NCWP Common Core Institute
The voices and expertise of classroom teachers have been utterly absent from the Common Core State Standards. It’s hard to argue this fact when you look around at all the money that private corporations and “think tanks” have poured into them, and at who has been sitting in on the meetings. If teachers are asked their thoughts, it’s usually after the fact, and more often, it’s in a hallway in a school where no one with the power to effect change is really listening.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In January, 2013, teacher consultants from the Tar River Writing Project and the UNC-Charlotte Writing Project met for a three-day weekend in Raleigh, NC, to unpack for themselves what the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were saying. What, we wondered, are these standards asking of students? What, of teachers? What assumptions do they make about what it means to be “college and career ready”? And how might teachers go beyond the functionalist bent of CCSS to engage the whole student? And most important, how might teacher professionals speak back to the assessment measures which seem to have been designed to hurt students and to limit achievement?
