Schools

NY Principal Continues Critique of Common Core

Carol Burriss has been dissecting the Common Core standards and tests for months, often on a Washington Post blog.

As parents across New York are storming into forums to complain about the "chaotic" Common Core standards and assessments, Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York has another killer commentary on the topic on The Answer Sheet, a Washington Post education blog.

This one, from Oct. 31, identifies some of the "ridiculous" questions being asked of New York's first-graders.

Here's one she likes:  “Which is a related subtraction sentence?”

And she digs into the standards to show one reason why questions like that are being asked of 6-year-olds.

"I am amused by all of the politicians and bureaucrats who love the Common Core and see it as the salvation of our nation," she wrote. "I suspect they are supporting standards that they have never studied. I wonder if they have ever read the details that ask first-graders to 'compose and decompose plane and solid figures' and 'to determine if equations of addition or subtraction are true or false.'" 

Education reporter Valerie Strauss, who writes The Answer Sheet, titled the piece "A ridiculous Common Core test for first graders." But Burriss's commentary goes deeper, examining the origin of the first-grade standards ("back-mapped" from what state education officials want high school graduates to know) and comparing them to standards in countries with higher-achieving students than our own (based on actual early-childhood expert knowledge).

Here's Burriss's kicker: "New York, sadly, has been a canary in the Common Core coal mine, and if we do not heed the danger a generation of students will be lost."

For more on the state assessments and Common Core Learning Standards in Hudson Valley districts, see these reports on Patch. 


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