http://www.wltx.com/story/news/2015/03/11/common-core-standards-dead-in-south-carolina/70177726/

Common Core Standards Dead in South Carolina

Columbia, SC (WLTX) The South Carolina Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday afternoon to replace the Common Core Standards now being used in math and English, killing Common Core in the state. The board adopted new standards, written by teams of South Carolinians, which teachers will start using this fall.

Common Core has been controversial here and across the country.

Robert Kittle

The state Board of Education voted Wed. to replace the controversial Common Core Standards in SC.

Critics say the Common Core Standards were a federal takeover of state schools, even though it was state governors who decided to put the standards together.

The idea for them was that, with each state having its own standards, it was impossible to tell whether South Carolina students were learning the same things and being held to the same standards as those in Georgia or California.

With a set of common standards, students in every state would know they'd be ready for college or jobs.

The "federal takeover" argument popped up when the federal Department of Education used federal grant money to encourage states to adopt Common Core.

Critics also found confusing and difficult math problems from across the country and posted them online as examples of why Common Core was bad. But Nickie Brockman, a retired English teacher who helped write the new English standards for South Carolina, says the Common Core Standards never dictated specific problems, exactly what was being taught, how, or which textbooks were used in class.

"Standards are goals for where we want children to be," she says. "Now how we get there, the teachers, the administrators, the school districts, they make that decision. They make the decision about the curriculum materials that they use. Standards are just the end of the road, not necessarily the route."

There are differences, though, between Common Core and the new standards that will be used starting this fall. For example, under the new standards students will go back to learning cursive in grades 2 and 3. And they will be expected to know their multiplication tables in grade 4.

In English, "There's an opportunity for the classics. That was a huge complaint, but the genre that teachers teach is left up to the teacher," Brockman says.

Even though critics of the Common Core Standards wanted them gone, many of them don't like the new standards either, saying they're too difficult and therefore set children up for failure.

The state Board of Education says the new standards are more rigorous than Common Core.

But Dr. Cindy Doolittle, a math teacher in Spartanburg District 6 who was on the math standards writing committee, says, "We can't say, 'This is the way that I was taught.' Our society, everything is different now."

And Brockman says every time the state has changed standards there have been complaints that the new ones are too hard. "Every time we have new standards, it needs to be a little harder because the world is different," she says.

Here's an example of the changes

1st-grade reading standard

Common Core: requires students to "ask and answer questions about key details in a text."

New SC standards: requires students to "ask and answer who, what, when, where, why and how questions to demonstrate understanding of a text" and to "use key details to make inferences and draw conclusions in texts heard and read."

6th-grade math standard

Common Core: "understand the concept of a ratio and use ratio language to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities."

New SC standards: "interpret the concept of a ratio as the relationship between two quantities, including part-to-part and part-to-whole. Investigate relationships between ratios and rates."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/08/lessons-in-a-trash-can-teaching-kids-how-to-manage-earths-resources/

Lessons in a trash can: Teaching kids how to manage Earth’s resources

Student Keelan Bell holding a Clarke Middle School chicken (Photo by Debbie Mitchell)

How will young people become the leaders that society needs to adapt to environmental change? That’s the question that Wick Pritchard,  a VISTA volunteer at Clarke Middle School in Athens, Georgia, asks and answers in the following post. Clarke is a high-needs, high-achieving traditional public school serving a very diverse population in a district committed to equity and opportunity.

By Wick Pritchard

How will our present middle-school students become the leaders that society needs to adapt to environmental change? At Clarke Middle School in Athens, Georgia,, we are betting on resource management. We believe that schools can cultivate environmental awareness in their students by focusing on managing the resources around them. We have chosen three school settings to pilot this idea: the school vegetable garden, the family and consumer science kitchen, and the cafeteria trash can.

You can learn a lot by looking in the cafeteria garbage can, which I have been doing for the past school year. Your perspective of sustainability will change. You will discover that it is difficult for our students to stop for the tiniest moment to separate the recyclable and compostable items on their lunch tray from items that go to the landfill. And you will see waste: one day, 73 Chiquita bananas, bright yellow, entirely unblemished — and untouched by  students.

