But the Common Core Standards were validated by a committee!

A 25-member Validation Committee (VC) composed of leading figures in the education standards community... TheVC’s charge was to:

• Review the process used to develop the Common Core State Standards and provide input and feedback on that process; and
• Validate the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the Common Core State Standards.

As a free-standing committee—independent of standard-setting responsibility—theVC’s role was to observe and validate the process of identifying Common Core State Standards and assess the evidentiary base for the standards.

Here is the official report on the validation process, as well as the names and brief bios of the members of the committee.

Sandra Stotsky was one of the people on that committee. However, she is not one of the people who approved them. Here Part 1 and 2 of a great talk Sandra Stotsky gave about the writing and validation of the standards. I excerpted an important segment below them, but please watch them yourself; they are not that long and they are a great piece of first-hand education you can provide for yourself. There is nothing quite like hearing it from someone who was actually there.

I was on Common Core's Validation Committee. This was a committee that was set up in 2009, there were 25-29 of us, and as it's name suggests, we were to validate the standards. Which meant we were to make sure they were internationally benchmarked, research based, rigorous, and so on.

The committee, unfortunately, never was able to do anything with its charge, and I can't tell you what the committee actually did because we all had to sign confidentiality statements on our first meeting, promising never to tell anybody about what this committee did.

I can tell you what I wrote and what I did, but I can't tell you about what this committee did. It was clear to me at at the very end when we were given a certification form with several criteria, that we were expected to be "rubber stamps".

...Milgram the Mathemetician, and me, the only recognized national expert on English Language Arts standards, we were two of the five people who did not sign off on the standards.

But, the claim can be made that the majority of the members of this committee signed off on the standards, even if they couldn't understand the math. It didn't matter; they signed off.

So who were the people writing these standards?... The two lead writers, and their names are well known, David Coleman is now president of The College Board, and Susan Pimentel, were the two lead writers. Neither of them had experienced teaching English in college or at the K12 level, neither of them had ever published any serious work on K12, and neither had a reputation for scholarship or research; they were virtually unknown to the entire field. But somehow they had been chose to transform ELA [English Language Arts] in the U.S.

Milgram was the only Mathematician, there were many other people who had doctorates in mathematics education, or appointments in an education school, but none of them ever taught math courses. Very few people seem to understand the difference between people who teach math at the college level, and people who teach other people how to teach math. Huge difference.

And if you're developing standards it's the people who understand the structure of mathematics that you want to tell you what the content of a trigonometry course, or a pre-calculus course can be. And interestingly enough, we have no standards for pre-calculus in the common core's math standards, and we have only a few trig standards, which is one of the big issues Professor Milgrem keeps raising...