Friday, May 17, 2013

Race to the Top: The Common Core Dilemma

4 years after the start of the Race to the Top initiative, we as a country have reached a point in which we should see the fruits of the insurgence of resources schools have received. However, the benefits have yet to be reaped. This is due to a variety of reasons. 

With the money that schools received, there were stipulations put into place that forced schools to implement certain strategies. This would work if schools across the nation that were receiving this money had the same type of needs. Working in an inner city school, the students I serve need different things than students at higher performing schools even in the same state, let alone the country. Whereas the implementation of common core standards are great in theory in raising the bar of the education in this country, they are lofty and inappropriate to be implemented in every county. The common core standards that each and every school that accepted race to the top money are held to were not released until this past year. The assessment that students will be evaluated with are still not yet released with definite detail. Therefore, it would be highly irregular for success to be met at any which level in the first couple of years of the testing cycles. Would it have been a more effective way if the common core standards were released, then funding be provided and finally then hold our students accountable to testing measures? Probably, however we are now still "catching up" to meet standards that were promising for our educational system. 

It will be interesting to see what the next few years bring in terms of actual implementation of assessments that focus on common core standards and to see how students do on them, especially for those students who are still unprepared, not due to a lack of trying, but only due to a lack of not enough preparation time with resources. 

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