Common Core Problems

[Lkm111784]

Common core is causing me great stress. I am a 6th grade English teacher, and I am extremely frustrated. I left a 90% pass rate, to now arrive at an underperforming school. It's almost like our benchmark assessments have set us up to fail. Across the entire school, we had 40% and below pass rates, grades 5-8. I work my butt off, but simply put, I have kids who can't read. My district has us using all these higher order level questions, critical thinking techniques, and engaging lessons...but I have students who are: A. Unmotivated. B. ESL learners C. Reading waayyyyy below grade level D. Try, but just can't. I now see an upcoming benchmark with two and three page long passages and excerpts from Jekyll and Hyde. With words like balderdash, somber, immodest. My kids are going to drown again
Just seems like Carousel activities, comic strip summaries, narrative essays...are just not going to cut it, with them wording questions in a way to purposely confuse them. The word choices and wording of answer choices...is beyond me The passages are a lexile of 1100 and the answer choices require a key component..well, 2 key components. ( Reading Skills and the Desire to Pass) No one wants to hear it, all I hear is create a plan of action ( we all had to, Math and ELA), do a passage 2-3 times a week. These questions require extreme critical analysis of the text. i just feel like it is sooo much, soooo soon. My kids passed the state test last year in 5th grade, with a 47.8%...which was AFTER retests. Implementing common core...I see a bad outcome in the near future.

[mopar]

It's hard because common core is expecting the students to do go deeper and remember things from previous years. In some places, students have not needed to remember learning or been held accountable when they just forget things.

Hopefully in a few years, your students will be better prepared for 6th grade. But these next few years are going to be difficult for all.

[a2z]

I never thought Common Core was going to fix problems in education. A kid that is so far behind in reading not getting proper instruction isn't going to get proper instruction just because the standards change a bit.

The only chance that Common Core had to work conceptually was to implement it year by year starting from the bottom up.

[Lkm111784]

It's like they want an overnight fix. I fear our scores are going to plummet

[mopar]

Administration definitely wants an overnight fix and scores will probably plummet as testing gets realigned with the standards. Just know that this is happening in many schools across the nation.

[BumbleB]

Originally Posted by Lkm111784

It's like they want an overnight fix. I fear our scores are going to plummet

Oh, across the board they will plummet. We know this. There was an article in our local paper that had a chart with every district from our portion of the state, their % passing the math test from last year and what they project the passing % to be once Common Core assessments are fully implemented.

My district had 70% of kids pass the math test last year. The article projected that only 40% of the students would pass a Common Core assessment. Talk about a wake-up call!

[EdEd]

The sad thing is that people aren't getting that even with CCSS instruction should be based on a student's current instructional level, even with the concept of "text complexity." While the standards are higher, that doesn't mean that teachers should start teaching material that's too difficult - it just means, as others have mentioned, that kids won't pass the test at the end of the year.

[Tyler B.]

I understand the frustration of teaching at a low-performing school. I went from a low-performing school to a high-performing school and had to listen to the P tell us that our scores were high because we are such great teachers. All the time I thought it was because nearly all the parents had post-graduate degrees and read to their children each night. It made me ache for my colleagues at the low performing schools who were being told it was their fault the scores were low.

What we found worked best with the low kids is to hold high expectations. Present the appropriate grade-level material, which they are chronologically mature enough to handle, but read it to them as they follow along silently. The power and magic of good literature and fabulous classroom discussions will pour motivation into your students. We also found that a great deal of our parent conferences was most productively spent in educating parents on how to help their children.

[EdEd]

Originally Posted by Tyler B.

Present the appropriate grade-level material, which they are chronologically mature enough to handle, but read it to them as they follow along silently.

Tyler, I think this is really the essence of the "complex text" element of CCSS - that we should be expecting kids to engage in the most challenging text within their instructional level of comprehension,
while providing scaffolding for non-comprehension elements they may struggle with (e.g., decoding the text).

So, text should still be on a student's instructional level, but we shouldn't use decoding instructional levels to determine level of instruction for comprehension.

I personally think this is being presented extremely poorly to teachers, with most teachers feeling that we should be teaching "above a child's instructional level," which is absolutely not true - but, a child's instructional level for comprehension may be much higher than his/her instructional level for reading fluency.