Undermining higher order thinking in the pursuit of the mundane…
My district has made a strong commitment to starting to switch over to Common Core standards before the 2014 deadline. How committed? Folks have been sent to trainings, in the face of a $28M budget shortfall. Hearing what was being brought back, second-hand, was not giving me a good idea of what the district has in mind, so I made the leap of volunteering to go as a representative from my site, to the district’s Common Core ELA leadership cadre. I went with a co-worker who has been attending these meetings for the last two years. Apparently things are becoming clearer, but that’s not necessarily better.
First, I and others have always said it would be the assessments that would be where we’d find out what they really want us to teach. The Smarter Balanced assessment consortium has put out some sample items from