Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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Many students in high-poverty schools perform poorly on state tests already. With Congress’s plan to cut food stamps for the poor, elderly, and disabled, schools nationwide will face much greater difficulties in educating hungry children. Then add the cost for technology to make Common Core testing possible. Many schools have trouble now connecting to the Internet, and others have many connections but terrible WiFi infrastructure. Systems have been known to crash on the day of testing, forcing students in mid-keystroke of a...
Many teachers are concerned about the Common Core State Standards. Compounding their anxieties, Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, has noted that the CCSS establishes national standards for the country, as though they had never existed before. However, we have had national standards for a long time. Since World War 2, textbook publishers have competed with each other for the school textbook market. As a result, many texts from different publishers were barely distinguishable from one another. That is still the case...
Marianne Iksic and I realized that though the state standards were superior, the new national standards were here to stay. About 90-95% of our English program matched the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). At Common Core English workshops, we both have heard teachers’ concerns, the major one being that the CCSS would dictate the books that teachers were to teach and students to read. When teachers saw, for example, that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or William Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury were marked at the 4th grade...
As we learn from home and research, the most important influence on a child is the parent. Next, we learn that daily support in reading from parents and other adults contributes greatly to the child’s success in reading. Then comes the inevitable question: What do I do when my child gets stuck reading? Well, there are several strategies that teachers use with K-3 children that parents can also use at home. In fact, these strategies also work on readers of any age. The parent can ask the child, “What would make sense her...
As noted last week, the backlash against Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has begun. A look back to two years ago may provide some insight into the current groundswell against the CCSS. In 2010-2011, Marianne Iksic and I examined the English portion of the national standards. We shared the same understanding – the state standards were as good as, if not better than, the CCSS. The only major differences in the national curriculum were the use of traditional grammar (labeling by parts of speech), an emphasis on a...
Research into early reading shows numerous elements that help children become readers. Teachers know these factors; and if parents know also, they can support their children at home with some of the same information. I comment on some of them in no particular order. One, exposing children to books and literature from infancy, maybe even before birth, helps them as readers when they go to school. The town library has an excellent elementary collection of books that parents can use all year long, in addition to the elementary...
Common Core is the most recent version of a five-decade long reform movement, which has stressed over and over that public schools are failing. It all started with Sputnik. In 2012, McDonnell and Weatherford, professors at UC-Santa Barbara, examined the connection of Common Core, policy, and politics. Contrary to common perception, public schools were not failing. They discovered that politics determined the definitions of what makes up “research” in order to support policy decisions concerning the Common Core State Standards...
