Are Common Learning Standards the Answer? Re "Moving Ahead With Common Core" (editorial, April 21): Hope runs high that the new Common Core learning standards will fix American education. A risk is thinking that the standards alone can do the job. The intention of the standards, the editorial says, "is to help students develop strong reasoning skills earlier than is now common," with students by fifth grade "required to produce essays in which they introduce, support and defend arguments." These are objectives hard to argue with. But simply adopting the standards will not make it happen. Nor will widespread testing to gauge whether they've been met. Tellingly, it is "the states and localities" that are charged with the more formidable task of figuring out how to achieve these standards. How does one develop strong reasoning skills in students, and exactly what do these skills look like across different kinds of content? Teachers can't be expected to come up with answers to these critical questions on their own. Instead, we need to recognize the standards as only a first step, not a final one. The mission is one that will require significant, sustained investment in research on how children learn, if we are to find out what we need to know to meet such standards. The writer, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, is the author of "Education for Thinking." You are right to urge us to stay the course with the Common Core learning standards. We have built an education system where far too many high school graduates find themselves utterly unprepared for reasonably paying jobs or college. But you err doubly when you celebrate the lack of a specific curriculum in the new standards. First, the standards explicitly require the study of our country's founding documents, 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, as well as Shakespeare and ancient mythology. Second, the applause for a skills-based education is misguided: learning has to be about something in particular, not nothing in general. As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued, our most underprivileged students suffer most in skills-based schooling; it will require content-rich, well-sequenced curriculums and matched assessments to make good on the promise of the Common Core. The writer, dean of the Hunter College School of Education, is a former New York State education commissioner. It is disappointing to see you echoing state officials who claim that parental alarm over high standards or tough tests accounts for growing resistance to the Common Core. Instead, our objection is that the new standards are not high enough. They are tied to cookie-cutter assessments in the form of state tests that severely restrict the ability of teachers to innovate in the classroom. We want our children to be challenged as individuals and encouraged to go far beyond anything that a multiple-choice test can possibly measure. There has been much media attention lately given to the opt-out movement, but the real opt-outers are the country's wealthy, who send their children to private schools that are exempt from state tests and the Common Core. Separate has never been equal in this country. Imposing a curriculum on public schools alone can only deepen the yawning gulf that separates well-financed, flexible private schools from underfinanced and increasingly test-oriented public schools. We will never achieve universal excellence in education unless we grant all teachers the same intellectual freedom now enjoyed by those educating the children of the elite.