My daughter on Common Core

[jazyd]

My daughter is a 5 th grade teacher and at dinner tonight she starts in on common core and how much she dislikes. I was really surprised at how much she knew and the lack of knowledge of other teachers. We had a great discussion.

But when she said it was like obamacare and the government takeover and when people figure out it is no good it will be late. I just smiled and realized she listened and I raised her right

[KeithKSR]

The Common Core much like Obamacare was dictated from the White House liberals who think they know much more than they do. Kentucky was the Common Core version of Nancy Pelosi, our state not only adopted it before they knew what was in it, but before it was completed.

[jazyd]

Same in miss Keith, adopted in 2009. Most have no idea what it is about. We do have a group of state senators who are trying to get it repealed


The Common Core much like Obamacare was dictated from the White House liberals who think they know much more than they do. Kentucky was the Common Core version of Nancy Pelosi, our state not only adopted it before they knew what was in it, but before it was completed.

[kritikalcat]

Exactly (as much as can be explained in a brief summary) is Common Core and why are people opposed? I don't know much about it yet except a few soundbites. My kids go to Catholic schools. My experience is that Catholic schools adopt public school pedagogy 10 years late and hold onto it 10 years too long. So my kids will be well in college or past before it's an issue for them.

[suncat05]

Gov. Rick Scott down here in FL has said "NO!" to Common Core as well. I have heard it's not well liked over in Texas either.

[bigsky]

Public K-12 is failing. 50% of college freshmen aren't competent to take a 100 level math or writing class.

Send your kids to private school, don't wait see them lose out.

[CattyWampus]

The Common Core much like Obamacare was dictated from the White House liberals who think they know much more than they do. Kentucky was the Common Core version of Nancy Pelosi, our state not only adopted it before they knew what was in it, but before it was completed.

It's worse than that. Jeb Bush and his cronies have been pushing this crap for years.

[UKHistory]

JazyD,

What were her specific concerns? I would really like to know specific issues or problems and any recommendations she might have as opposed to these standards.


My daughter is a 5 th grade teacher and at dinner tonight she starts in on common core and how much she dislikes. I was really surprised at how much she knew and the lack of knowledge of other teachers. We had a great discussion.

But when she said it was like obamacare and the government takeover and when people figure out it is no good it will be late. I just smiled and realized she listened and I raised her right

[jazyd]

History, she was firing them off so fast hard to remember them all. Taking all past American literature out if I remember, no creative thinking on the part of students, trying to cram the same standards for students here as in every other state. I will ask her more tomorrow when I see her. Haven't seen her that passionate against something,in a long time.



JazyD,

What were her specific concerns? I would really like to know specific issues or problems and any recommendations she might have as opposed to these standards.

[UKHistory]

Thanks Jazy. I'd love to hear. I recall traveling around and listening to people criticize No Child Left Behind. A lot of time folks didn't have answer on how to improve the law.

Some did. And I always wanted to know what changes people thought should be made.

The loss of creative thinking is an often cited negative that standardized tests and "teaching for the tests" over greater learning is something I hear a lot about.

Trying to raise and as a result make standards more uniform has been a common goal for quite some time for many people

The idea, at least from my perspective, is that a high school diploma should be the ticket to acceptance to any public university in America. A high school diploma should not merely be certificate of completion or attendance for 12 years.

20 years ago there was an effort to establish national social studies standards and that was voted down 99-1 in the Senate. And 1 was angrier that bill than others.

I'd love to know her perspective as the educator in the room. She is the person that has to implement whatever curriculum she is told to by her superiors. In some cases these very strict standards take away an educator's creativity and ability to better connect with his or her students.

I will keep an eye for anything you can share on this topic.

If she would like to outline those concerns in more detail, send me a message and I am happy to share my email address.

thanks,

[jazyd]

Will do. Like I said she was very passionate in her criticism, she is also passionate about children learning and how to be creative in teaching vs just by an outline. When she had kindergarten she halved okay and nap time and made every child read to her every day. Those children scored the highest on reading at the beginning of the next school year in the whole district and we live in one of the biggest in the state. Some of the other teachers told her they were babies and she told them they were there to learn,

Now she has 5 th grade and likes it so far. She us my daughter but she us a good teacher.

