Common Core and OUR kids

The State Education department has announced that Common Core Inc., a Washington based company, will produce math curriculum materials for preK through 5th grade. The Core Knowledge Foundation of Charlottesville, Va., will develop English guides for PreK through 2nd grade and Expeditionary Learning of Manhattan will do this for grades 3 to 5. contractors are still being sought to write curriculum for the upper grades... State Education Department John B. King said the planned guides will provide "a carefully sequenced road map" of topics to help students master high quality text and prep for new state tests. My thoughts are that whenever I embark on a journey, I usually like to take a look at the "road map" first, not when I am in the middle of the trip and not sure if I am going in the right direction... But this must be how educators throughout the state of New York feel. They are going to be held accountable through APPR for their students' test results, for a test which they haven't been given the proper tools by the State to prepare for. I read the following article in Newsday and was disturbed to see them refer to New York Schools "test driving" common core... Does this make our kids the "crash test dummies?". My hope is that the State will get their stuff together, give the teachers the tools and the training they need to do this so Our kids are not th ones to suffer! Julie "If education accountability were an evolutionary chart, the Common Core curriculum, a set of uniform educational plans in English and math adopted by 45 states, would be Homo erectus. It's a lot smarter than what came before, most notably the No Child Left Behind Act, but there's still plenty of space to improve and develop. Last year President Barack Obama offered waivers from No Child Left Behind to states willing to adopt the Common Core curriculum and participate in Race to the Top, a federal grant program that encourages student achievement and teacher evaluations. Most states, New York included, jumped at it because No Child Left Behind is a badly flawed law, and because Washington money is hard to refuse. New York schools are starting to test-drive the Common Core, and the State Education Department announced Tuesday it has awarded several contracts to develop the classroom materials for it. But this creation of a quasi-federal curriculum is happening quietly and with little debate, considering how big a change it represents. The Common Core curriculum was created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The federal government cannot officially run this process, but it has engineered the scenario from behind the scenes. The goal is a rigorous, national K-12 curriculum in English language arts and math that will prepare students for college or a decent job upon graduation, something employers and institutions of higher learning say isn't happening now. Making sure our students can compete in a global and technological economy is a wise goal. Common Core, with its emphasis on real-world problem-solving and reading comprehension, could well help. The clearest improvement Common Core delivers is in assessment, not achievement. The system will be fairer than No Child Left Behind because it acknowledges the challenges of educating handicapped and non-English-speaking students, and makes it easier to compare achievement across state lines. We have no national proficiency standards: If we're going to fund education via Washington, we need a common baseline. And in general, there's nothing wrong with the focus or teaching methods Common Core uses, and there's much good. But education doesn't happen in general. It happens between individual students and teachers, and this one-size-fits-all curriculum doesn't leave much room for innovation. It erodes the idea that each state is a center of innovation that others can learn from, and seems to limit the flexibility of individual teachers to adjust to each class and student. Common Core does not yet include standards in science, technology and history, and it should. It reads, in places, as if teaching to the test is the highest priority, which it's not. It sets standards, in math in particular, lower than those in the most educationally advanced nations, a mistake. And its specificity in what is taught and how, too zealously applied, could stifle the best teachers, a tragedy. Common Core's creators say it is designed to be constantly strengthened; making that so will be the key to success. The program is an improvement, but it's a long way from fully evolved." Newsday 4/3/2012