​----------- Posted on behalf of Henry Dircks ----------

We are veteran high school teachers from Long Island with 35 years of combined teaching experience. We share an entirely different view of the Common Core Standards than Ms. Nasser, and are writing to voice our concerns.
​Over the past year, New York teachers have been introduced to the Common Core Standards, which were adopted as part of the competition for “Race to the Top” funding from the Federal Government. The State Education Department claims that these standards will help to accomplish many goals: boost academic literacy and increase college and career preparedness among students; shift the focus of curricula away from their “mile-wide and an inch deep” formats; and help American students to compete against their global counterparts. While these goals are desirable in the eyes of any educator, we believe that the untested Common Core Standards fail to recognize shortcomings in addressing the true needs of students across New York State.
​Adoption of the Common Core Standards further entrenches the recent trend of assessing students by standardized criteria. This trend has caused schools to adopt policies which “teach to the test”, at the expense of broader educational goals. One needs only to recognize the devaluing of social studies and science curricula on the elementary level as a result of ELA testing. On the secondary level, will the emphasis on Language Arts and Mathematics promoted by the Common Core similarly devalue the content knowledge in other curricula?
​Teachers from diverse subjects have voiced concerns about the Common Core Standards. In mathematics, teachers and students will face a fourth curricular revision in fifteen years. How can we expect our students to achieve results if the expectations are changed so often? Language arts teachers, many with backgrounds in literature and grammar, wonder what form of training they will receive to teach  reading, a skill unto itself. A shift in the social studies toward teaching history more exclusively with primary source documents may improve reading skills and build vocabulary, but will come at the expense of content knowledge (as the Standards specify, “how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10”, not what role faction plays in democracy). Many teachers question attempting to teach material in the name of college and career preparedness to 14 through 17 year olds who developmentally may not be able to understand and process such material. One final question: to what extent will the need to implement and evaluate whether our lessons abide by the standards detract from our efforts to creatively engage our students and make the content we teach relevant to them?
​Like many schools across New York State, ours regularly succeeds in meeting and surpassing the expectations set out for us by the community we serve and by the State Education Department. Our school boasts a graduation rate of 98% with Regents diplomas, 76% of students receiving Advanced Regents Diplomas, and 96% of our students go on to attend a two or four-year college. Are these achievements no longer valid? We do not understand why the State Education Department would want to “fix what ain’t broke.”
Another concern of ours is the timing of the State Education Department’s implementation of the Common Core Standards. During this time of economic hardship, school districts have little extra funding to devote to developing new curricula, providing training to teachers to meet the new requirements, and purchasing textbooks and materials to support instruction.
​Finally, during our careers as teachers, New York State has always taken a leadership role in providing diverse and quality educational opportunities to its students. As well, New York has a long tradition of assessing student achievement   and the role of schools in facilitating that success. Reform measures such as Regents exam requirements, grade-level testing, test revision to include higher-order skills (i.e. DBQ’s), and secure testing and reporting procedures all attest to that fact. We believe that the State Education Department is undermining the progress it has made in the past 15 years by adopting standards formulated for states that have yet to measure up to ours.
 
 
Henry Dircks​
Social Studies Dept.
Rob Walsh
Mathematics Dept.
W.C. Mepham H.S.​
Bellmore, NY

I am worried that this new common core is going to leave my child who is in general ed with resource room, reading and math help with out a high school dipolma and unpreprared to go on to a tech school or hold a job. I find the teaching to test very disturbing. Teachers are hardly able to teach with all the testing they must do.

Thank you for presenting your concerns in such detail. I am grateful for the strong professional voice, absent in the coverage of this issue. Our professional organizations have abandoned us--instead jumping on the bandwagon, eagerly publishing books to support teaching the Common Core. Anyone who has ever taught knows how very inappropriate the long-discredited New Criticism approach to text interpretation is for young readers. Who made David Coleman, who has never taught in public school, King of Curriculum--and why is everyone rushing to do what he says? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the Common Core and paid for videos of Coleman spouting his doctrine to be circulated across the country in the name of teacher professional development. I'm very serious when I ask the question: Who elected Bill Gates? Who elected David Coleman? What happened to teacher professionalism? What happened to democracy? As a longtime teacher of students who had difficulty in school, I find the Common Core reading exemplars exceedingly inappropriate and David Coleman's doctrinaire approach to teaching an invitation to disaster. I run a website detailing these matters. www.susanohanian.org

http://whatiscommoncore.wordp...

Claudette is right; teachers are hardly able to teach with all the testing governments make them do. The data collection that is required now from standardized tests is not just academic data. They are asking for personalized information and psychometric and biometric information. Nationalized databases of student information are one of the major effects of Common Core's implementation. Indoctrination by liberals is another. I urge all people of faith to investigate Common Core and stand up for liberty and Constitutional rights which are not respected under the Department of Education's push for states to choose either NCLB or Common Core, or face losing funding. It is not good!

Dear Sana, 
I really enjoyed your article on the Common Core.
It’s exciting to see how this is changing the way we teach and am so glad that the Common Core is being implemented in schools across the US.
 
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