Common Core Standards

No Good...Not everything that glitters is gold.....This is not just a matter of changing education's standards...It goes beyond....

Makes sense to me. When I moved from CA to NY as a kid it was a huge difference in what the grade levels taught. I left CA at the end of 3rd grade and was considered "gifted". When I started 4th grade in NY I found out that I had completely missed the teaching of the multiplication tables and the school believed I was borderline learning-disabled.

I still struggle with multiplication... It gets pretty embarrassing when I'm helping my own kids with homework.

The problem with our public education system is the way it normalizes and standardizes. This is terrible stuff for learning. All educational theorists know this. But as long as govt and bureaucracy are in charge, we will never have good schools.

The history of American education has been this: the more we push to equalize, the more shallow the education becomes. This is a fact, btw, I learned it from one of the best educational historians in the country.

We need to throw out public schools as we know them. They were created not to educate but to socialize and indoctrinate. This is still their primary function.

as long as we continue with the doomed dinosaur that is our current public school model, we HAVE to have a core curriculum. when you look at children as a vast monolithic herd, there is no option but to standardize everything and frantically shove everyone to the center.
we're going to need to rely on the homeschooled, montessori-educated, and those kids who are so naturally resilient that they rise to the top even under the oppressive thumb of mass-produced curricula to break out of the zombie mold.
sorry. i have strong opinions about this.
khairete
S.

To everyone that commented on you making copies, ;) I think the way I am reading it is that you were making copies as a service TO the teacher, so had an opportunity to read them while doing so. Or am I wrong?

It's great to have a standard for everything in life, but I don't think that it helps assure anyone of anything. Honestly, each teacher has their own agenda, their own method of teaching, and each student has THEIR own agenda, and own way of learning, and until education and teachers are valued more in this country and classrooms become MUCH smaller to accommodate individualized learning, I have no hope for the public school system.

From my viewpoint, I think the standards set by either the state or national gov'ts keeps raising the standards just to save face internationally. I am 59 and I remember kindergarten like it was yesterday. Everything was introduced on a very gradual basis, age and grade appropriate, but definitely without stressing kids out with overwhelming expectations. It's like expecting a 5 year old to think and learn and behave like someone several times older. That's totally stupid.
Plenty of kids excelled w/out being force fed. When I was in high school, that's when we learned geometry. These days it's being pushed on elementary schoolers. And what's being eliminated? Spelling, grammar, and other fundamentals that many of today's adults have trouble with. And with this kind of standards, how can we expect to compete as having a great educational system if people don't even know how to properly spell? Raising these standards to 'create geniuses' is the result of some other nation having higher intelligence ratios in the people. Heaven forbid the US should be anything other than #1. And it's failing the people. I say educate people with the standards of a couple generations ago and see how the results compare.

Educational standards are only as good as the people who present the information. Until we, as a nation, admire, respect, value and PAY teachers as if we believe what they do is important, we will not have successful schools. For the most part, America's best & brightest do not look at teaching as a "high end" profession because it doesn't PAY like one.

A couple of months ago, my husband and I were listening to a show on NPR about education in Finland and Japan, the two highest ranking systems in the world. They have very, very different approaches to education but one great commonality: it is an honor to be a teacher (and very difficult to become one). Where teachers are valued, education will be successful. Where teachers are NOT valued (& supported by parents), education will always suffer.

Our youngest is a college freshman and our youngest two kids went to private school for grades 6 through 12 so we no longer directly have, as they say, a dog in this fight. Still, we care about education & realize it is the core of a healthy society and a strong economy. Just last night at dinner we were discussing the local race for school committee, teacher salaries & income disparities. Years ago (& maybe still, but I don't know), Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream had a corporate "rule" that the CEO and the chairman of the board could not make more than a certain percentage above the lowest paid worker in the company. I always admired that sort of corporate principal. Wouldn't it be cool if the highest paid professional athlete in a state couldn't be paid more than a reasonable percentage above the lowest paid teacher in that state?

Amen Julie G. and Suz T.!!!

I used to be a big believer in common core standards but as my kids have grown up and gone through several schools, and then started homeschooling - I've begun to believe that it's mostly B.S.

Education will always come down to parents and schools who act on the local level. It starts right in our homes.

