Common Core's epic fail: Special Education

[Anonymous]

^^^keeping in mind that most kindergarteners are 6 by the end of the school year. This is beyond the capabilities of a typical 6-year-old?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

The first problem:

Those K standards should be grade 1 standards.

Huh! Well, besides you, who else says that, specifically, adding and subtracting to 10 with objects is too hard for grade K (neurotypical) students?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The first problem:

Those K standards should be grade 1 standards.

Huh! Well, besides you, who else says that, specifically, adding and subtracting to 10 with objects is too hard for grade K (neurotypical) students?

Most professionals familiar with how children learn would tell you this.

And in my state, children often enter K when they 4 years old.

[Anonymous]

Kindergarten should be for play. Learning letters and numbers. Getting the basics down of a classroom.

[Anonymous]

Why? It's unrealistic to expect kindergarteners, by the end of the year, to be able to solve addition and subtraction word problems, and add and subtract within 10, e.g., by using objects or drawings to represent the problem?

Yes. It is unrealistic for some. Probably not for the kids of those who write on this board--but it is for some.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The first problem:

Those K standards should be grade 1 standards.

Huh! Well, besides you, who else says that, specifically, adding and subtracting to 10 with objects is too hard for grade K (neurotypical) students?

Most professionals familiar with how children learn would tell you this.

And in my state, children often enter K when they 4 years old.

C'mon, cite some references. Now don't find some article where some educator is quoting a "Common Core math worksheet" and saying how this math is horrible for K students. Cite some recent experts (people working in the field) who are saying that it is developmentally inappropriate for 5 and 6 year old kindergarten children to be able, by the end of their Kindergarten year of school, to add 2 oranges and 4 oranges and count 1-2-3-4-5-6 oranges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Why? It's unrealistic to expect kindergarteners, by the end of the year, to be able to solve addition and subtraction word problems, and add and subtract within 10, e.g., by using objects or drawings to represent the problem?

Yes. It is unrealistic for some. Probably not for the kids of those who write on this board--but it is for some.

So what addition standard do you think is appropriate for ALL kindergarten kids (even the ones in your state who started at age 4, and who possibly are also learning disabled to boot) to be expected to master by the end of the year?

Or do you not believe K students can do addition, even with objects? Do you think the best we can expect from K students by the end of the year is that they choral chant the numbers 1-5 in sequence while teacher is modeling? Or what?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The first problem:

Those K standards should be grade 1 standards.

Huh! Well, besides you, who else says that, specifically, adding and subtracting to 10 with objects is too hard for grade K (neurotypical) students?

Most professionals familiar with how children learn would tell you this.

And in my state, children often enter K when they 4 years old.

C'mon, cite some references. Now don't find some article where some educator is quoting a "Common Core math worksheet" and saying how this math is horrible for K students. Cite some recent experts (people working in the field) who are saying that it is developmentally inappropriate for 5 and 6 year old kindergarten children to be able, by the end of their Kindergarten year of school, to add 2 oranges and 4 oranges and count 1-2-3-4-5-6 oranges.

http://www.edweek.org/media/joint_statement_on_core_standards.pdf

Joint Statement of Early Childhood
Health and Education Professionals
on the Common Core Standards Initiative
Issued by the Alliance for Childhood
March 2, 2010
www.allianceforchildhood.org
WE HAVE GRAVE CONCERNS about the core standards for young children now
being written by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State
School Officers. The draft standards made public in January conflict with compelling
new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood
education about how young children learn, what they need to learn,
and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades.


It's signed by hundreds of educators, doctors and researchers.

If you don't know this, you have had your head in the sand.


...

[Anonymous]

http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/standards

The new standards call for kindergarten children to master over 90 skills related to literacy and mathmatics. Is this necessary for children to succeed in school? Experts know of no research showing that children who read at age five do better in the long run than children who learn at six or seven. The proposed standards will almost certainly add to the stress already afflicting many children in kindergarten and the early grades—stress associated by clinicians with growing problems of aggressive behavior in young children and with burnout by third or fourth grade.



An added burden for children and teachers is the extensive testing required to assess mastery of these skills. Alliance research indicates that kindergartens already devote 20 to 30 minutes per day for testing or test preparation. A Milwaukee teacher reported having to give over 150 tests to her kindergarten children last year.



