New national Common Core standards have been equally lauded and criticized across the media and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

The Common Core standards will work in the long term, but most students at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School (DPMHS) probably are more concerned about the short term. And there are numerous problems with the standards in the short term.

The key event for Common Core in the short ter

m will be the trial run of testing this spring for various students, most notably high school juniors. The short notice on the testing means that it will be quite hard to even attempt to prepare for the tests.

The district’s plan is to use the trial run results to then tweak the standards for next year, when they will be implemented nationwide. However, most, if not all,  of the students at DPMHS have not seen anything resembling a Common Core test question and will likely do worse than they might expect to on the trial run.

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the district will see similar results next year when the standards are rolled out in force. Students in the fall of 2014 will essentially be thrown into a metaphorical swimming pool without having being taught how to swim first.

Even if we lived in a hypothetical world where we all knew how to take Common Core tests, there are still logistical problems raised by the testing medium.

All Common Core testing must be taken electronically, which means that every student who takes Common Core tests must have access to a laptop or iPad during testing.

What’s more, the testing is online. Translation: you will have nearly 100 people, 400 when the whole school needs to take it next year, all attempting to use the same page at the same time.

One hundred people might not seem like a lot. Facebook has over a billion users. True, but A) not all of the billion log on at the exact same time and B) Facebook has the servers and infrastructure to handle that. Many districts however, especially small ones, may not.  In short, don’t be surprised if the Common Core site crashes during testing.

Common Core will come to work in time, have no doubt about that. But in the here and now, there are many kinks that need to be (and should have been) worked out for the standards to do their jobs properly.