Still Putting It All Together

The wonder drug has been invented, manufactured, packaged, and shipped. Doctors and nurses are being trained to administer the drug properly. Companies and consultants are offering products and services to help with the proper administering of this wonder drug. A national effort is underway to develop tools to monitor the improvement of the patients. The media are flooded with enthusiastic endorsement and euphoric predictions.

This cure-all wonder drug is the Common Core, short for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Cooked up by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, this magic potion promises to cure America’s education ills, according to its Mission Statement:

“The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”

Specifically, the Common Core claims to cure the ills that have long plagued America’s education: inequality and inefficiency. Common standards will help ensure that students are receiving a high quality education consistently, from school to school and state to state. Common standards will provide a greater opportunity to share experiences and best practices within and across states that will improve our ability to best serve the needs of students.”

So how wonderful is this wonder drug? There is no empirical evidence at the moment to make any judgment since no one has taken it yet. But common sense can help. If it is too good to be true…

From the get-go, I’ve been able to see the positives of having Common Core standards.  However, I’ve been wary of the drawbacks — much of which I don’t think we’ll know of until they are implemented.   If you can’t weigh all of the cons before implementing something, the more I get nervous about it.

I would love to hear from #education their opinions on the implementation of the standards, what it means for education in America, and what we as educators need to be on the ball for in order to protect our students from possible downfalls related to the common core.

Any Texas teachers have any opinions on this?

While I share the concerns of many of my colleagues that the new standards are a Trojan horse for further standardized testing, narrowed curriculum and hierarchical control of what happens in the classroom, I think the standards themselves represent the greatest opportunity for history teaching and learning to be widely re-imagined since theCommittee of Tenset the basic outlines for American education over a hundred years ago.

The standards offer an opportunity to broaden the conception of social studies from one that focuses on helping students acquire an established body of knowledge to one that emphasizes the historical thinking skills that are central to constructing this knowledge.

However, none of this will matter if the Common Core’s implementation is not paired with a dramatic change in how the state holds students accountable for learning social studies.

The standards clearly articulate the disciplinary skills necessary not only for reaching the relatively low bar of “college and career readiness,” but also for the much greater calling of creating an informed and critical citizenry

I haven’t looked at the social studies common core standards for middle school and high school.  I have looked mostly at the L.A. common core standards since Florida uses them.  I’m pretty iffy on them.  For some, I think the standards are watered down.  Furthermore, I worry about the corporate influences that will arise with the common core, and as the writer mentions the windows and doors that may be opened to more standardized testing.  However, I think as professionals we need to look at both sides of the issues.  Helping students become critical thinkers is an important goal for teachers.  At the same time, how critical are we going to help them be when we have to get them ready for more and more standardized tests that may not require critical (and other higher order) thinking.

toseealambatschool:

Correlated to the State Standards, just select your state, grade level, subject, and standard to receive a variety of units, lesson plans, and activities based on the topic.

The Obama administration issued long-awaited, long-delayed guidelines on Friday to insulate government scientific research from political meddling and to base policy decisions on solid data.

Under the guidelines, government scientists are in general free to speak to journalists and the public about their work, and agencies are prohibited from editing or suppressing reports by independent advisory committees.

And the agencies are instructed that when communicating a scientific finding to the public, they should describe its underlying assumptions. For instance, they are told to describe “probabilities associated with both optimistic and pessimistic projections” — a guideline that, had it been in place last summer, might have helped the administration avoid overly optimistic estimates of the BP oil spill.

In a blog entry on the White House Web site, John P. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, said the guidelines set “minimum standards” that federal agencies will be expected to meet.

The agencies are to report to Dr. Holdren within 120 days, detailing how they will carry out the policy.

Some scientists praised the new guidelines. “I think they represent several steps in the right direction,” said Albert H. Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

But others were disappointed that the four-page document did not provide more specifics. “The guidelines are substantively quite thin,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.

The guidelines have their roots in a series of scientific controversies that erupted during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Officials were repeatedly accused of suppressing or even altering research findings, particularly on climate change, to match the political views of the White House. So in March 2009, when Mr. Obama overturned Bush administration limits on stem cellresearch, he set out several principles to “guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch” and added, “We make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

But though the president called on Dr. Holdren to come up with recommendations within four months, the guidelines did not emerge for over a year and a half.

(Click the link to read the entire article)

BOISE, Idaho — State lawmakers will have final say in whether Idaho scraps a requirement that high school students pass standardized tests in science before they graduate.

A plan to dump the requirement is set to go before the 2011 Idaho Legislature, which convenes in January.

Public schools chief Tom Luna says science classes vary from district to district and students are only tested twice - in the 5th- and 7th-grades - before it really counts.

Luna’s office confirmed that the state Board of Education last week approved removal of the science test as a graduation requirement, starting with the class of 2013. Luna’s department was directed to create end-of-course assessments in science that students will have to pass to graduate.

Includes over 100 online math activities, lesson plans, math standards, and links to other online resources for math.  Definitely a great resource for any math teacher!

This Fordham Institute publication—co-authored by President Chester E. Finn Jr. and VP Michael J. Petrilli—pushes folks to think about what comes next in the journey to common education standards and tests. Most states have adopted the “Common Core” English language arts and math standards, and most are also working on common assessments. But…now what? The standards won’t implement themselves, but unless they are adopted in the classroom, nothing much will change. What implementation tasks are most urgent? What should be done across state lines? What should be left to individual states, districts, and private markets? Perhaps most perplexing, who will govern and “own” these standards and tests ten or twenty years from now?

I do think having standards across state lines is a good thing, but I do wonder what this means for standardized testing and what it does to my craft.  I hope it doesn’t push teachers to teach to the test even more.  We need thinkers, not parrots.

Like websites based in other states, this webpage has resources that could be aligned to many other state’s standards.  This particular website focuses on math, science, and reading.  There are lessons, discussion boards, information on texts you can use in the classroom, ideas for centers, and more.

What works in education? The Best Evidence Encyclopedia (BEE) presents reliable, unbiased reviews of research-proven educational programs to help:

POLICY MAKERS use evidence to make informed choices.

PRINCIPALS choose proven programs to meet state standards.

TEACHERS use the most powerful tools available.

RESEARCHERS find rigorous evaluations of educational programs.

    …because all children deserve the best in education