As an AmeriCorps VISTA, I fight poverty in the United States. One manner in which I do this is by teaching  young people how to manage the planet’s resources. Before my year of service as an AmeriCorps VISTA, I completed a masters’ degree in environmental planning and design while working on the Tybee Island Sea Level Rise Adaptation Plan. Last month I was shocked when a report surfaced that oceans along the U.S. East Coast rose four inches between 2009 and 2010. This rapid spike in sea level rise was described by climate scientists as a “1-in-850-year event” or in other terms “very extreme” and “unprecedented.” Global climate change contributed to this event.

Events like the spike in sea level rise, coupled with my trashcan observations, underscore the need to educate our young people in how to handle environmental change. Here’s what we are doing at Clarke Middle School to help achieve this:

The garden. Three years ago, Clarke Middle School Principal Tad MacMillan not only greenlighted a school vegetable garden; he also started a plan that would spin sustainability into the school ethos using a school garden as the engine. Collaborating with the University of Georgia Office of Service-Learning and UGArden (the University of Georgia’s student teaching garden), Clarke Middle School planted a garden right in front of the school.

This garden was our first area of attack in our fight to teach our students to manage their resources wisely. Because most of our students live in an urban area, they lack an awareness of gardens let alone natural ecosystems. Due to this fact, we use the school garden as a jumping off point for environmental awareness. Literally.

Four students are jumping over garden rows, the baby plants cowering from death by sneaker. These students and their classmates are in the garden to transplant collard and kale starts they grew in the school greenhouse. Dr. Mitchell, the school agriculture science teacher, places their activity into context. “Many of our students operate on a first grade awareness of a garden (thus the jumping),” she says. “In the past, kids were able to learn about gardens in their family garden,” she adds, “but now most of them have had no contact whatsoever with gardening. The more time they spend in the garden, however, the more they will learn about the makeup of garden.”

She allocates at least 10 minutes of each class period for garden work and garden related activities such as feeding the school chickens. Over the course of this year, I have indeed seen students learn their place in the garden, walking between garden beds not in them, high-stepping over garden beds not stomping them.

Without access, our students do not have the opportunity to form meaningful relationships with the natural world. They have no inner contextual map of their place within it. With no relationship how can we assume that they will attach value to the environment? At Clarke Middle we believe a school vegetable garden is a great starting point for students to plant a relationship with the natural world.

The kitchen. We chose the kitchen as our second area of attack to teach resource management. “Can we cook today?” the students plead. Baking powder, sugar, and salt are added to flour. Butter is cut into the mixture and milk added. Biscuits are rolled, patted, and cut out. A student reflects, “I don’t have to go to the Golden Pantry on Saturday mornings any more. Now I’ll make my own biscuits.”

Whether Hope Zimmerman, the school family and consumer science teacher, is introducing taste buds to arugula from the school garden or scratch biscuits, she is teaching our students to draw a map of the resources that keep all of us fed. This map includes the knowledge that preparing food from scratch can be inexpensive and nutritious as well as tasty. It can also help connect students to a time period other than their own, to a time when grandparents made apple sauce at home.

“Oh, no, we must use the peeler,” Mrs. Zimmerman politely demands. “Something happens when the students start using the peeler,” she says, “and I like it. I stop being the teacher. They stop being the students. They become community members, sharing stories about their grandparents and the food they prepare. They are focused, attentive.”

The apples Mrs. Zimmerman and her students use to make apple sauce have come from the school cafeteria. Since students cannot return uneaten apples on their trays to the kitchen, they have become accustomed to tossing them into the trash. Now our students are learning to divert their uneaten fruit, unopened cartons of milk, and unopened bags of carrots to the family and consumer science classroom where these trash bound items are transformed into ingredients for food labs.

Without practice in managing resources, our students will build few skills to manage any type of resource be that food related, environmental, or financial. Without management skills, how can we expect them to make choices that will have a positive impact on their future social and natural environments? Cooking from scratch in a family consumer science classroom is a perfect environment for learning about resource management.

The trash can. Back to the trash can, our third point of attack to teach resource management. In the trash I find roasted cauliflower, fresh broccoli florets, entire uneaten baked sweet potatoes, cups of guacamole. It doesn’t stop there. I even see unopened ice cream in the trash. But this picture is changing.

