Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Article on development of common core

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...1e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html?hpid=z1

Article attempts to explain the involvement of Bill Gates as well as how states were convinced to adopt the standards.

Which states?

I agree completely. The way common core was designed was really good, but rather than adopting it as a framework, within which to create an appropriate curriculum, or even within which to modify the current curriculum, textbook makers completely screwed it up and wrote it as the curriculum and school boards adopted it that way.
As a teacher it makes me so frustrated because there was some really good stuff in the common core framework that would have improved mathematics understanding if implementation had been done correctly.
Science also rewrote their standards and are largely compatible with the common core, BUT they did it the right way and haven't turned it into a badly designed curriculum (at least not yet).
I think if it had been introduced as a framework and the minimum standards and schools were allowed to rewrite their curriculum to fit the new standards in the next 5 years it would have been fine, but since it was wrapped up into a lot of federal funding and grants for schools, there wasn't the time or understanding by the teachers about what it really is. They were simply told they have to teach it or the school loses funding.
Since the textbook companies are making a bundle off it, within the next year there will be NO textbooks available that are not tied to the common core. It will then take another 3-5 years to get a company to agree to make another set of new books possibly not tied to the core, but depending on how often your school allows new books to be ordered, it could be 10 years before common core is out of classrooms.

Kerry, very well-stated. I'd also add that (for whatever reason) administrators in some places, naturally inertia-driven creatures that they are, whined and moaned about CHANGE... and losing local "control" of curriculum...

and basically lit a grassfire, which largely caught on with the conspiracy-theorist crowd of parents and community members. {sigh}

Well, now that CCSS are a reality, they can't put it OUT. They thought to use parents to prevent it in the first place, but when that didn't work, now they just have a huge MESS on their hands, since public opinion is so very negative about the standards themselves at this point.

The rhetoric, a lot of it, has little to do with reality, and everything to do with foaming, but little difference in the end. ANY ills are going to get labeled as being the fault of Common Core at this point, and out goes both baby and bathwater.

I blame administrators-- at the state and local level-- who have always framed this as a power-struggle rather than much-needed educational reform. They knew that it was coming for years, but did nothing until they were FORCED to do so. Well, by that time it was a scramble. And yeah, the timing of the release of the standards themselves didn't help, because details were pretty sparse until rather late in the day, making turnkey solutions (e.g. whatever Pearson devised as "CC aligned!" ) more appealing than a full summer meticulously fine-combing extant curriculum and developing additions.

*****

When challenged with facts-- or asked to provide them, those arguments crumple, of course, but the anger behind them remains, along with the sense of "othering" the educational establishment.

It's all very sad.

Some have suggested that when implementing common core teachers could provide differentiation which requires higher level producibles from gifted students. In some cases, this may use higher level content. For example, differentiation in task demands might consist of some students preparing a report on (easy book) while others prepare a more detailed report on (higher level book). Reference the materials linked at this recent thread. From the view of many parents whose gifted children have experienced this approach, this does not solve the problem, rather it exacerbates the difficulties faced by gifted learners.

Under this approach, the gifted students are not receiving more input/teaching/guidance or acceleration to new material but rather are required to produce more output: read more pages, write longer essays, follow additional rubric constraints. They are required to work at a higher level to receive the same grade as their classmates. They are essentially working at a varsity level to maintain a JV team placement. Both the higher task demands and the grading policy/practice may discourage gifted students and encourage underachievement.

Please consider that the textbook companies may not have been working independently or at crossed purposes to the common core standards; The creators of common core standards could have withdrawn support of textbook companies and changed direction at any time. Please consider that common core may be a bit of a Trojan horse by design: People gladly welcome guidelines and then are surprised by the onslaught of requirements flowing from it.

Some say that if the common core tests and assessments are dropped then common core is essentially out of the classroom: Curriculum can then be taught as local school boards see fit: using standards as a guideline for a performance floor while exercising discretion with regard to skipping material, condensing material, and otherwise teaching material at the grade levels which seem appropriate to each student.

Some parents have reported that their gifted and/or high-achieving children have not been allowed to work ahead under the common core and were given the reasoning that working ahead may cause the student to be focused on newly acquired skills and information, therefore not have the skills and information currently in mind for the common core grade-level assessments, resulting in performing less than optimally on those assessments, penalizing the teacher/school/district.

I don't really understand the comments saying that the CC is being used as a curriculum. This isn't possible, because it's just a list of standards:


The Common Core is simply a statement of what children should know. A challenge with implementing it is that it's mathematically correct, and textbooks have had a problem in that area for a long time. Another major problem is that many teachers don't understand mathematics well enough to teach it properly, and they're hindered by the poor textbooks. This hasn't changed much with the supposed alignment of textbooks with the Common Core.

Indigo, the developers of the Common Core never had any involvement with the textbook companies, nor did they "support" them. Plus, the textbook companies never had any influence over the Common Core.

developers of the Common Core never had any involvement with the textbook companies



Wellllllllllll...



sort of.

While that is nominally so, there is a definite linkage between companies like Pearson and the architecture under the roll-out of CCSS. There IS money in there, and there HAVE been links between the CCSS construction and those same educational providers, corporate players in the big leagues, all of them.

They HAVE probably (IMO) had undue influence on the reconstruction of curriculum which is aligned with CCSS, and certainly with the assessment arm. In fact, the latter provides fairly rich scandal broth even now, and I imagine that is only going to get worse as the investigations into that proceed in places other than NY.

But again-- it didn't need to be this way. IF administrators at the regional/local level had simply gotten it together back when this all emerged on the horizon (in 2008 or 2009) then they wouldn't have NEEDED to be in a panic and looking for "classroom-ready" curricular materials in 2012.

This may allude to common core standards; Common core is more than standards. Common core is also a series of websites, linked from the official CCSS website, with many implementation directives.

Throughout this thread I have not seen concerns about math standards per se.

There are complex interrelations over time, including funding. We do not need to agree. Some may see it as a chick-or-egg situation, and that is ok, too. Funding and interrelationships between different entities is a bit of a side issue; On this forum, I prefer to focus on the impacts of common core on gifted learners and gifted education.

I definitely want to read about that. Do you have any links?