Louisiana Educator: Report on Common Core Forum

Louisiana Educator: Report on Common Core Forum:

Report on Common Core Forum

I attended the anti Common Core forum in Baton Rouge last night. The forum sponsored by Parents Concerned About Common Core drew a packed audience at the Crossfire Auditorium. There were parents from the metropolitan Baton Rouge area with others coming from as far as Lafayette, Mandeville and New Orleans. This is definitely a purely parent led movement. The supporters of CCSS cannot blame the teacher unions for this one.

Several of the forum presenters had impressive credentials and did a good job of pointing out glaring flaws in the Common Core State Standards. The presenters explained that the standards were developed by a self appointed group of academic elitists and testing company representatives and did not include any significant involvement of regular classroom teachers.

My opinion as an educator, is that the lack of field testing of the standards, the inappropriateness of many of the standards for the lower grades, and the poor and obscure wording of many of the standards will cause major problems in Louisiana if we continue with the present plan for implementation. For example, in New York, the standards so far, have resulted in a huge failure rate, a widening of the achievement gap between affluent and non-affluent students, and a demoralization of the teaching profession. This is the opposite of what it has been advertized to do.

One of the presenters pointed out how the wording of many of the standards ended