Editorial: No More Common Core

What is Common Core?

Common Core is defined as, "a set of clear college- and career-ready standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts/literacy and mathematics. Today, 41 states and the District of Columbia have voluntarily adopted and are working to implement the standards, which are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to take credit bearing introductory courses in two- or four-year college programs or enter the workforce"

Put into place nearly a decade ago, educators and learners both have experienced no benefits from the initiative. In fact, some studies find the exact opposite.

Common Core creates a one size fits all system of learning, and anyone who works with children could agree with how inaccurate that is. Teachers should be able to adapt lessons be able to educate each student in a way that works best for them.

Along with making students adapt to certain learning techniques instead of learning techniques adapting to them, Common Core teaches in fragments.

Instead of understanding a subject in depth, and knowing the why behind it, student learn fragments of information that they will be tested on.

There is no initial romance of learning a subject, creating a lack of interest in learning the subject itself.

This downfall also stems from focusing on the skills of the learner.

Certain students may excel in memorization, while others may be good at analyzing texts. Common core takes the process of simply learning and understanding and replaces it with testing that requires skills that cannot be learned.

Not only are students with different skills discriminated against, but schools in low economic areas.

The required standard Common Core wants American school systems to meet is impossible without financial support for schools in poorer districts.

Of the multiple reasons Common Core is not a wise choice to be implementing in schools, the greatest is who created it.

They were not school teachers. Both the architects of the reading and math sections never taught school kids. So the question can be raised, what makes them assume they know what is best for students?

The majority of schoolteachers agree, Common Core is not the learning program American schools should be following.

Students are the future of our country. Their education needs to be held to a higher standard.

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