From November to December of 2014, our students diverted from the trash: 767 pounds of compost, 299 pounds of recycling, 260 bananas, 249 oranges, 341 apples, 207 unopened cartons of milk, 131 unopened cartons of juice, and much more. And we are not stopping. At last count we were nearing 2,000 pounds in compost collected.

At Clarke Middle School we are connecting our garden to our kitchen to our trashcans to our classrooms to our environment to our society. We are starting to manage our resources more wisely and gaining ground in the fight against environmental degradation. We are building a relationship between our students and the ecosystems that support society so that in the future our students will be able to manage not just a concept in a book but a living system they understand, perhaps even love.

As one of our sixth-graders told me while working in the compost pile, “We don’t need another Dust Bowl.”

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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/06/schools-quiz-twelve-year-olds-about-gay-oral-and-anal-sex/

SCHOOLS QUIZ TWELVE-YEAR-OLDS ABOUT GAY, ORAL, AND ANAL SEX

A public hearing is taking place Wednesday morning in the Massachusetts State House to look into a controversial sex survey given to middle school and high school students.

Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and called the “Youth Risk Behavior Survey,” the survey asks students as young as 12 a series of very personal and highly ideological questions.

The survey asks students if they are homosexual and if they are transgender. It also asks if they have had oral or anal sex and if they have performed such acts with up to six people.

Whether or not they have carried a gun, smoked cigarettes, consumed alcohol and how much also appear on the questionnaire, as well as whether they have taken drugs, such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. It asks how often their guardian uses a seat belt, if the youngster has a sexually transmitted disease, and where they sleep.

The group MassResistance says the survey is “psychologically distorting” and will lead the child to think he is “abnormal if he is not doing it all.” The group stated that “having children reveal personal issues about themselves and their family can have emotional consequences.” They also complain that “the survey results are used by radical groups from Planned Parenthood to LGBT groups to persuade politicians to give more taxpayer money [to] these groups.”

Though students fill out the survey anonymously, MassResistance warns that “they are administered by the teacher in the classroom and there is often pressure for all kids to participate.”

The test is given nationally and not without controversy. The Chicago Tribune reported two years ago that a Chicago teacher was reprimanded for telling students they had a “constitutional right” not to fill out the survey.

Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse.

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JOHN OLIVER EXPOSE ON STANDARDIZED TESTING

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k#

https://www.facebook.com/don.demaria/posts/10155589196515637

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/04/27/does-common-core-ask-too-much-of-kindergarten-readers/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150502

Does Common Core Ask Too Much of Kindergarten Readers?

Sandwiched between preschool and first grade, kindergarteners often start school at very different stages of development depending on their exposure to preschool, home environments and biology. For states adopting Common Core, the standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should be able to do by the end of the grade.* Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and word recognition as well as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.

“There’s a wide age range for learning to read,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige on KQED’s Forum program. Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita of education at Lesley University and co-author of the study “Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose,” which criticizes the Common Core standards for kindergarten.

“If we make students feel pressure so that they shut down, then that light bulb is not going to be as likely to come on and they aren’t going to develop the confidence that they need to become successful readers later.”

“Most five-year-old children are not really ready to learn to read,” Carlsson-Paige said. “There are many experiences in the classroom that are beneficial for building the foundation for learning to read that will come later.” She favors a play-based classroom that gives students hands-on experiences, helping them to develop the symbolic thinking necessary to later recognize letters and numbers.

“Research shows on a national scale there’s less play and experiential based curriculum happening over all, and much more didactic instruction, even though we have research that shows long term there are greater gains from play-based programs than academically focused ones,” Carlsson-Paige said.

While Common Core aligned assessments don’t kick in until third grade, many teachers feel pressure to make sure kids are meeting the specified standards before they move on to first grade. That pressure can mean more focus on academics, at the sacrifice of play time.

Kindergarten teachers try to interpret the standards and translate them into developmentally appropriate activities. But they struggle when kids still don’t meet Developmental Reading Assessment benchmarks. “Teachers start to question themselves and waver even though they believe in doing what’s developmentally appropriate,” said Colleen Rau, a reading intervention specialist at Aspire Berkley Maynard Academy. “So I think we really need to think about taking the pressure away and looking at student growth.”