Effective learning in the early years requires a very different starting point than the one presumed in the core standards. The federal Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services are working together to develop a fresh look at how children learn best from birth through age eight. New research points to the indivisibility of physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. The core standards are based on a narrow and flawed focus on subject matter in isolation, overemphasizing cognitive skills at the expense of all others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Kindergarten should be for play. Learning letters and numbers. Getting the basics down of a classroom.

No, that is three year old classroom and start of 4's. At five, prek and k, they should be reading, writing and basic math. My prek five year old
Over learning. He has know his letters and numbers since 3, reading slightly afterward. Early exposure is good. No wonder our country is so behind others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The first problem:

Those K standards should be grade 1 standards.

Huh! Well, besides you, who else says that, specifically, adding and subtracting to 10 with objects is too hard for grade K (neurotypical) students?

Most professionals familiar with how children learn would tell you this.

And in my state, children often enter K when they 4 years old.

C'mon, cite some references. Now don't find some article where some educator is quoting a "Common Core math worksheet" and saying how this math is horrible for K students. Cite some recent experts (people working in the field) who are saying that it is developmentally inappropriate for 5 and 6 year old kindergarten children to be able, by the end of their Kindergarten year of school, to add 2 oranges and 4 oranges and count 1-2-3-4-5-6 oranges.

http://www.edweek.org/media/joint_statement_on_core_standards.pdf

Joint Statement of Early Childhood
Health and Education Professionals
on the Common Core Standards Initiative
Issued by the Alliance for Childhood
March 2, 2010
www.allianceforchildhood.org
WE HAVE GRAVE CONCERNS about the core standards for young children now
being written by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State
School Officers. The draft standards made public in January conflict with compelling
new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood
education about how young children learn, what they need to learn,
and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades.


...

I HAVE seen that letter. NOTHING in it comes even close to saying that Kindergarten students should not be able to, say, add 2 plus three oranges and come up with 5 oranges.

It is NOT addressing specific skills. They say that early childhood education should not contain "didactic instruction". However, all the skills required to be learned in Kindergarten (in math anyhow) should be learned through hands on activities. They can be taught, and taught well, through games, and through the use of active manipulation of objects.

They are assuming that when a standards says "be able to say which number is greater" that the teachers are forcing this information onto a child with the use of flashcards and pencil and paper tests, but that does not have to be the case. Children can play AND learn math.

There are some great card games you can play with to help kids learn to break down numbers and to see which goes with which to make ten. I posted a description of such a game on the first page on this thread -- I use it all the time with my K students.

http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/364328.page

[Anonymous]

The new standards call for kindergarten children to master over 90 skills related to literacy and mathmatics. Is this necessary for children to succeed in school? Experts know of no research showing that children who read at age five do better in the long run than children who learn at six or seven. The proposed standards will almost certainly add to the stress already afflicting many children in kindergarten and the early grades—stress associated by clinicians with growing problems of aggressive behavior in young children and with burnout by third or fourth grade.

Totally agree with this statement. I taught first grade for years and saw many kids that came in not reading and quickly surpassed others.

[Anonymous]

Why? Because they had a background of experience with language and experiences that encouraged thinking rather than robotic responses when they were three years old.

[Anonymous]

Common Core standards for Kindergarten Foundational skills do not say that a Kindergarten student should be reading by the end of the Kindergarten year.

They do say that the Kindergarteners should be expected to have all of the components necessary to begin reading instruction in first grade; most importantly:

be able to say a sound for each consonant and short vowel
be able to take a word like "fat" (heard orally) and say each sound in it /f/.../a/.../t/ (except for words ending in /l/ /r/ or /x/)
be able to read a few high frequency sight words (the, a, and, etc)
be able to turn pages in a book the correct way and understand that the text represents words

http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/K/

These are challenging and while not all students will completely master them, they will be much better prepared for 1st grade if they have even mastered half of them.

There are other reading standards that involve reading literature and informational text; they all say students will be able to respond to literature "with prompting and support" which could be as simple as repeating what the teacher has just said -- identify the author characters and setting of a story and so on. This is not difficult. The characters are frog and toad. The setting is Toad's garden. Etc.

http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/K/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

The new standards call for kindergarten children to master over 90 skills related to literacy and mathmatics. Is this necessary for children to succeed in school? Experts know of no research showing that children who read at age five do better in the long run than children who learn at six or seven. The proposed standards will almost certainly add to the stress already afflicting many children in kindergarten and the early grades—stress associated by clinicians with growing problems of aggressive behavior in young children and with burnout by third or fourth grade.

