A comment from a teacher.
She writes:
I work with gifted students in an affluent district and I’m quite concerned with Common Core. Diane’s article points out some very serious flaws in how this is being foisted on states and thus, schools, teachers and the children in them. The students I work with will likely do well regardless, but I sense CC is created specifically to destroy public education by creating an environment where many are guaranteed to fail, much to the delight of non-educators behind this movement. Even gifted students, I fear, will find little in CC to inspire, motivate and guide them to find their areas of greatest passion and achievement and explore that area in all its depth and complexity. It will, however, develop in them a loathing of school drudgery by its heavy-handed sameness. Already our students have lost the freedom to accelerate, compact and skip previously mastered curriculum because of CC.
Gifted students who are just learning English, come from diverse cultures, live in poverty or have specific disabilities will be hog-tied by their “deficits” to the point where their giftedness is neither acknowledged nor addressed.
I have thought, ever since NCLB, that there is a determination to drive out of public education the difficult students, i.e. those who are cognitively, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically diverse or disabled. This is just the latest step in that direction.
Initially, we were told that it would be possible at some point for all students to be successful. Assessment was designed to create a culture where all students would, in a few years, be “Proficient and Above.” The Bell Curve was out. The reality is that the finish line (the level at which one must achieve to be designated proficient/successful) has constantly and continuously been moving. The reason is to ensure that we would *never* reach that point and that there would always be failures. CC is the next step in ensuring failure – the real, although largely unspoken, goal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Will be fascinating to see how this evolves, given this and the note earlier today re an English teacher who was told that she/he would not be allowed to teach literature.
Yes.
I really feel for the writer. Gifted students are one of the most misunderstood populations; this is compounded by common myths that are often accepted as factual. What they don’t need is to be held back by grade level standards that they may have already mastered (CC or whatever). Often, gifted students’ asynchronous development makes some of them better at one subject than another, but they’re held back if they are not equally good at all subjects.
Some of the issues described by the writer are detailed in a report titled “A Nation Deceived.”
http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/nation_deceived/
Maybe many kids are gifted with their own strengths and interests. They just can’t all be measured by a stifling invalid test. We are slowly killing creativity and the true potential of our children. This faux reform movement will implode eventually. I plan to protect my kids, those I teach.
Yeah, it’s really sad. I’ve met students who love to learn but hate school. What’s worse is meeting those who have never experienced the joys of learning. Anyway, there will probably be a new panacea before this one has a chance to implode…
Students that are truly advanced have always been allowed to leap from through the grades. Skipping grades is not a new concept. There are TAG programs and by middle school students can take advanced classes.
I don’t know about that. Grade-level and subject matter acceleration are not new, but implementation is another matter. I had a 7th grader one year who scored a 32 on the math portion of the ACT, but he was forced to remain in a class where they were practicing multiplication tables.
As an inner city teacher these cc standards are just one of the many ploys to hurt public education, particularly that of poor, minority students. Today I proctored an exam on editing and revising in English by bilingual students. They tried so hard but were pretty clueless about many of the rules of English grammar. Why? Not so much because they bilingual BUT because these things are not taught in the majority of today’s classroom. It was amazing to me what they were being asked on this test. I really had hopes that Obama would be part of the solution in saving public Ed but I am unfortunately not believing that any longer.
Hopefully, the Common Core, and the tests it is a vehicle for, will collapse of its own inappropriateness, spurring a parent and student revolt against this forced march to the Gates/Broad/Murdoch/Pearson dystopia of school- as-testing workhouse.
Otherwise, it’s as this writer and Rick Hess (who wrote with indiscreet honesty) have said: the Common Core is being promulgated to “prove” that successful school districts are “failing.”
Urban districts with mayoral control have long since been successfully tarred with this libel, and are well on the way toward dismemberment and privatization.
Unless parents and kids rise up – since the leadership of the teacher unions, or at least the AFT, will do what they are told – everyone else is next.
My gifted son had to leave the existing K-12 curriculum to find appropriate classes, so I would dispute that the common core will “develop in them a loathing of school drudgery by its heavy-handed sameness”, that loathing is already there.
Is Sec Duncan hearing concerns about standardized tests? Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post just posted this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/15/three-commitments-u-s-ed-dept-made-at-teaching-summit/
Students can graduate early by testing out and moving onto college courses.
If this is happening in your area, that’s great! If it’s not restricted by age, I say it’s even better!
K-12 requirements are so fragmented that it is difficult to make generalizations about what a student can always do.
All students in my state are required to take a US history class in their junior year. My son would have happily taken APUSH (he had taken AP Euro the previous year), except that he was planning to take 6 AP science exams that spring along with 10 hours of math at our local university. He would have happily taken APUSH his senior year, but the rules did not allow it. The rules and other classes forced him into a main line US history class that was ill suited to his education.
As you suggest, skipping grades and graduating early is often an option. It is not without cost, however. My son did skip from 5 to 7, and without the availability of local university classes (and the understanding of a principal willing to look the other way about some regulations), we might well have also had him graduate early. It would have meant that he would be 16 for his entire first year of college, and that would be problematic as well. The world is filled with trade offs.
Sadly, I don’t think there’s a plot to drive low-performing, hard-to-teach students out of public school; the goal of privatizers is to drive everyone else out so public schools become marginalized “schools of last resort.”
Educrats want Deltas, not Alphas. Workers as opposed to thinkers. After all, why teach children to think? Then they will become informed and boot out the educrats!