Some Thoughts on Common Core I have an undergraduate degree in education and though I have never been a classroom teacher, I have always had jobs where I was teaching someone something. For the past several years I have been working with teens and people WE ARE IN TROUBLE. With a few RARE executions these young people who mostly come for middle and upper incomes families cannot do basic math, cannot follow a series of 3 instructions, cannot look at a situation and think of how it could be improved. They dont think and I think it is largely because of our emphasis on high stakes testing. School is data in - data out. No thinking required. Common Core changes that. Common Core sets standards for what students should know by the end of each grade. IT DOES NOT dictate what curriculum should be used. That decision is up to each school district. CBS Sunday Morning did a segment this morning on Common Core and Hillsborough Countys Mary Ellen Elia was featured. It also included a segment with a NY high school principal who was opposed to Common Core and she gave an example of a test question for a 1st grader which frankly made no sense at all BUT... that is a curriculum issue NOT a Common Core issue and the interviewer failed to ask about that or point it out. That portion of the news piece was very misleading. A national set of standards was required because allowing each state to set their own standards meant some states had high standards while others were far too low. There was no consistency. Unlike much of what is done TO education, Common Core had lots of involvement by educators. We constantly hear that high school graduates are not prepared for college level work so obviously what we were doing was not working. I also like common core because we are a transient nation. With Common Core the child that moves from FL in 5th grade to Oregon in 5th grade will find they have to learn the same things, not that he/she is far behind because they learned something in Oregon in 4th grade that was being learned in FL in 5th. This has become a political issue like almost everything else and thats a shame. The United States has slipped to 36th in the world for educational quality. Common Core is a much more active learning process. It teaches critical thinking, something really need if we are to remain competitive in the world. I hope the politicians will stand back and let educators use this. I hope the public will look closely and not believe everything they hear without checking it out. Our kids need this.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 16:39:02 +0000
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