I am a liberal Democrat, a minority, female, with serious physical disabilities, a product of public education from kindergrarten to an M.D. and Ph.D. I am also a mom of an 8-year-old child.

Who would be against improving education? Perhaps that's why, I regret to say, I was not paying close enough attention when the current changes were made to education.

I sent my then-5-year-old to public kindergarten after public pre-K, and she exceeded the public school's exit criteria for kindergarten before she started. I volunteered in her K class. I was very disturbed by what I observed. The teaching was not developmentally appropriate, did not take into account the great differences in ability and developmental stages at these young ages, was exceedingly stressful to the children and damaging to their love of learning and school and their sense of self.

What gives me the right to judge? Well, besides being a mom, I am a board-certified pediatrician. A deep understanding of childhood development is required, taught and tested for all pediatricians.

I painstakingly read every last one of the standards on the New York website. I then did hours of reading to determine who and how these standards came into being. It was disheartening. As a biochemist, I understand that we need to generate hypotheses, design experiments, seek IRB approval, perform the experiment on a limited sample, submit to oversight in case of adverse outcome, and can have our experiments stopped by oversight boards in case of and adverse outcome. The Common Core amounts to a huge social experiment that has significant potential harms.

I also tried to comment on the Core website. This was a cruel joke. You had to spend hours and go line by line specifying which exact standard was wrong. The answer is, "all of them," since they build on each other and are inextricably intertwined.

My child is now in private school, where she has an enriched curriculum, including foreign language. She reads fiction, classic poetry, has science, social studies, art, music, gym, recess, coding and computers. But what about the other children, the vast majority of children, who cannot afford this?

Charters you say? No, the way they are funded they undermine the funding for public schools, and many focus on test scores, not actual learning, critique, original ideas. Critical thinking is not blindly agreeing to what you are told.

I hold to these hypothesis: that public schools have been and will always be a critical component of our democracy; local democratically elected school boards are the only valid governance of these schools; individual differences in students and teachers are strengths; teachers need freedom in a democracy to have wide discretion on pedagogy; and all students should have access to a free and excellent education that supports them in developing into wonderful citizens, with a life path of their choosing, and the ability to change that path as many times as they feel warranted. I would posit that there are 200 years of supportive evidence for this.

I firmly believe New York state educators can write their own set of standards, and that the "old" ones were quite rigorous for jobs of today and tomorrow. I know mine were back in 1974-86, because the teachers bestowed upon us a love of learning, curiosity and the ability to question and think critically for ourselves. This is something the Common Core program denies.

Maya Srivastava lives in East Amherst.