Board of Education Work Session

I attended most of the Board of Education work session held 4 April 2012.  I missed the first portion (baseball coach’s meeting), which dealt with the Common Core State Standards and the impact on Greenwich Public Schools.  I will be reviewing the discussion once it is posted on the web, but if the presentation attached to the agenda is any indication, the administration is still denying that the changes in standards between the old CT standards and the Common Core are significant:


” In 2011, the State provided districts with Crosswalk documents that demonstrate a correlation between the new CCSS, [and the] Connecticut State Standards for Mathematics and Reading and Language Arts. These documents demonstrated a 90-92% alignment among the CCSS, former State Standards and current assessments.”


In reality, the Reading and Language Arts match is only 80%, and that is before you subtract the weak matches, which push the total of changes required to 32% (i.e., only a 68% match where the match is considered Excellent or Good).  The Math match is 92%, but that is before subtracting another 24% for weak matches, bringing the more realistic match to only 68% for Math also. 

http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/lib/sde/PDF/CCSS/CCSS_CT.pdf

Now it is possible that the Greenwich standards exceed the old state standards, so that our specific match rate would be higher.  I have seen no evidence of this coming from the administration, and the fact that they continue to quote the source document match rates for Math makes me believe that the Greenwich standards are not different. 

Based on what was posted on the internet, the district Math Coordinator presented three alternatives to transition to the Common Core for math.  All of these alternatives involved keeping Everyday Math, or changing (notice I didn’t use the word “upgrade”) to the CCSS edition of Everyday Math. 

http://www.greenwichschools.org/uploaded/district/Board_of_Education/meeting_materials/2011-12_meetings/4-4-12_meeting/Addendum_to_4-4-12_Transition_to_Math_CCSS.pdf


Missing as an alternative is to initiate a Math Curriculum review now so that we can transition to a program that works as soon as possible.  Any of the suggested pathways would only delay the termination of the failing Everyday Math program, extending the lost generation of our children another few years.  Even under the new Board Policy for curriculum reviews the schools would have 12-18 months to complete such a review, likely putting any implementation into 2015-16 school year.

I also noticed that this slide only addresses K-5.  Are there no changes to be made for the rest of the grades? 

I am sure I will have more comments on this when I get to review the video.