College Level Common Core Setting Up Students For Failure
Setting students up for failure?
Setting students up for failure?
Sample questions for the 8th-grade writing assessment aren’t available on the PARCC website, but a look at the sample 10th-grade questions is sobering. The text that serves as the basis for the questions is a lengthy and high-flown translation of the Daedalus and Icarus story, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that would probably challenge many college students. It may well be, as two professors argue in Sunday’s New York Times, that some of the standards are pitched at so sophisticated a level that they’re setting many students up for failure.
A recent series in Education Week, focusing on an 8th-grade class at Stuart-Hobson Middle School on Capitol Hill, is a vivid illustration of the difficulties facing DCPS teachers trying to adapt to the Common Core. “Sometimes,” says an assistant principal at Stuart-Hobson reflecting on the challenges of guiding teachers through the new standards, “I feel like the blind leading the blind.” (Stuart-Hobson is not one of the DCPS schools participating in the PARCC tryout.)
It’s clear that students and teachers are trying hard, but bringing a largely disadvantaged student population up to the ambitious standards set by the Common Core is a gargantuan task. Test scores will probably drop significantly once PARCC replaces local tests, as they didlast year in Kentucky, the first state to completely align its tests to the Common Core.
We should be prepared for that, and prepared as well for the missteps that will undoubtedly occur in DC and other districts as they feel their way through a system that demands so much of both teachers and students.
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