Going to the Source

When I worked at a charter school, I remember reading the common core standards and being very confused by them. They didn't seem meaningful, and certainly did not address the key underlying question: what is school for?

For example, there was some random bullet about social studies and art history that seemed extremely arbitrary for a 2nd grader to know. It's concerning to read a mashup of weirdly specific things alongside very vague criteria as the standard for learners in this country.

I now understand most present education systems are unlikely to uplift each child to their potential. In many ways, they are structured to mitigate risk, shift blame, and create compliance. This becomes obvious if you take the time to dig into school administrations and their poorly written standards.

More recently, I took a look at the Women's Health Protection Act of 2025. This is the proposed legislation to legalize abortion. Without knowing much about the topic at all, I suspect it's a much more useful focal point than angrily looking backwards at Roe v. Wade being overturned, regardless if that was the correct ruling or not.

Personally, I'm all for abortion. Some AI-assisted research quickly gives us two bottlenecks: the Senate cannot easily get to 60-40 and the definition of "fetal viability" can be problematic. Maybe 20-25 weeks is reasonable for a federal standard and viability can be a sub-bullet or edge case instead of the main cutoff?

For the 2025 bill, right off the bat, I'd cut lots of silly sentences in Findings (1) (2) (3) so all that remains is: "Abortion access allows people who are pregnant to make their own decisions about their pregnancies, their families, and their lives." And (4) (5) can also be re-written much more objectively. (Notice the 2023 version wasn't so aggressive...)

I don't have a full alternative to common core or the abortion law yet. It's outside the scope of this blog post, and maybe I'm even being a bit of a hypocrite here. But if either of these issues were my full-time work—if I was still a teacher or had a kid in a public school or somehow became one of the 12,000 Planned Parenthood employees—I would write something concrete and advocate for improvements.

The problem is, nobody makes it their full-time work. Nobody takes full ownership to the necessary extent. Decision by committee kills social progress every day, with reviewers who are too lazy to care and lawyers who are too scared to take a stand.

I wish that instead of speaking in sweeping generalities, rage-sharing superficial articles on social media and complaining to neighbors, more citizens would simply pull up a doc and go line by line over the exact text.

I guess this might be a product idea: google docs for laws with fancy comments, suggestions, version controls, and upvoting tools.