My reservation is that, ultimately, I think Common Core evolves into a budgetary principle. School admins are going to have to focus on the core, and devote a disproportionate amount of money to meeting those standards. My experience with a 'core curriculum' comes from college, where I had to take (literally) rocket engineering classes in order to earn a PoliSci degree. If that seems like a waste of time, it was -- I didn't use rocket science once. Of course I never used polisci either, but whatever.

Point being, NCLB sort of demonstrates to me that federal education solutions have unforeseen negative impacts on the actual students. I think privatization responds better to local and personal needs than federalization, so to me, this is a step in the wrong direction. But a slim majority of teachers reportedly like the idea, and I guess in the broad sense, not a lot of bad things can come from teaching more maths, so I guess we'll see.