Our district is rolling out the common core math this year, and I think language arts and social studies next year.
Oh, your people are talking about rigor too. Ours never define what rigor is, but they say it a lot. The meetings for parents about the new math curriculum basically boiled down to the presenters saying "rigor rigor rigor" until the word lost all meaning. It got funny, but also weird and unconvincing.
They have purchased Math in Focus for elementary, replacing Everyday Math, likely an improvement. Pearson's Digits for the middle school, jury is still out on that one. The user interfaces for the online materials are VERY poorly designed from what we have seen so far, and the server's been down several times already at homework time. The high school curriculum will be phased in year by year, and we're not there yet, so I don't know about those materials yet.
All kids should now be getting the equivalent of algebra 1 (not called that, called Common Core 8) in 8th grade; identified-and-served GT kids will get it in 7th, unless they are grade-accelerated to move faster than that. They are saying they are going to increase access to the accelerated curriculum, which will be good, but there is still a problem in that the accelerated path still starts egregiously late, with many adept children champing at the bit until 4th grade. There will be three chances to accelerate in the new plan: compacting 4-5 into one year (in 4th); compacting 7-8 into one year (7th) and taking a double math period in high school. They have not said whether they would let someone do both of the first two compacting options; I assume they would if the child tested convincingly high.
The math teachers at the high school are strongly in favor of the Common Core, and really excited (about the rigor
. Our family is willing to go along and give it a shot, knowing that our own kids will learn math no matter what, and we are prepared to speak up knowledgeably on behalf of all kids if we start to not like the way it looks.
DeeDee
