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| Photo by Stephen Babcock |
The Baltimore Guide recently featured BCP's Leading Minds Forum - "The Cure for the Common Core" - at Loyola University Maryland on October 8, 2014. The event was organized by BCP and the Loyola University Maryland School of Education. Sponsors included Baltimore's Child, Congressional Bank, Heaven 600, Chesapeake Employers Insurance, McGraw-Hill Education, and MECU of Baltimore Inc.
We would like to thank the Baltimore Guide and Stephen Babcock for the wonderful article:
For a trio of education experts who addressed a forum at Loyola University Maryland last week, the debate over the Common Core standards comes down to jelly beans and tree frogs.
In a recent study, students presented with a passage on jelly beans were able to easily comprehend it. Next, they were given a passage on tree frogs. Many of the same students struggled.
The difference, according to Dr. Lisa Hansel of the Core Knowledge Foundation, was not necessarily the students’ reading abilities. Instead, it was the knowledge base they brought to the passage.
“The only kids who could understand the passage on tree frogs were the ones who, somewhere in their young lives, had learned about tree frogs,” Hansel said.
With the introduction of the Common Core standards in classrooms across the country this school year, debate in the education community has been centered around the difficulty of the tests that assess the students’ adherence to the standards, and the way the grades on those exams reflect on the teachers and schools.
But the three panelists who spoke at Loyola University last week sought to address not the tests themselves, but what the students learn in the run-up to those tests. Titled “The Cure for the Common Core,” the speaking event was sponsored by the Baltimore Curriculum Project charter school network, which, in the southeast operates Wolfe Street Academy, Hampstead Hill Academy and City Springs Elementary/Middle School.
Read the full article at: http://baltimoreguide.com/panelists-seek-cure-for-the-common-core/
