College Readiness

Today's Journal....

New curriculum will transform how education is taught

By Richard O Jones

Staff Writer

The biggest curriculum shift in public education in more than a decade is underway as schools roll-out the Common Core State Standards.

School districts in 46 states, including Ohio, are now in the process of rolling out new standards in English and math, which includes assessments that will be given for the first time in the 2014-15 school year. New standards for science and social studies are in the pipeline.

The goal of Common Core, according to Keith Millard, director of secondary education for Hamilton City Schools, is to “provide a clear road map that allows districts to focus on the skills that allow college and career readiness for all students.

Educators say the curriculum change will transform the way students learn in schools.

“It will specifically define the knowledge, skills and habits children need to have in the interconnected world of the 21st century,” he said. “The Common Core increases the level of academic rigor expected of all students.”

While Common Core doesn’t dictate instructional techniques, the standards promise to significantly change the way classrooms are managed and how knowledge is attained and utilized.

“The curriculum maps outline the standards and sequences for a year’s worth of instruction and provide guidelines, but there is certainly room for the teachers to use their professional judgement in working with individual students,” Millard said.

Common Core has been designed to help students understand real-world problems, according to Denise Griffin, curriculum director for Edgewood City Schools.

“To accomplish this, we have to change instructional practices,” Griffin said.

While the previous state curriculum has been criticized as being “too deep and too wide,” Griffin said, the Common Core provides a sequence of learning that more specifically focuses areas of instruction to order to go even deeper… We’ve been teaching way to much at every grade level.

“In language arts, there will be more reading, more research and more debate,” she said. “They expect students to be able to pose questions and find evidence to prove things, to be able to write more and to analyze more.”

Whereas traditional instructional techniques were focused on the teacher providing facts and information and testing children on how much they retained, Common Core encourages them to be “problem solvers and life-long learners,” Griffin said.

Because it is nearly a nation-wide initiative, there is the additional benefit that a child moving from one state to another won’t have to spend precious weeks or months trying to adjust to a new set of studies as everyone will be working on the same subjects at the same time in every grade level.

The initiative, funded through private grants, was sponsored by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve, a nonprofit organization created at the 1996 National Education Summit by the nation’s governors and corporate leaders. Achieve is “an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit education reform organization based in Washington, D.C. that helps states raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability,” according to its website.

Common Core grew out of Achieve’s American Diploma Project and a 2004 report called “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts,” which concluded that “current high-school exit expectations fall well short of (employer and college) demands.”

The strongly-worded report called high school diplomas in the United States a “broken promise” that failed to “reflect adequate preparation for the intellectual demands of adult life, (and) in reality it falls far short of this common sense goal.”

Standards were released for mathematics and English language arts in June, 2010, and states were given an incentive to adopt the Common Core Standards through the possibility of competitive federal Race to the Top grants.

There has been a lot of debate among education experts whether the Common Core Standards are more rigorous than standards currently in place.

A 2011 Center on Education Policy survey of more than 300 school districts in the participating states found that roughly 60 percent of respondents believed the Common Core Standards are more rigorous than the ones they have been using.

A national poll released by Achieve this summer indicates that educators are largely behind the Common Core initiative. Of teachers who have seen, read or heard about the Common Core, 68 percent have a favorable impression, up from 59 percent a year ago.

“Most educators see the need for it,” Griffin confirmed.

“It’s a huge project,” she said, “and we’re trying to make sure that teachers are educated in the new standards while they continue to work with the current standards.

The some of the as-yet unanswered question, however, is what impact Common Core assessments will have. The Ohio Department of Education, for instance, has yet to determine whether passing Common Core tests will replace the Ohio Graduation Tests and other state-mandated assessments, or what parts of Common Core assessments will have on School Report Cards.

Schools are already bracing for a perceived reduction in test scores, which are predicted simply because the standards are set a little higher.

IF YOU LOOK BACK ON PAST POSTS ON THIS FORUM CONCERNING THIS TOPIC, YOU WILL SEE THAT SOME OF US HAVE BEEN ASKING WHY THE METHODS USED IN THE CLASSROOM WERE NEVER CONSIDERED FOR CHANGE. NOW, YEARS LATER, WE READ AN ARTICLE WHERE SOMEONE HAS DECIDED WE NEED TO APPROACH THE METHOD OF TEACHING IN A DIFFERENT MANNER. GUESS IT TAKES TIME FOR THE EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY TO CATCH UP WITH THE IDEAS OF THE WORKING SEGMENT OF SOCIETY OUTSIDE ACADEMIA AS TO POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS.

Bocephus wrote: Vet in my opinion on this is that a huge part of the problem in Middletown schools are the parents of the kids attending our schools and their home support/enviroment if the parents dont care why should the kids? Ask any of my kids what happens when they brought home a C (only 2 Cs out of 3 kids school career one was in phys/ed. lol) or we get a call from a teacher or principal saying they were acting stupid.No amount of new school buildings or million dollar budgets will improve these numbers until the parents start giving a dam.

Good observations Bo. And since you mentioned some parents not caring as being the culprit here, and since we can stereotype some lower income parents as typically not placing too much emphasis on education, I would ask this question of the city leaders......Why did you aggravate the situation with the Middletown schools and the difficulties they have in educating the kids here by inviting more low income to town? It would appear the city leader's desire to increase revenue via the fed handout programs has created residual problems for the schools. You also mentioned new schools. Has anyone seen any appreciable improvement on student performance since the new schools were built with the $45 million bond levy? Have the new schools made a major contribution toward improving scholastic achievement, or were they built just to provide the teachers and admin. a more modern place to work? Before/after new schools data on performance? Is it available school board members?