Effects of Common Core Standards on Ohio Public Schools

Education has always been a hot button topic, especially during election time. Both President Bush and Obama presented major education overhauls. In 2002 Bush signed into law the NCLB (No child left behind) act, which gave states with at-risk school districts, title I funds to help increase student performance. And in 2009 Obama presented a new competitive program called RTTT (Race to the top). RTTT gave states a chance to gain federal grants if they would adopt the new Common Core Standards (CCS) and assessments. This assessment was supposed to improve teacher instruction, retrain staff, and turn around low scoring. In 2014 Ohio adopted CCS and the PARCC assessment (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), along with 45 other states, in hopes that it would improve student’s educational quality. While CCS is an improvement to NCLB, it does share some of its flaws. If these new standards won’t take into account “at-risk” children, district funding, and a plan to teach parents how to handle new curriculum, then Ohio needs to opt out of CCS.

Although Common Core is supposed to help close the achievement gaps between whites and minorities, its failure to address “at-risk” students only serves to perpetuate this problem. Many of Ohio’s inner city schools are filled with student that are considered at-risk. According to Quinnan (1997), at-risk is described as being: 'poorly equipped to perform up to academic standards' (as cited by Bulger & Watson, 2006). CCS’s are supposed to prepare students for higher education and the workforce: reinforcing science, ELA (English language arts), and math. Yet it fails to advance and consider the needs of at-risk children. According to Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, and Marx (2001), discourses are “ways of knowing, doing, talking, reading, and writing, which are constructed and reproduced in social and cultural practice and interaction”( as cited by Kurtz, 2014). Some children have a hard time with story problems: it’s not that the child cannot do the math, they just cannot understand the language. The story problem frustrated her so much that, she was going to skip her homework altogether. According to CCS’s, not only should she be able to do the problem but, she should have understood the language as well. How can all children conceive of what success means to them in the one size-fits-all curriculum served up as what “every child should know?”(Wexler, 2014). With Common Core’s higher standards and disregard for at-risk students, many children will be set-up to fail.

Even though, many of inner city school districts are less funded; they are still expected to meet the same benchmarks. How can a school district be expected to perform as well as other district when it is underfunded? When Obama started his Race to the Top (RTTT) campaign he included an incentive to states that added CCS’s. According to Steinberg (2014), “In 2009 federal Race to the Top (RTTT) grant program incentivized a number of policy reforms at the state and district levels. Notable among these reforms was the implementation of common state education standards, referred to as the Common Core State Standards Initiative” This caused school to compete for funding and forced underperforming school to close or go without very little funding. Instead of standards helping improve our children’s chances of being competitive in the workforce, it simply crippled some of Ohio’s biggest school districts.

While Common Core claims to be easy for everyone to learn, it is confusing the parents of students. Traditionally parents are asked to “get involved”, by volunteering and helping children with homework, but CC is even more confusing to the parents than even the students. How can we expect to keep parents involved with what their child is learning, when what the child is learning confuses the parent? CC teaches students to build up tens in order to complete addition and subtraction, division and multiplication is no longer done by the rote method. Parents are even having trouble with some of the reading questions [know as reading response] that students are being asked to answer. Homework used to be a way for parent’s to gage their child’s academic level and find out where help might be needed; but due to the parent’s inexperience with the new curriculum, homework has become an inconvenience. The reason why these parents are not helping with the homework is the same reason why their child is not completing homework: CCS‘s are confusing and were not properly introduced into the curriculum.

Instead of preparing students for the future and giving them the skills they will need to enter the workforce: CCS has only been a hindrance for most students. Unfortunately, CCS has failed to fulfill its promise to give students a high-quality education, which is supposed to prepare students for the future. Instead, it has frustrated parents, decimated school districts, and left at-risk children lost in the system. Because of this, Ohio needs to opt-out of CCS before there is any further damage.