The Triumvirate of Upheaval in Our Classrooms
By Michelle Strater Gunderson.
I recently had an epiphany while listening to Melissa Katz, a wonderful student activist from New Jersey, talk about corporate education reform on the radio. When speaking about the swift and drastic changes in education based on implementation of Common Core and aligned tests she used the word upheaval.
Upheaval. Think about it. Is this what you are experiencing in your school setting?
The roll out of Common Core standards, aligned tests such as PARCC and Smarter Balance, and new punitive evaluations has produced what I call the Triumvirate of Upheaval. The combination of all three has disrupted almost every school in our country.
The changes have been full speed ahead, and this should concern us all. This is my 28th year of teaching, and in my experience change in education happens slowly. It should. The ways in which we approach student learning should never be adjusted on a whim and teachers should hold on to what they know works with children. Yet, with the onset of Common Core standards we are being asked to practically throw everything we know aside and form completely new curricula. Concurrently, the textbook publishers saw an opportunity for profit and a boatload of poorly developed and un-piloted materials were rushed into the education marketplace.
My school is a case in point. It is a high-performing arts magnet school in Chicago. By anyone’s measure – school climate, test scores, educational level of faculty, parent/teacher relationships, and student satisfaction – we are an exceptional school community. Yet, this year my first grade team was asked to completely toss aside our teacher created curriculum and teach with “fidelity” the newly purchased Common Core aligned Math curriculum.
Now, to be honest, all of the lessons in the new Common Core Math curriculum are not universally horrid, but what I was teaching in Math before was amazingly good. There was no reason to completely overhaul my entire Math programming. And this is happening in classroom upon classroom around the country. Teachers are being asked to scrap what they know about teaching and children and start from scratch with really bad The Triumvirate of Upheaval in Our Classrooms - Living in Dialogue:
