NAS board member and Endowed Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas Sandra Stotsky has a new blog post, Education's Long Forgotten Vision, that chronicles the lowering of academic standards in high school, and in a domino effect, in college. She writes:
Efforts are already underway to make sure that all “college ready” students can be successful in their freshman college courses. Public colleges are being asked to “align” entrance requirements and the content of freshman courses to Common Core’s secondary standards, not the other way around. And, to ensure that “college ready” students can graduate from a college degree program in record time, all of their freshman courses must be credit-bearing, not tagged as remedial. (Otherwise, these students could not be called “college ready.”)
Check out Stotsky's article and her attached critiques of the Common Core standards, released last summer, which have contributed to the decline.