contrast, my maternity-position school had exactly one principal.