http://www.cbsnews.com/news/parents-join-nationwide-boycott-of-common-core-exam/

The other day a parent shared with me this CBS story about parents boycotting the common core exam. I appreciate the press that our educational system is getting but wish it was more accurate. Based on this type of press and others like it in social media, I understand why anyone would oppose the common core. I on the other-hand do not. This is my response to the parent who sent me the video.

Thanks. I have not seen the video until today. I don’t have the same perspective as the woman in the video. As a parent, I am grateful that my children will be learning the curriculum outlined in the common core standards and not the retired California standards. I want my kids to grow up to be critical thinkers, sense makers, communicators, and problem solvers. These are all things that are brought out in the common core standards and were scarce in the retired California standards. With that said, there are many challenges we face with the transition to the new standards. The standards identify the content only. They do not identify the materials or instructional strategies. At MUS, as well with other districts, we are charged with identifying those strategies and materials in a very short time frame and in some cases having to develop our own as the transition period for common core is shorter than curriculum developers and trainers can keep up with. Common core is a change for teachers, students, and parents.

The common core is far from perfect. My biggest criticism of common core is the short transition period. The common core standards came out in 2010 but schools were held accountable to take the CST test which assessed the now retired California content standards until 2013. That means that most schools only had the 2013-2014 school year to completely revamp the content they taught, the curriculum, and the teaching strategies they use. In one academic year, teachers have been asked to undo what they spent at least a year of graduate school and many years of teaching mastering and totally revamp their role as a teacher. They have been asked to do this without all the supports they got when they first entered their career in education.

This change also has an impact on students. Students grew to learn that a good student sits quietly in class, listens carefully to the instructions and procedures of the teachers, and then quickly mimics those processes on their own. Now they are asked to try out their own ideas first, think about the ideas of others, and make sense of their learning. Kids never had to make sense of fractions or long division. Now they do. The hardest part of this change is students now have to make sense out of their current learning that builds upon their sense making from their past learning. The challenge is that the past learning they are building on did not have to make sense.

The CBS video has a particular focus on the testing of common core. I am not a fan of standardized testing and the need to rank schools by how well their students perform on a test. I do however appreciate the opportunity to see how much our children have grown and how they measure compared to their grade level expectations set by the common core standards. The parent in the video criticizes, “teaching to the test”. I believe that teaching to the test is a wonderful thing if we have the right test. The past California CST test did a great job of assessing how well students could select the correct multiple choice answer to a series of low level questions. Schools that taught to the CST test lowered their rigor as test taking strategies and the memorization of rules were more efficient than teaching students to think. With common core comes about a new type of assessment with few multiple choice questions and many opportunities for students to communicate their thinking and to analyze the thinking of others. If teaching to the common core test means that I have to teach my students to be critical thinkers, writers, and problem solvers then I support it. This is yet to be seen.

The mother in the CBS story also talked about how her 10 year-old child did not know what social studies was and listed that as another criticism of the common core. The common core standards actually promote more science and social studies as the language arts standards are explicitly connected to reading and writing in the content areas. Walk into any one of our classrooms at my school and chances are that most students would also say they don’t do social studies. They spend hours a day reading expository texts and writing about the impact of decisions on society. They debate, research, and respond to both past and current events. Is that language arts or is it social studies?

To conclude, I am grateful my 3 children will be educated in a common core world. I am grateful that we are educating our future workforce to be critical thinkers and sense makers. I wish educators and students would have another year or two before the high stakes testing begins to really strengthen our art of teaching. I wish curriculum developers had more time to really create better instructional materials rather than stick new labels on the old materials. I wish “the common core” did a better job of educating the public.