Common Core Causing Problems in Connecticut

Aside from the usual gripes about text book companies cashing in on Common Core and using it as another excuse to promote agenda as education, some other problems are emerging with one-size-fits-all standards.

'So the standards are higher, so what our job is is to take the students from where they are, to get them to that point,' Canelli said. 'If the students have not mastered addition and subtraction, we can’t move them to multiplication and division.'

This is a quote from a discussion of the standards. What this teacher is essentially saying is that the standards are bad because they force the entire class to move on together or not at all. So, if a few kids in the class have not mastered the current concept, none of them can move on.

When I think back to my own days in school, this would have been enormously frustrating for me. I often mastered things quickly and easily. Imagine being that kid and now having to go over the same material day after day and not really understanding why. How quickly would you begin to hate school? How quickly would you begin to not care?

On the flip side, imagine being the kid who can't get it and being forced to go over it again and again. That will get frustrating, too.

Also, imagine that you are a teacher in an inner city school where kids are often well below grade level and being told that these are the standards for you grade and the things you must teach, and you are being asked to teach them to kids who are far behind enough that they won't be equipped to pick them up easily or at all. Apparently, there has been no latitude given for kids who have simply been passed up the rungs without having to learn the material and so are entire grade levels behind. They are expected to learn at grade level like everyone else, and teachers are expected to teach them that way.

Practice tests are sent home but are useless unless the children own a computer. If they do not have a computer, they do not have the necessary skills to take an electronic test.

We're also talking about populations that do not have home computers in every home. So when you send home a practice test that assumes you have a home computer (wasn't the Gates foundation big into making the Common Core?) and you don't have one, how do you do the practice test?

Again it seems to me that Common Core is just a one-size-fits all program that tries to impose a fit from the top. It cannot take every unique situation adequately into account and doesn't even try. Instead, I guess we're going to break a lot of eggs on our way to a homogenous, one world Utopia.

I also find it interesting that in most places, the criticism is that Common Core is dumbing down the standards, but many of the quotes here are complaining that it raises the standards too high. Again, if anything, it illustrates that one-size-fits all isn't always the best approach. Certainly, if these teachers are coming out of the same type of urban poor situation I taught in, I can sympathize with some of what they are saying. In order to get some of these kids caught up, allowances and concentrated efforts will have to be made. You can't just stick them in a grade level program and expect them to perform. They don't have the prior years of knowledge to support it.

The other problem in CT with this is Special Ed.

A child with an IEP has a few rules and restrictions that apply to them, the biggest being that the IEP overrides everything and is met and should be enforced with the full force of Federal Law over something like Common Core, however teachers are now fighting the IEP's and are trying to get around them.

I'm in such a battle with my local School District here in CT, they know darn well the IEP is law and cannot be broken except by having a meeting that everyone agrees to and even then, the parents have veto power. The district teachers are trying to find loopholes to exploit and not have to follow those IEP restrictions and force kids with disabilities out the door in favor of Common Core (they are using it as a way to say integration fails, and in this case yes it is)

The State of CT is looking the other way as well while this happens.. Interesting times are-a-comin

I'm in Oklahoma and my son has an IEP as well.

At his last IEP meeting I was told that there is a new reading test that every third-grader must pass - special ed or not - in order to pass to the fourth grade. They told me my son reads and comprehends at a fourth-grade level, but his reading speed is behind (slow processing speed due to traumatic brain injury), so as of right now, he would not pass the test and would have to repeat third grade. Right now he is already repeating second grade due to a life-threatening accident which left him with a brain injury.

Now, I'm not sure if this test is a part of the Common Core stuff or if it was just a brilliant idea on the part of Oklahoma leglisators, but either way, special ed kids don't need to have to shoulder any more discrimination than what they already bear.

Beyond that, I really don't see the sense in this Common Core crap. Different regions of our country require differences in education and skills to thrive. IF they really have the best interests of American students at heart, why not give them the education that will behoove them the most?

Kenneth Ye

Kenneth Ye, Tennessee Student, Argues Common Core Makes Our Schools Like China's (VIDEO)


www.huffingtonpost.com...

Annee


Kenneth Ye, Tennessee Student, Argues Common Core Makes Our Schools Like China's (VIDEO)

If thats the case shouldnt the USA be number one or in the Top 5 in education? For once being "like China" probbaly not a bad thing.

reply to post by crazyewok


The problems with US education are bigger than standards.

1.) National Teachers Unions that prefer to be activists rather than teachers.

2.) Cultural attitudes that do not value education, either through complacency or outright hostility to the concept (look up "acting white" to get an idea).

3.) Elite academic attitudes that view classrooms as places for social engineering rather than places of actual academic instruction. So you have kids who can't read or write or do arithmetic are grade level, but they know all about sex and gender orientation and how not be bullies.