Rau says under Common Core she’s seen positive shifts at her school towards more thematic units and more hands-on learning, but she agrees with Carlsson-Paige that pushing young children into skills they aren’t developmentally ready for can have poor results. Students can develop coping mechanisms that don’t serve them well later when they are confronted with more advanced texts.

“The lightbulb goes on for students at different times,” Rau said, “But if we make students feel pressure so that they shut down, then that light bulb is not going to be as likely to come on and they aren’t going to develop the confidence that they need to become successful readers later.”

There are plenty of children who do learn to read in kindergarten or even before, so for many parents the argument that young children aren’t developmentally ready to read rings false. But not all learners are the same, and what’s true for one child won’t necessarily be true for the child sitting next to her. Young children learn differently from older children, adolescents and adults, Carlsson-Paige said. Early childhood educators have documented the progression of increasingly complex symbolic thinking that leads to understanding letters make sounds and sounds make words.

“If you present children with information that’s too disparate from what they know then they give up or feel confused, or cry, or get turned off,” Carlsson-Paige said. “Part of the art of teaching is to understand where a child is in developing concepts and then be able to present information in ways that are new and interesting, but will cause a little bit of struggle on the part of the child to try to understand them.”

AN IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEM

Advocates for the kindergarten Common Core standards agree that kindergarteners should not be sitting still all day doing reading drills. But they are clear that the standards in no way require that sort of teaching and were written with help and input from early childhood educators around the country. They are meant to offer challenging opportunities to advanced learners while supporting learners who may be coming into kindergarten with very little literacy exposure.

“What we set out in the Common Core are those skills and concepts that will help students learn to read in first and second grade,” said Susan Pimentel, lead writer of the English Language Arts Common Core standards. She says early childhood educators were adamant that the language “with prompting and support” be used throughout the kindergarten standards in recognition that young learners will be new to school and won’t be left to answer dozens of questions on their own.

“So much of the concern is about the implementation,” Pimentel said. And while she agrees that educators need to be vigilant about pointing out poor implementation and working to fix it, the problem is not new. Education standards have always been implemented in a variety of ways. “What we’re talking about is teachers who have maybe not been trained and some attention on that would be important,” she said.

Other advocates of the Common Core standards see them as an important step towards education equity. “The strongest argument in favor of reading by the end of kindergarten and Common Core’s vision for early literacy is simply to ensure that children—especially the disadvantaged among them—don’t get sucked into the vortex of academic distress associated with early reading failure,” writes Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Many children start kindergarten able to identify short words or aware of the difference between lowercase and uppercase letters, two of the kindergarten standards. Pondiscio and others believe it is completely appropriate to begin introducing these ideas in kindergarten, albeit in fun play-based ways.

“If teachers are turning their kindergarten classrooms into joyless grinding mills and claiming they are forced to do so under Common Core (as the report’s authors allege), something has clearly gone wrong,” Pondiscio writes. “Common Core demands no such thing, and research as well as good sense supports exposing children to early reading concepts through games and songs.”

Another literacy researcher says the critique that the standards are developmentally inappropriate may be a misinterpretation of what the standards require. For example, one standard says children should be able to read emergent texts with purpose and understanding.

“The emergent-reader text is first modeled by the teacher for the students, then joyfully read over and over with the students until eventually the easy book is independently read by the students with great joy and confidence,” writes J. Richard Gentry, author of “Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write — From Baby to Age 7,” and a former professor and elementary school teacher. Gentry says this process emulates “lap reading” which some children get with their parents at home and which helps students gain confidence in their reading.

All of these educators agree that it can be difficult to teach the kindergarten standards in developmentally appropriate ways when teachers are worried about how kids will do on standardized tests. While Carlsson-Paige and others believe the standards are inappropriate and should be thrown out, Pondiscio, Gentry and Pimentel are among those who believe the standards are important to make sure reading gaps don’t start young. They favor the idea that implementation is the real problem and that more energy should be put into helping early childhood educators interpret the standards and integrate them into class in fun, approachable and developmentally appropriate ways.

*An earlier version of this story suggested that Common Core was the first time academic standards were set for kindergarteners. We regret any confusion.

