Here is the first day of the Union Leader’s special series on the Common Core: Reporter Dave Solomon’s take on the key questions and answers about the Common Core.  While I might have had a different slant on some of it, there’s little to complain about here.  And his backgrounder on how the Common Core came to New Hampshire is here.

There’s one detail I would expand on.  You could get the impression that Manchester and Alton made similar decisions about the Common Core but they were really quite different.  The Alton school board voted 3-2 to express its lack of support for the Common Core in its one school.  The Manchester school board voted 13-1 in favor of implementing its own standards based on the Common Core.  As a practical matter, neither district will have the capacity to develop an alternative to the Common Core or adopt an alternative to the Smarter Balanced assessment aligned to the Common Core and adopted by the State.

These first two stories do make the important point that each state takes its own approach to implementing the Common Core.  But you could also get the impression that there is more momentum away from the Common Core in other states than there really is.  If that question matters to you, here’s a good article documenting that, if you actually look at the details, there is very little pull-back from the Common Core.