[KeithKSR]

The problems I see in Math is that it compounded the mile wide and an inch deep problems that SB 1 ordered fixed. The curriculum is now two miles wide, and half an inch thick.

There are a lot of algebra concepts I am now teaching to my 7th grade students that were previously taught in Freshman level Algebra 1 classes. Overall the Math Common Core is a collection of pet topics within the larger areas of statistics, algebra, geometry, numeracy and probability. There are topics in Math that I had never heard of, and googling them initially when the common core came out led me to college level course syllabi.

The Common Core is short on problem solving through writing expressions and equations to solve real-world problems. There is still a major problem with throwing too much at kids each year, especially at the elementary level, and as a result kids develop little number sense and even less procedural fluency. The people who have designed the Common Core don't think these things are important, but students who do not develop number sense and procedural fluency never reach higher level thinking skills.

The whole testing system in Kentucky is nuts. The KPREP test Pearson makes for 7th grade math doesn't really match the curriculum it is supposed to test. In addition the test gives next to no data feedback, making it impossible to evaluate an individual student's areas of weakness using that test. If a test that is supposed to measure growth cannot provide data indicating strength and weaknesses of students it really isn't valid.

The cut scores for the various scoring levels are determined after the test is taken, it should have been determined prior to taking the test, as normed tests are.

The test is not reliable, as the same student taking a different version of the test could have a very different score.

We thus have an unreliable, invalid testing instrument that millions of dollars is being spent on.

The newest catch phrase is "College or Career Readiness." At the middle school level we get a CCR score based on the score of 8th graders on the EXPLORE, which is an ACT predictive test put out by the same company that does the ACT. This test is taken in September, which is going to make it far less accurate than it would be if taken in the Spring. We give the EXPLORE to our 7th graders as well, but it doesn't count toward the school's score.

If CCR is really the goal then we need to toss out the current spring tests and use the ACT predictive assessments and build the curriculum around the content of those tests.

Currently we are paying Pearson a fortune for Infinite Campus, CIITS and the KPREP. I am not comfortable with one company holding three major contracts with the state, looks too much like something improper is going on.

[UKHistory]

Great article from a teacher on educational strategies through the years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/four-decades-of-failed-school-reform/2013/09/27/dc9f2f34-2561-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story_2.html

[CitizenBBN]

Great article from a teacher on educational strategies through the years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/four-decades-of-failed-school-reform/2013/09/27/dc9f2f34-2561-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story_2.html

In the four decades between when I started teaching English at T.C. in 1970 and my retirement this year, I saw countless reforms come and go; some even returned years later disguised in new education lingo. Some that were touted as “best practices” couldn’t work, given Alexandria’s demographics. Others were nothing but common-sense bromides hyped as revolutionary epiphanies. All of them failed to do what I believe to be key to teaching: to make students care about what they’re studying and understand how it’s relevant to their lives.

That, in essence, is what is wrong with education and why Common Core and every other top down initiative is doomed to fail.

This will sound odd: once you hand education over to the pure academics, nothing good will happen. What you have is a bunch of people with no real world experience either teaching at that level or anything else of use, sitting around theorizing and coming up with the latest new "educational philosophy" full of buzz words and liberal idealism with almost no substance and ignoring the simple truth he states so well.

The truth is that most of these high brow Harvard consultants and education gurus are born of the same world and are just as mentally deficient as McNamara and the Whiz Kids of Harvard responsible for Vietnam. Highly educated and as smart as a melon. You know how you can spot the congenitally stupid? They use a constant stream of meaningless buzz words all chained together as if it is some totally new concept when it is in fact either undefined drivel or a repackaging of simple concepts that advance us not at all in our effort to actually DO something.

As that article alludes to, the #1 reason why kids achieve and why they don't is parents. Schools can't fix parents who don't care about education, though I was victim of more than one such attempt before my mother had enough.

Get rid of federal education standards. All of them. We built the greatest nation on Earth without a single one of them and the last thing something as undefinable as education needs is more bureaucracy. Move the whole system to vouchers/tuition tax credits and let's get some competition in the market for education among those who can't afford private schools and we'll get a lot of kids reading better in short order. dont' focus on this trendy concept or that one, focus on empowering the consumers of education and we'll start getting somewhere.

Leaving it to the Harvard elite sure wont' get us anywhere.