I'm torn. In first grade here, the kids are doing "algebraic" word problems and being taught that they need to prove their answer via complex thought processes, rather than just provide the answer (whereas I was taught "memorization" methods *in* the 70s.) For a young child it's challenging, but then again their brains are developing so quickly that they are catching on. They are learning fairly complex grammar and spelling rules as well. Writing and math curriculums work together, which is good. My concern is that kids function at SUCH different levels at this age, some may thrive and some may fail miserably. We'll see. The only real problem I have is the testing. The kids seem to be learning in order to "pass the tests" so the schools can meet standards and achieve the required success. It's hard, like someone said, when class sizes are so large that each child may or may not be learning at the appropriate speed. It seems like so much academic pressure for young children. And teachers have my utmost respect, they work so hard. Just my two cents. I'm tired, so difficult to put into words ..... :)

1. If you think that by providing your son's kindergarten teacher with a copy of the common core standards she is going to change her curriculum, you are in for a long hard road with the public school system.

Also - I think there's a good chance she is going to feel like you are arrogant... unless you have a degree in childhood education. Then, by all means, tell your kid's teacher how to teach.

2. If you think that the common core standards will help assure that kids get an equal education across the country you are super naive.

That being said, I think standards are fine. However, I think for/against the common core standards is the same ole parental argument as public school vs home school / breast vs bottle / cio vs co-sleep. Everyone can prove why their opinion is right and everyone else's opinion is wrong.

In the end what makes kids learn in school is having positive experiences. Finding out that you get a good feeling inside when you figure out a problem. Learning to take direction from a myriad of adults. Learning how to each your lunch in 15 minutes. Finding out how peer pressure can be used for good or evil. Having a teacher that can motivate each kid to learn in their own way. learning that you aren't the end-all-be-all of kids.... some are better than you and some are worse than you. NONE of that has to do with the common core standards.

But yes, the common core standards are a guide to what each student SHOULD be learning each year. It's good to have a guide, so that you can tell what kids need supplemental material and guidance... because they are either above or below the standards.

To me, though, this is just more of the same as No Child Left Behind - this is just the bar..... or the "grade level" behind the *all kids have to be at grade level by a certain year*.

Will this bring us up in world rankings? no. Because at the end of the day the US schools that are teaching these standards are teaching them to US kids.... who by and large are entitled, selfish, *1st world*, poor, victims of domestic violence, mean, rich..... etc etc etc. The public school is filled with kids who aren't there to learn.... for a myriad of reasons, core standards in place or not.

I read an estimate somewhere that in all public schools across America only about 10% arrive with a true ability to learn the lesson plan. The rest struggle with the basic entities of survival in this life.

Now, don't get me wrong.... I'm a fan of the public school system. Because it teaches kids how to interact with...... well, the same people they are going to interact with for the rest of their life once they graduate.

Well I would like it to believe that it has to be better than PA standards now. My current frustration with PA's standards is that they repeat, repeat, repeat the math concepts. My first grader did the slide, flip, turn lesson one week and a week or so later my fourth grader's homework was slide, flip, turn. Really??? Instead of teaching and reteaching the same math concepts every year why can't we move on to more complex math concepts?

They also have a "top down" method of teaching grammar. There is minimal grammar taught because the kids are supposed to learn it (by osmosis) through their reading. What happened to the days of diagramming sentences???

So I am holding out optomistic hope that maybe the common core standards will move our kids forward because they seem to be in neutral, and I don't understand why that is okay.

I'm sure you didn't need to make copies for your son's teacher as obviously she already knows them, because THAT is what she's expected to teach.
Personally I think our standards are too low in this country, not too high. The problem lies within the system itself. It's deep and wide. When you have 30 students and maybe one aide (if you're lucky) it's extremely hard to provide differentiated instruction to an entire classroom.
Students SHOULD be able to learn at their own pace, whether it's faster or slower than the norm, but sadly when we have one set of standards and a bunch of burned out, underpaid teachers, that just isn't going to happen.

It's a good idea in theory.. but you left out something.. Say you do have "common core standards" what about the child's caregiver roles? In as much as it might be a school's responsibility to educate a child, it is also that of the caregivers... and it's been my experience that some (not all) but some really don't take an active part in their kid's learning.. in fact, some are downright lazy...... My son goes to a private school because our public schools are very good where I live (speaking of a LACK of standards) and you'd think that because people are paying more money for this that they 'd actually help their kids out more.. NOT......often, you have your share of kids in my son's class who do not do their homework...... who are late..... who don't behave in class.... whom even though tutoring is offered after school, do not attend the program....

