2/28/2023 0 Comments Slice it ccssI saw Common Core as very much a social justice issue.” “Oklahoma is notorious for its very low academic standards in mathematics, at least as far as mathematics teachers are concerned. “Wouldn’t it be great that students had the same standard wherever they moved, even if they left our state?” she asked. At a highly transient school like Taft, where she says 60 percent of the students who enroll in the fall have moved on and been replaced by others by the last day of school, Sparks saw the standards as a way to keep students on track even as they moved from school to school. Sparks says she was among the first teachers in Oklahoma to hear about Common Core, in 2009, before the draft standards were presented at the National Governors Association meetings the next year. Heather Sparks, an eighth-grade math teacher at Taft Junior High in Oklahoma City, helps students mold three-dimensional geometric solids. “They learned some things in the four years that we were working on the transition. “From the feedback I got, most teachers were disappointed by the state’s decision to overturn the Common Core,” Cobb said. Related: Opponents of Common Core open new fronts in battle against standards after a series of defeats “It happened in June, and when some teachers got back to work in August, there were several that hadn’t even followed the story,” said Rick Cobb, an assistant superintendent in Moore, a school district south of Oklahoma City. Oklahoma Teachers Trained for Three Years to Teach Common Coreĭespite the political turmoil, many classroom teachers in Oklahoma barely noticed the change at first. “The words ‘Common Core’ in Oklahoma are now so divisive that they have become a distraction,” she remarked. She signed it in June 2014, less than six months after her defense of the standards at the NGA meeting. Propelled by a national wave of local-control school politics and accusations that the Obama administration was guilty of “federal overreach” in education, HB 3399 sailed through the legislature and landed on Fallin’s desk. The goal is to ensure our children finish high school with better critical thinking skills and the tools they need to succeed in higher education or the workforce.”Ĭlassroom tools in David Woodside’s seventh-grade math classroom: pencil, scratch paper, clicker. Educators and school districts will still design lesson plans, choose appropriate textbooks and drive classroom learning. It is also not a federal curriculum in fact, it’s not a curriculum at all. “It is driven and implemented by those states that choose to participate. “Common Core is not a federal program,” she told her fellow governors. They learned some things in the four years that we were working on the transition. “From the feedback I got, most teachers were disappointed by the state’s decision to overturn the Common Core. She was chair of the bipartisan association at the time. 15, 2014 Fallin defended the standards in her State of the States Address at the National Governors Association in Washington. Mary Fallin, who took office in 2011, was an advocate of the new standards from the early days of her gubernatorial campaign. So why are kids spending weeks prepping anyway?Īs late as January 2014, it seemed certain that Oklahoma would start the coming school year under Common Core. Related: Common Core tests were supposed to be immune to test prep. Common Core may no longer be law in Oklahoma, but it has not disappeared from the classrooms. Yet more than half a year after the repeal, teachers like Sparks continue to use the standards. But in the summer of 2014, as Oklahoma school districts were to begin teaching the standards, the state legislature repealed Common Core, claiming that the federal government was using it to undermine local school control. Helping students discover mathematical relationships on their own is an idea that is central to Common Core, the educational standards adopted by more than 40 states, including Oklahoma.
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