by Gretchen Logue of Missouri Education Watchdog
Is this scenario coming soon to a kindergarten class in your school district? Teachers are mandated to teach developmentally inappropriate standards, assessments and curricula to district students. What do you think will happen? Will endlessly assessing students in kindergarten make them more ready for the global workforce or will they dissolve in tears and view school as something to avoid at all costs?
THIS is what teachers, parents, school board members and legislators need to understand about Common Core standards. When students implode, there is nothing your school can do. Schools can’t subtract from the standards and they must use the copyrighted material.
This is not what education should be. But this is what it is becoming unless we stop the implementation of the standards in our states.
From the NY Post:
Way beyond the ABCs, crayons and building blocks, the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write “informative/explanatory reports” and demonstrate “algebraic thinking.”
Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.
“For the most part, it’s way over their heads,” a Brooklyn teacher said. “It’s too much for them. They’re babies!”
In a kindergarten class in Red Hook, Brooklyn, three children broke down and sobbed on separate days last week, another teacher told The Post.
When one girl cried, “I can’t do it,” classmates rubbed her back, telling her, “That’s OK.”
“This is causing a lot of anxiety,” the teacher said. “Kindergarten should be happy and playful. It should be art and dancing and singing and learning how to take turns. Instead, it’s frustrating and disheartening.”
The city has adopted national standards called the Common Core, which dramatically raise the bar on what kids in grades K through 12 should know.
Read more here. This is the same story, just set in a different school, published about a kindergartner in Chicago who sobbed “I’m just no good at kindergarten”.
If you are in Missouri, call your Senator and ask him/her to support Senate Bill 210:
This act prohibits the State Board of Education and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from implementing the Common Core State Standards for public schools developed by the Common Core Standards Initiative or any other statewide education standards without the approval of the General Assembly.