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http://www.upworthy.com/a-new-kind-of-kindergarten-design-encourages-kids-to-be-their-silly-selves?c=ufb2

A new kind of kindergarten design encourages kids to be their silly selves.

Thinking about what young students really need caused a major do-over for what a kindergarten could look like. 

What does a school do with 5- and 6-year-old kids?

The old answer was coax them into little chairs — at least until “creative time" — keep 'em relatively organized, and keep a lid on their natural enthusiasm. Basically a constant riot-control situation. And a first taste of standardized education.

But kindergarteners don't need to be forced to learn — really, they can't stop learning.

So educators in Tokyo had a different idea.

Architect Takaharu Tezuka explains in a TEDx Kyoto talk how one school created a kindergarten that doesn't fight against kids' natural impulses. It counts on them.

The roof is a giant ring of a playground. Why? Kids love to run in circles.

The single, continuous classroom has no walls.

 

Teachers asked kids to use crates to create their own areas, but somehow it didn't quite manage to get done.

 

The design has child psychology in mind.

Kids can get anxious when they feel walled-in or constrained. That doesn't happen here. And since little dynamos thrive in environments with lots of noise, they've come to the right place — there are no acoustic barriers.

“The principal says, 'If the boy in the corner don't want to stay in the room, we let him go. And he'll come back eventually because the circle comes back.'" — Takaharu Tezuka

 

This shows the rambling travels of one little boy over the course of just 20 minutes. Over the course of his entire morning, he covered 6,000 meters, or 3.7 miles! 

Things are deliberately a little risky.

 

Parents have a hard time figuring out how much protection is too much protection. But children, Tezuka says, “need to get some injury. That makes them learn how to live in this world." And so, he says, there needs to be a “small dosage of danger."

Should all kindergartens be like this?

Dunno. But there's a lot of discussion these days about standards-based teaching and why our kids don't seem to be learning as much as they need to.

This refreshingly creative and successful take on kindergarten is at least a reminder that there's still a lot to learn about educating children, especially at this miraculous young age.

Here's how the kids spend their day.

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John Kasich's Common Core lie

                         

If John Kasich wants to make the case for Common Core, he should focus on any academic gains made in his state instead of lying about the way Common Core was written. (AP Photo) 

Potential presidential candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich defended his support for Common Core on Friday, claiming the standards were developed by governors and adopted locally. Critics argue that Common Core was written behind closed doors with little evidence governors were closely involved, then forced on schools by the federal government.

"Governors themselves wrote the standards," Kasich said at the National Review Institute's Ideas Summit. "We've implemented the standards. I didn't implement them, Obama didn't implement them, nobody did. The local school boards have adopted the standards, and now, the curriculum is being written by local school boards. I don't know what's wrong with that."

Kasich paints a picture of Common Core that would be nice, if only it were rooted in reality.

"Literally, it's not at all true," Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, told the Washington Examiner. "To my knowledge, there were no actual governors involved in writing the actual standards."

In reality, some governors did ask the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to draft some potential standards. That's where the involvement of governors stopped. Governors didn't even agree at that point to adopt the eventual standards — rightly so, because they didn't know what they would look like.

If governors didn't write the standards, as Kasich suggests, then who did? That's a difficult question to answer. "It was all done behind closed doors," McCluskey said. "The actual drafting was closed to the public. Again, there's no evidence that there were any governors actually sitting there, doing it."

The idea of local school boards adopting Common Core also stretches the truth. States adopt Common Core standards, and local school districts risk losing funding if they don't score well on Common Core-aligned tests. Technically, local school districts don't have to comply with Common Core. But if they don't, it is almost guaranteed they will lose money.

Kasich also falsely implied that President Obama had nothing to do with Common Core adoption. President Obama essentially forced states to agree to adopt Common Core before they could get a waiver from the standards created by No Child Left Behind, which more than a decade after its adoption had become obsolete and increasingly harsh and impossible to meet. Obama also attached federal dollars to Common Core adoption using Race to the Top funding.

There are legitimate arguments in favor of Common Core, but the notion that governors came together to write the standards in a transparent fashion is false. If Kasich wants to make the case for Common Core, he should focus on any academic gains made in his state instead of lying about the way Common Core was written.

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