More student support, teacher training, and community awareness essential to Common Core success
September 3, 2013: The Maryland State Education Association (MSEA) has launched a month-long, parent-focused digital ad campaign on the issues that are critical to the success of Common Core: adequate resources for technology, textbooks, and materials; ongoing training and support for educators; and community awareness of the changes taking place and how student test scores will be affected.
The Common Core State Standards were developed by state education leaders—in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and education experts—as a new way of learning reading and math, emphasizing critical thinking skills and real world applications. Common Core is being fully implemented across Maryland for the first time during the 2013-14 school year.
“Although Common Core presents exciting opportunities for teaching and learning, we must make sure that all students are getting more from the Core,” said MSEA President Betty Weller. “To be successful, we need to focus on more student support, more educator training and resources, and more community awareness,” said Weller.
There are three things we can do now to make sure that our students, educators, and communities get more from the Core, according to Weller:
- “As students tackle new kinds of homework, classroom lessons, and tests in coming years, they will need extra support from parents. Parents should partner with their child’s teacher to learn more about Common Core and how they can help.”
- “School systems need updated technology, textbooks, and materials to teach the Common Core standards. Educators need ongoing training and support to make sure that students are successful.”
- “Student test scores will be unpredictable until new tests match the new curriculum, which may take several years. Rather than focus on test scores that are not very meaningful, we need to stay focused on helping students and teachers succeed with the new, rigorous Common Core standards.”
Watch the More from the Core video and learn about the campaign at marylandeducators.org/commoncore.
Sample tweet: @marylandeducators starts #morefromthecore campaign about what needs to happen for #CommonCore to succeed in MD: http://bit.ly/195xekG
