Blue Ribbons on LI

[rr]

3 New Blue Ribbon Schools on LI - I'm sure a few have read this article but I found it interesting that very little publicity about the East Moriches school, which happens to have a very public advocate for Common Core as it's principal.

For some odd reason I feel like if a school with a very public advocate against the CC standards had won it would be front page Newsday news and there would be a thread on this forum about it already.

Anyway, article below.
www.newsday.com/long-island/education/three-li-elementary-schools-awarded-national-blue-ribbon-status-1.9450285

[Chris_Wendt]

Interesting read, the article you provided. And, yes, the media are sensitive to the controversiality of the Common Core, and made special note of the (favorable) leanings of one principal in this report, although the Common Core had little or nothing to do with the Blue Ribbon Award process, which starts at the State level (NYSED) and ends at the Federal level (USED). I think, possibly to your chagrin, this otherwise nice report leads inescapably to at least a mention about the Common Core...

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Some notes about the Common Core:

• Many educators who are seemingly "against" the Common Core are actually against its roll-out in NYS across six grade levels all at once, instead of its having been introduced over several years, beginning in the first grade and moving forward with that class in the vanguard, each successive class joining the parade.
• Some very good teachers, some of the best teachers those most suited for mainstreaming special ed students in classrooms with general ed students are opting-out of those special assignments because of the way their performance evaluations are structured, even with Common Core having been temporarily removed from teacher evaluations.
• Numbers people need to ponder the macro results of the Common Core Assessments across this state; this is different than looking at your own child's individual score of 3 or 4 and smugly stating the Common Core is a good thing. The numbers show that the Common Core Assessments are not only not working, they are actually going in THE WRONG DIRECTION as far as ELA is concerned. If the Common Core Concept was valid, and if the Common Core Curriculum had real value in the classrooms, then ELA and Math scores should advance together, thus demonstrating the efficacy of the Common Core as a means of improving the performance of our public schools in terms of their students Assessment scores. While you could have legitimately pointed to the disastrous 2013 results and claimed part of the problem was trying to compare CC Assessment scores with prior non-CC Assessment scores (and the rest of the fallout having been the result of poor implementation), you cannot point to the crappy 2014 EAL Assessment scores and get away with saying they were unfairly being compared with non-CC Assessments (because the comparison is with the 2013 CC Assessments), or that any part of the problem traces back to poor implementation, because the implementation is over, and what you see in the 2014 ELA scores is the abject failure of (Choose one or more) ...the effectiveness of teaching the CCC...a crappy CC ELA Curriculum to begin with...a crappy CC ELA Assessment...or some of each. No matter how you look at the 2014 ELA scores, there is a lot of crap and not much, if any, good.
• One the biggest most touted prospective benefits expected to flow from the Common Core is its perceived ability "to inform instruction", meaning, to make subsequent years curricula and focus more and more effective, proving the Common Core Concept to be more and more efficacious. No such luck.

If your kid scores 4's on ELA & Math Assessments in two successive years, then I think your kid should move up an additional grade level. Is that going to happen? YOU should insist on it! Otherwise, your kid will languish in a classroom where she or he is one to two grade levels ahead of SIXTY PERCENT of her or his classmates, in effect, being held back by the old system of age-specific grade level assignments. I mean, that's what the numbers are saying to me.

How about you?

Chris Wendt