The Importance of Common Core Standards

The common core standards for Ohio aims to prep students for his or her future with more of a challenging curriculum. For both John Charlton of Ohio Department of Education and Pat Ciccantelli of Aurora City School District, the standards are about achieving high standards for Ohio and preparing students for the future.

The Core

The standards are mainly focused on English Language Arts (ELA) and Math, but for Ohio these standards also include social studies, sciences and more.

The common core standards, defined by Ciccantelli, focuses on critical thinking and application in the classroom in order for students to better prepared for college and beyond.

“We want to raise the bar in Ohio,” said Charlton, associate director of media relations, talking about the state’s education level. “When 40 percent of high school graduates have to take remedial classes when they get to public colleges and universities. I think two years ago, we had 27,000 third graders who are not proficient in reading and we have 18 percent of adults cannot pass military entrance exam. We need to do a better a job of making sure our students graduate prepared for the future.”

Charlton said a way to do this by raising the standards, which what the common core is designed to do.

Ciccantelli, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said that he likes the common core standards because they are consistent with developmental appropriate for students, though they are not that different from standards in Ohio the last 10 years ago.

“What’s changing is how the teachers are going to instruct in order to help kids master these standards,” Ciccantelli said. “The way they’re designed there is a nice progression; they scaffolded and increase in difficulty.”

The Timeline, Ohio and Aurora

For the state of Ohio, the Common Core standards were adopted in June 2010, according to the common core website and is one of 42 states that have decided to adopt this change.

Three years previously, in 2007, the idea of the standards started during a Council of Chief State School Officers meeting, according to the common core website of the standards.

Seven years later, Ohio finally implemented the common core standards for the 2014 – 2015 academic school year.

As for Portage county, in Aurora city school district, Ciccantelli said the teachers began preparing for the common core in three to four years ago.

“We had to do some of professional development, there has been a quite a bit of training that’s needed to be complete for our teachers to understand what those changes are,” Ciccantelli said. “It does take time because it is a change and it takes us providing (teachers) time and to really understand what those shifts look like instructionally.”

[pullquote]It does take time because it is a change, and it takes us providing (teachers) time and to really understand what those shifts look like instructionally.[/pullquote]

For the future

“The Common Core standards in English Language Arts and Math, that we’ve adopted in Ohio, raise the bar in Ohio,” Charlton said. “There are more rigorous than our previous standards, there are fewer standards so it gives our teachers to go into depth in a topic area. It encourages problem solving skills, compare and contrast and information analysis.”

Charlton said that these skills that students need to better prepare them for the workforce or continue through school.

“We feel it’s important that we adopted these new standards that raise the bar in Ohio,” Charlton said.

Ciccantelli said the idea of the standards is that if students master these they will be college or career ready.

“We use the standards as a basis for what we want students to know or be able to do at the end of each grade level,” Ciccantelli said. “They’re not really in an order, you get to choose locally what order you want to put them in and choose locally what kind of materials to use.”

Controversy

As far as controversy goes for the Common Core, both Charlton and Ciccantelli believe that the reason why people are so opposed to the standard change is because of misinformation or misunderstanding.

“I certainly encourage people to take a minute to read (the standards) before they judge them,” Charlton said. “Some of the things you hear is that this is not normally appropriate for a certain age group. Read the standards and judge for yourself.”

Ciccantelli said there could be a political reason behind the stance against the Common Core.

“There are some things some people feel like it could be in a different grade level, in some cases it’s too rigorous, some people don’t like the shift of more non-fiction than fiction,” Ciccantelli said. “There’s no perfect set of standards.”