So raise or the lower the standards.. in my opinion, unless you get parents on board............ it's an uphill battle.. Although, I personally like the idea of higher standards because I think it's always best to aspire upward rather than down.... why not learn as much as you can rather than less.. .

I don't believe there were many "standards" in place when I went to school. I can remember kids coming to my school and finding that they had already covered what we were learning the year before or already that year.

When my oldest daughter was in school, there wasn't an Internet available to pull such standards online and print them out, for myself or the teacher. If I had them available, I would have been able to keep her up to speed as we moved about every 2 years.

Now that my little one is in school, her teacher seems to follow the author E D Hirsch. I have the book loaded on my iPad and I am able to teach a little background at home and let her teach her curriculum in the class. She posts a monthly newsletter and that way we know what the plan is for the month.

I would like to think that if she had to transfer schools next year, she would not be behind or bored.

Because we are a military family and move around alot, I have definite opinions about this particular subject.

Can you imagine having a child that has always gotten A's in her classes having to be held back a year when she got to her new school because she hadn't yet learned what they were doing? Can you imagine sending your child to her junior year of high school in a new state and finding out she's failing English because they are doing research papers and, as a junior, she has never before been taught how to write one? In fact she has never had to write more than a 5 paragraph essay. Can you imagine going to a knew school and being so far ahead they want to move you up a grade, only to move in three years time and be put BACK a grade because you don't know enough to be in the grade you were assigned to at your old school?

This happens to military families all of the time and that's just the required pass skills for the grade and doesn't even include when the state changes the grading scale from 90 - 100 being an "A" to 93 - 100 being an "A" and "F" starting at 65%. Or how they do kids with learning disabilities, follow IEP's and how low your reading scores have to be to qualify for a lab or intervention outside an IEP.

It makes getting a consistent education difficult and I would love to see some across the board standards.

well my opinion on common core standards as my kids shifted from a private school that has implemented common core to a public school that has JUST accepted common core. it was different like night and day. at the first school we knew exactly what kids were learning, and that knowledge spread through all subjects. for example, whatever vocabulary was being used in science, math, social studies, they were also used in writing, so that kids were learning to write those words. math was very difficult, using different methods to solving one problem. i thought it was great. my kids stayed in the second school for 2 months before i had to pull them out and send them to another (third school) that was implementing common core. so to me it was a no-brainer. i hope all schools throughout the country implements common core. yes, it's more difficult, but we as a country have to keep up with what kids in other countries are learning and doing.

I think they are great. They focus more on processes, than products and there was shifting between grades of standards (as opposed to what we had before) to make things more appropriate for the kids.

I would HOPE that your son's teacher already had them! I am actually helping to run a professional development workshop tomorrow for some teachers on my district about some of them. :) That is why your post really caught my eye!

It should help across the country. As of now, when people compare how many kids pass "the test" of choice in each state it is really comparing apples to oranges. Some states seem to be doing better than others just because their test is easier. I have a problem with comparing and ranking anyway (in ranking or percentiles half are always in the bottom 50%!!!), but at least we will maybe get a more accurate comparison.

If you go to the Michigan Department of Education website you can look at a document called the "common core crosswalk" and it will show you what has changed from the previous standards (GLCEs).

I haven't heard anything about repealing the standards. Did the person provide any more insight into that or where they got the information?

Our school is "On Board" with common core standards. My son and it seems the rest of the class is keeping up with, meeting and exceeding the standards. We have no one who is failing from my understanding (I am a room mom and have a decent grasp on all ten of them.) a few that could use an extra push as they are just meeting the standards and most are equal to or "1st grade ready." I think that if tought correctly and with proper support at home then the standards for Kindergarden are totally reachable. I have not gone thru the rest of the grades in full detail and am begining to cover first grade as we make the preperations for my son's transition, so I can not comment on the other grades. Being a student who suffered from transitioning and moving a lot and trying to figure out where I was compared to where they were was stressful, I agree with making more uniform standards, that does not mean it will be perfect by any means. I will admit the transition is not always easy in schools ours has felt the shift but I think the end results will be worth it in the long run.