Tom Toch, a senior partner at Carnegie who heads the Washington, D.C. office and Susan Headden, a senior associate in the D.C. office, write in The Atlantic: Over the past five years, more than $200 million has gone toward launching the new Common Core standards, with the goal of closing achievement gaps in public schools. But for all their meticulous detail about math and language curricula, the standards fail to address one important factor: the psychological barriers that stand between many students and deeper learning. Unless students are motivated to take on the new standards, and persuaded that they’re up to the challenge, the Common Core could have the unintended effect of leaving many students even further behind.

The piece refers to work by David Yeager. Yeager is a Carnegie Fellow and works with us on productive persistence.

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