Classroom chaos? Critics blast new Common Core education standards http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/03/critics-claim-common-core-brings-chaos-not-acountability-to-classroom/
FoxNews.com – Diane
Diederich - 9/3/2013
A full year before students
around the nation submit to the new Common Core standardized tests, the
federally-backed program is already causing chaos and confusion at local school
board meetings, in the classroom and at the dinner table.
As critics fear Washington is poised to
take control of what and how local districts teach kids, school administrators
are adopting new curriculum in an effort to ensure their students outperform
their peers and parents worry that their children are being used as academic
guinea pigs. As the program gets closer to full implementation, a full-blown
backlash is developing despite assurances from supporters that it is merely a
test aimed at establishing a national standard.
‘What is this, and why is it
being forced on us?’” said the Cato Institute’s Neil McCluskey.
When 90 percent of states
signed on to subject K-12 students to the Common Core math and English
standards being pushed by the federal government, the program looked like an
unqualified success. Kids around the nation would be tested once a year in
grades 3-8 in math and English language arts, and once in high school, either
in the 10th or 11th grades. Finally, students throughout the country could be
measured by the same yardstick, long before taking college entrance exams.
Local districts that excelled at educating children could be singled out, and
ones who lagged could also be identified in order to address problems.
But if what happened in New York and Kentucky,
two of the 45 states that have signed on to the Common Core State Standards
Initiative, is any indication, the chaos has only just begun. Those states
administered their own standardized tests aligned with Common Core, and the
results were disastrous. Just 31 percent of New York students in the third through
eighth grades were deemed proficient in math and English on the new tests, down
about 50 percent from the traditional test given the year before. Kentucky,
which also implemented its own Common Core-aligned tests, experienced similar
declines in scores.
. . . kids who had always done well in math were
left disillusioned with the subject.
Five parents filed a
complaint with the state over use of the new Algebra 1 book, and, after a
protracted battle, forced the district to establish an "instructional
online interactive forum" for Algebra 1 students and adopt new regulations
for pilot programs as part of a settlement on the controversy over use of a
textbook. Crisp said she worries about some 800 students who spent a year
studying from a textbook hastily adopted in the frenzy to align with Common
Core. THE DISTRICT LATER DISAVOWED THE BOOK.
“Common Core is forcing
districts to re-think math curriculum,” Crisp said. “And in cases like ours,
they are making poor decisions.”
In McCluskey’s words,
“standards are designed to set a box around curriculum,” meaning whatever is on
the test will have to be taught.
Phyllis Schlafly of The
Eagle Forum goes even further. “Common
Core means federal control of school curriculum, i.e., control by Obama
administration left-wing bureaucrats,” wrote Schlafly. “The control mechanism
is the tests (called assessments). Kids must pass the tests in order to get a
high school diploma or admittance to college. If they haven’t studied a
curriculum based on Common Core standards, they won’t score well on the tests.”
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