Totally agree with this statement. I taught first grade for years and saw many kids that came in not reading and quickly surpassed others.

Common Core Foundations Skills in Reading for Kindergarten students stress phonemic awareness.

http://www.literacyresourcesinc.com/research/

Phonemic Awareness Research
• The two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness. (Adams, 1990)

• Phonemic awareness is central in learning to read and spell. (Ehri, 1984)

• The probability of remaining a poor reader at the end of fourth grade, given a child was a poor reader at the end of first grade, was .88....... the probability of remaining an average reader in fourth grade, given an average reading ability in first grade, was .87. (Juel, 1988)

• The lack of phonemic awareness is the most powerful determinant of the likelihood of failure to read. (Adams, 1990)

• Phonemic awareness is the most important core and causal factor in separating normal and disabled readers. (Adams, 1990)

• Phonemic awareness has been shown to be a very powerful predictor of later reading achievement. In fact, it [phonemic awareness] is a better predictor than more global measures such as IQ or general language proficiency. (Griffith and Olson, 1992)

• Phonemic awareness is the most potent predictor of success in learning to read. It is more highly related to reading than tests of general intelligence, reading readiness, and listening comprehension. (Stanovich, 1986, 1994)

• Yes, there really is a difference in brain activation patterns between good and poor readers. We see the difference when people carry out phonologically based tasks. And that tells us that the area of difficulty - the functional disruption - in poor readers relates to phonological analysis. This suggests that we focus on phonological awareness when trying to prevent or remediate the difficulty in poor reading. (Shaywitz, 1999)

• The most comprehensive reading program EXPLICITLY [sic] teaches about the sounds of language. It teaches children that words can be broken up into these smaller units of language, that the letters represent this unit of language - phonics. (Shaywitz, 1999)

• ALL [sic] children can benefit from being taught directly how to break up spoken words into smaller units and how letters represent sounds. (Shaywitz, 1999)

http://www.sedl.org/pubs/sedl-letter/v14n03/3.html

Even more suggestive evidence comes from a closer look at  the distributions between phonemic awareness and reading skills  concurrently measured. If you plot skill in phonemic awareness  against skill in decoding (measured as reading individual  pseudowords), you find triangular distributions. In these  distributions, there are many instances of either low skill  in both domains or high skill in phonemic awareness coupled  with either low or high skill in decoding. However, there  are no instances of low skill in phonemic awareness and high  skill in decoding. This pattern suggests that phonemic awareness  is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for skill  in decoding. That is, you must have skill in phonemic awareness  if you are to acquire skill in decoding, but having skill  in phonemic awareness is no guarantee for successful development  of skill in decoding. To get the latter, you need something  in addition to phonemic awareness (you also need knowledge  of the letters and of the alphabetic principle, plus lots  of practice pairing written and spoken words).

The strongest evidence for a causal relationship between  phonemic awareness and reading comes from training studies.  In the typical training study design, children who lack phonemic  awareness skills are randomly divided into different groups,  one receiving training designed to develop phonemic awareness  skill and the other receiving training designed to develop  a skill that is unrelated to reading (say, a mathematical  skill like counting). After training, the different groups  are given the same reading instruction, and one looks to see  whether those groups that received phonemic awareness training  in fact do better in both assessments of phonemic awareness  and reading than those who did not. Many studies like this  have now been conducted, and the majority of them report that  the groups receiving phonemic awareness instruction subsequently  did much better in reading development than those who did  not receive such training.

Now it is true that reading by itself does advance skill  in phonemic awareness. Reading practice advances reading  skill, and the more skill in reading, the more skill in phonemic  awareness. This indicates a reciprocal relationship between  phonemic awareness and reading, where skill in one supports  development of skill in the other and vice versa. But the  critical question is whether some amount of skill in phonemic  awareness is critical before skill in reading can advance;  the evidence suggests (especially that from training studies)  the answer to this question is yes.

Foundational skill in Kindergarten in being aware of phonemes, and being able to break words into phonemes and blend phonemes into words, is the foundation of being able to learn to decode and to spell and there IS evidence that children who are taught these skills in Kindergarten learn to read better in the later grades.