Reply to "Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Another great post by an actual teacher in the trenches. Thank you.

Common Core's demands that everyone be taught at grade level whether they are actually there are not are going to be a disaster for 70 percent of kids in this country. They will get behind in Kindergarten and never be allowed to catch up.[/quote]

As the actual teacher in the trenches clearly explains, the Common Core standards do not demand this. The teacher's school administrators demand it.[/quote]

No, there are one set of standards and everyone is to be taught these standards. And tested on them.

No flexibility or leeway at all. The 1.5 pages on kids with IEPs in the Common Core standards makes this clear. They use garbage talk like "unpacking the standards" as if that will work. [/quote]

You can't be taught standards. You can be taught [whatever] so that you are able to meet these standards. And yes, everybody (in states that adopted the Common Core standards) is to be tested on them, as a result of the NCLB testing requirements. Do you think that it would make sense to say, "Well, you are in fourth grade, but you are only reading at the first-grade level, and so you will take the first-grade test."? (Especially since there isn't a first-grade test. The purpose of the tests is to determine whether the students in the school meet the standards. If you are in fourth grade, but reading at the first-grade level, then you don't meet the standards.

Meanwhile, where in the Common Core standards does it say that fourth-graders can only be taught materials related to the fourth-grade standards?[/quote]

In any good school with strong leadership, there will be acceleration.  Last year, my daughter's 4th grade English teacher said that with the high readers, she could stretch them as much as possible, which means reaching beyond the current standards.

"Unpacking the standards" is not a new idea. We've been unpacking since we started with standards when we had the Core Learning Goals.  It simply means that we're breaking down the standards into learning objectives and scaffolding material (chunking) so that students build skills.

This is under the standards for Reading for Information (9-10 band):
RI 1 Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

As educators, we're responsible for teaching before/during/after reading strategies connected to informative texts.  We must teach ways to make inferences.  We must show them organizational patterns to support a claim so that their textual evidence is organized. We must teach them to cite properly using either MLA or APA, depending upon the content area.

The standards are fine, folks. Any literate graduate should have these mastered.

What's fucked (!) is how we're expecting ALL kids to master these standards at the same time.  Benchmarks are a mess, as not all kids reach a specific level of abstract thinking at the same time. So while the standards are developmentally appropriate for SOME, they're not appropriate for all.  And this is where kids will be left behind or labeled.[/quote]

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