My kids used to love school ...Now it's half a year consumed in drudgery of test prep.
Last week, Louis CK tweeted about the low quality Common Core worksheets assigned to his daughters for test prep. A parent on Facebook identified them as iReady workbooks, produced by Curriculum Associates, widely used in NYC public schools.
Curriculum Associates is an educational company in which none of their top executives have had any training as educators – a phenomenon all too common in the testing industrial complex.
The CEO, Rob Waldron, is a graduate of Harvard Business School and was just selected as a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow – along with many other prominent edu-entrepreneurs and corporate reformers.
Here are the comments of Eugenia Zakharov, a Bronx parent, whose 5th graders were assigned workbooks from the same company. She wanted readers to know that her twins love school outside of the test prep season, which sadly consumes significant part of the school year.
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Our school bought the iReady math books and an online access.
Each topic/lesson is divided into sections (introduction, modeled instruction, guided instruction, practice etc.).
Explanations, or so-called modeled or guided instructions, are so convoluted that both my husband and I, one with an advanced math degree and the other a designated actuary, had to read them over several times.
The sad part is that you can't just tell your child to solve the problem using any method as long as the thinking is clearly shown, is NYC Public School Parents: My kids used to love school ...Now it's half a year consumed in drudgery of test prep.: