Core standards update

The following is from Ed Miller of the Alliance for Childhood:

Rachel Demma, Senior Policy Analyst at the National Governors Association, says that the final version of the K-12 Common Core Standards will be released on Wednesday, May 26. We have no idea at this point what kinds of changes are being made to the draft version of the standards that was issued on March 10, and we don't know how many people ended up urging the NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers to withdraw the K-3 standards and start over, because those two organizations are not telling.

 

I attended the "Listening and Learning About Early Learning" meeting in Washington on April 23 that was organized by Jacqueline Jones and Joan Lombardi (the first of a series of four such meetings held in different cities) and made a short statement about the Core Standards on behalf of the Alliance for Childhood.  The statement is attached.

 

Among the featured speakers that day was Gail Connelly, Executive Director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and her remarks were noteworthy for their blunt critique of the current overemphasis on standardized tests and their spirited defense of play. Here are some excerpts:

...It is insufficient to present a narrow curriculum that is easily measured by standardized test scores. Applying a single measure like test scores to a complicated enterprise like educating children paints a one-dimensional picture--a flat, shallow, and inaccurate snapshot when what we need is a three-dimensional portrait of the whole child. We can and should do a better job of capturing how students learn and grow: socially, emotionally, and academically....

 

We know that learning begins well before kindergarten and play is an integral part of the development. It is central to how children solve problems, develop relationships, learn the give and take of healthy interactions, develop language, and collaborate. NAESP recently teamed up with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Playworks, and the Gallup organization to study recess. Here's the opening statement from that report, titled The State of Play: "Class size. Standardized testing. The three Rs. When most people talk about how to improve education, they tend to focus only on what happens in the classroom. But the most unexpected opportunity to boost learning lies outside the classroom: on the playground at recess."

 

Exactly! Active children are more confident about their ability to learn and more creative in their problem-solving. Play helps children establish and nurture relationships, resolve conflict, think independently, express themselves creatively, and make good decisions--among many other benefits that bolster learning.

 

And yet play is a rapidly vanishing part of the school day.... Ironically, the evidence says that eliminating recess to strengthen learning is likely to yield exactly the opposite outcome. Unfortunately, the situation is not much better in kindergarten, which once was the all-important space that integrated play and learning.

 

The vision of prekindergarten through grade three alignment must begin with the recognition that early learning does not stop at the kindergarten school door--and play is the perfect example of how we must bring back developmentally appropriate learning experiences and carry them well into the third grade....

Ed