.... no thanks.


>>>>In a recent discussion board thread on reading comprehension challenges in autism, a special-education teacher commented that her students can’t understand the assigned reading passages. “When I complained, I was told that I could add extra support, but not actually change the passages,” she wrote. “It is truly sad to see my students’ frustration.”

Why must this teacher’s students contend with passages that are too complex for them to understand? She attributes this inflexibility to the Common Core, new standards—created in 2009 by a group of education professionals, none of them K-12 classroom teachers or special-education experts—that have been adopted by 45 states. Though most Common Core goals are abstract and schematic, collectively they constitute a one-size fits-all approach that, in practice, has severely straightjacketed America’s special-needs students.

The teacher I quoted above—one of the many special-ed instructors I
teach at the Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania
education schools—is hardly alone. She’s echoing the concerns of dozens of other special-education teachers I’ve spoken with, most of whom have already gotten the message from their supervisors or superiors that they must adhere to the standards and give all their students the designated grade-level assignments.

Precocious students, students with learning disabilities, precocious students with learning disabilities: How does the Common Core suit them?
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-common-core-is-tough-on-kids-with-special-needs/283973/

A lot of the implementation would be applied to the old standards, anyway.

Take SpEd. It was standard for schools to exempt SpEd kids from the test or to have their IEPs have them take modified tests. This is abusing the system, pure and system, to cover the school's and administrators' butts.

Result: As many kids who would fail were recategorized as SpEd with mods that featured modified standardized tests prominently.

Solution: Limit the number of kids who could be classed as SpEd?

Result: Number of SpEd kids decreases, but in some cases a school really does have a large # of SpEd students. Or all the available slots are filled--coincidentally most schools have the maximum number of SpEd kids.

Solution: Dispose of mods on standardized tests. Everybody teaches the same standards with a modified curriculum being rarer than hen's teeth.


The standards are okay, in principle, but too hard. You can lead kids to critical thinking as they learn facts--you can't do critical thinking without a lot of facts under your belt and knowledge of different fields. (There's not a good definition of critical thinking because in every field it's a bit different--you really have to know the field.) And since they often *don't* learn the facts, esp. low-achievers, it's really a lost cause.