Question

QUESTION.

1. Define Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (include the definitions of curriculum versus standards).

2. State the concern that you chose (written below) and then decide if the concern is valid or not. Give your rationales and references for your stance.

The Common Core can't speed up child development

Recent evaluations of the state's preschoolers have determined that only 47 percent are ready for kindergarten, compared to 83 percent judged ready last year. This drastic drop isn't the result of an abrupt, catastrophic decline in the cognitive abilities of our children. Instead, it results from a re-definition of kindergarten readiness, which now means being able to succeed academically at a level far beyond anything expected in the past. For example, a child entering kindergarten is now expected to know the difference between informative/explanatory writing and opinion writing. The concern is that preschoolers without that knowledge will not succeed at meeting the new higher-level Common-Core standards. However, I think a more pressing concern is: Why do we have educational standards that are not aligned with even the most basic facts of human development? Clearly these test results show that the problem is with the standards, not the children.

Educational attainment is part of human development, and fundamentally this is a biological process that cannot be sped up. We cannot wish away our biological limitations because we find them inconvenient. Children will learn crawling, walking, listening, talking and toilet training, all in succession at developmentally appropriate ages. Once in school, for skills that require performing a physical task, that are in what Bloom's Taxonomy classifies as the "psychomotor domain," it is understood that children will only learn when they are physically and developmentally ready. No one expects four-year olds to type fluently on a computer keyboard, play difficult Chopin Etudes on the piano, prepare elaborate meals in the kitchen or drive a car.

However, for skills in what Bloom calls the "cognitive domain," the school curriculum has become blind not only to the progression of normal child development but also to natural variations in the rate that children develop. It is now expected that pre-school children should be able to grasp sophisticated concepts in mathematics and written language. In addition, it is expected that all children should be at the same cognitive level when they enter kindergarten, and proceed through the entire grade-school curriculum in lock step with one another. People, who think that all children can learn in unison, have obviously never worked with special needs children or the gifted and talented.

Demanding that children be taught to developmentally inappropriate standards for language and math comprehension is not a harmless experiment. This exercise in futility wastes the time of teachers and students and unethically sets all of them up to fail. It exacerbates the very problems that the new curriculum is supposed to fix. It leaves boys, whose verbal development for biological reasons already lags behind girls, even further behind and will accelerate the trend of fewer boys going on to college. Even today boys only make up about 40 percent of college students nationwide and their numbers will continue to dwindle.

The new curriculum standards and testing regimens are motivated by a well-intentioned desire to close achievements gaps that exist between the various socio-economic and ethnic and racial groups. There is a belief that by demanding that all children meet a set of rigid and arbitrarily high academic standards, achievement gaps can be closed and economic opportunities increased for all. The apparent reasoning is that if all children receive the same education and are held to the same academic standards, then all children will have equal opportunity to succeed as adults.

However, addressing pervasive economic inequality by pretending that in an ideal world all children should be alike isn't a solution. The inequalities that plague our society are inherent in the structure of our political and economic systems. A new curriculum will not change the underlying pathologies corrupting these structures. It is a mistake to conflate unjust economic inequalities that arise from our broken political and economic systems with normal differences in abilities and dispositions among people that arise from being human. If all barriers to inequality were broken down, people would still be different from one another and normal human development would still unfold.

Education should be about helping each child, regardless of background or academic readiness, achieve his or her full, unique potential as a human being. It should instill not just academics but also physical, emotional and social skills, which are also essential for making meaningful contributions to the well being of our families, communities and the economy. Differences between people that arise across all skill sets and educational domains are an inherent and valued part of the human experience that should be celebrated in school, not erased.

Answer 1

Q-1:

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is an educatinal initiative For K–12 students in the US. It defines what they should know in mathematics and English language arts at the end of K-12. This is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

This initiative seeks to establish consistent educational standards across the states and it ensures that students coming out from high school are prepared for college studies, so that they become a backbone of US workforce

The stated goal of the English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects standards is to ensure that students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school.

There are five key components to the standards for English and Language Arts:

• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking and Listening
• Language
• Media and Technology

The essential components and breakdown of each of these key points within the standards are as follows:

Reading

1. As students advance through each grade, there is an increased level of complexity to what students are expected to read and there is also a progressive development of reading comprehension so that students can gain more from what they read.
2. Teachers, school districts, and states are expected to decide on the appropriate curriculum, but sample texts are included to help teachers, students, and parents prepare for the year ahead. Molly Walsh of Burlington Free Press notes an appendix (of state standards for reading material) that lists "exemplar texts" from works by noted authors such as Ovid, Voltaire, William Shakespeare, Ivan Turgenev, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the more contemporary including Amy Tan, Atul Gawande and Julia Alvarez.

• There is some critical content for all students – classic myths and stories from around the world, foundational U.S. documents, seminal works of American literature, and the writings of Shakespeare – but the rest is left up to the states and the districts.

Writing

• The driving force of the writing standards is logical arguments based on claims, solid reasoning, and relevant evidence. The writing also includes opinion writing even within the K–5 standards.
• Short, focused research projects, similar to the kind of projects students will face in their careers, as well as long-term, in-depth research is another piece of the writing standards. This is because written analysis and the presentation of significant findings are critical to career and college readiness.
• The standards also include annotated samples of student writing to help determine performance levels in writing arguments, explanatory texts, and narratives across the grades.

Speaking and listening

1. Although reading and writing are the expected components of an English language arts curriculum, standards are written so that students gain, evaluate, and present complex information, ideas, and evidence specifically through listening and speaking.
2. There is also an emphasis on academic discussion in one-on-one, small-group, and whole-class settings, which can take place as formal presentations as well as informal discussions during student collaboration.

Language

1. Vocabulary instruction in the standards takes place through a mix of conversations, direct instruction, and reading so that students can determine word meanings and can expand their use of words and phrases.
2. The standards expect students to use formal English in their writing and speaking, but also recognize that colleges and 21st-century careers will require students to make wise, skilled decisions about how to express themselves through language in a variety of contexts.
3. Vocabulary and conventions are their own strand because these skills extend across reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Media and technology

1. Since media and technology are intertwined with every student's life and in school in the 21st century, skills related to media use, which includes the analysis and production of various forms of media, are also included in these standards.
2. The standards include instruction in keyboarding, but do not mandate the teaching of cursive handwriting. As of late 2013, seven states had elected to maintain teaching of cursive: California, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Utah.

Mathematics standards

The stated goal of the mathematics standards is to achieve greater focus and coherence in the curriculum. This is largely in response to the criticism that American mathematics curricula are "a mile wide and an inch deep".

The mathematics standards include Standards for Mathematical Practice and Standards for Mathematical Content.

Mathematical practice

The Standards mandate that eight principles of mathematical practice be taught:

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
• Model with mathematics.
• Use appropriate tools strategically.
• Attend to precision.
• Look for and make use of structure.
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.