To all the US Dopers in education/concerned with education/up on current topics in education, what do you know about the Common Core Standards that many states are adopting? Massachusetts became the 27th state to adopt these national standards, eventually eliminating the need for the academic Frameworks documents that educators have been using to guide their instruction.
BTW, I’m a high school English teacher looking for some perspective. I’ve been using the state Frameworks for ELA and preparing my students for MCAS, the state’s required exam. I’m wondering how this is going to affect what I need to do, regarding instruction, and how it is going to affect my students.
Somehow I interpreted the thread title to be about states buying into a set of national standards for adoption. And my thought was that with all the fuss about gay marriage…
As far as I can tell, the states basically bypassed their educational systems and adopted these standards. That may be a good thing or bad thing.
In practice, it will depend on implementation. If a state doesn’t push to get the new standards to the teachers quickly, they will change (everything changes over time) faster than they get adopted in the classroom and these new standards won’t make much difference. They will be swamped by the steady changes that occur in teaching over the years. And that is the problem with my point above. The Governors adopted these plans but the educational system has to adopt them. So their future is in doubt.
In general, I’m okay with the idea of these standards. I know that the math folks in our state are pretty dismayed by the math standards, however: they’ve just spent years re-jiggering the math curriculum by grade level, trying to give each grade a chance to go really in-depth in a couple of concepts (rather than superficially touching on a ton of concepts at each grade), and the core standards movement will, if successful, undo their work.
I kind of like the idea of exploring fewer ideas in greater depth, since I think it matches how kids think better. But I don’t have a strong opinion on it one way or another.