Suggestions for @politico on education reporting #commoncore
Talk to teachers. For this piece on the common core, I don’t think you did. A principal, sure.
Speaking of which, here’s an interesting tidbit from one of the principals:
Jayne Ellspermann, the principal at West Port High School in Ocala, Fla., said teachers in her school are already seeing an improvement in the writing and analysis abilities of students who have been learning under the standards for about five years. Her own grandson benefited as a first grader, she said, when he wrote a Thanksgiving report about why he wouldn’t want to sail on the Mayflower. He built his argument on stories the class read that described rotten food and abysmal sanitary facilities. Before Common Core, she said, he likely would have just memorized the date the ship sailed and made a hat.
This might be too “in the weeds,” but this anecdote is not about the standards. It’s reflective of an improvement in the teaching of social studies, a subject that is marginalized by standardized testing. How we teach the Pilgrims has been the subject of a longstanding debate for years. I remember talking about how we teach historical myths in social studies methods courses as a graduate instructor in 2005. Lies my Teacher Told Me was first published in 1996.
Common core proponents did a great job selling the standards. In the above case, the principal confuses Suggestions for @politico on education reporting #commoncore | @ THE CHALKFACE: