Common Core: 101 and What It Has To Do With Hamilton-Wenham

Breaking News! Common Core (State) Standards are coming to Hamilton Wenham Regional School District and will radically change the way our children are educated for years to come! Well, not really “Breaking News” as the implementation of Common Core has been well underway for about three years following acceptance of Race to the Top (RTTT) federal funds in 2010 by Gov. Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

In exchange for badly needed funding for our schools, as well as a highly sought-after waiver from the unpopular No Child Left Behind mandates, Massachusetts was one of the first states to get in line to “earn” RTTT funding by agreeing to adopt Common Core standards and PARCC testing, before the standards were written, validated and pilot tested, in exchange for dropping the extremely successful Massachusetts Education Reform state standards and MCAS student evaluations that were developed in a long term, open and public process. The claims by the creators that Common Core standards are state lead, internationally benchmarked, and will produce “college and career ready” students have been widely critiqued and considered by many to be false. A large body of peer reviewed research has been done by Boston based Pioneer Institute and many other education reform think tanks across the country supporting these findings. Many educators are deeply troubled by developmentally inappropriate standards for the youngest students, substantial decreases in use and exposure to literature and poetry, math standards that top out at Algebra 2 for high school students, many of whom are preparing for math, science and engineering coursework in college, and myriad other deficiencies.

So what does all this have to do with our small district, staffed and guided by caring, dedicated professionals, many of whom are neighbors, fellow parents and/or HW alumni? While not perfect, our schools are top-performers, known for not “teaching to the test”, high levels of parent involvement, and independent and innovative instruction. The trouble with the Common Core initiative and associated student and teacher evaluations is that the goal, as stated by supporters, is to align the curriculum, texts, more frequent and lengthy student testing, sharply increased teacher evaluations, extensive student and family data collection, and SAT and ACT testing to the common standards. These standards are anything but local, anything but proven, funded and developed by educational bureaucrats far removed from Hamilton Wenham schools and there is no chance to avoid the decline of the education offered here.

If the parents, teachers, administrators and school committee fail to understand common core and speak out against its adoption, I believe we will have failed our children and our teachers.

Learn more at http://pioneerinstitute.org/common-core/. www.CommonCoreForum.com , www.hwStopCommonCore.org, or many other online sources of information about Common Core.