Kindergarten Common Core stop the madness

If a 90 minute uninterrupted reading block wasn’t bad enough for a 5 or 6 year old child, try the new Common Core standards. They are developmentally inappropriate and will create a classroom of suffering children and teachers, if teachers stick around. A Washington Post article, by Valerie Strauss critiques the standards and explains why Kindergarten teachers are frustrated.  It states:

“We reviewed the makeup of the committees that wrote and reviewed the Common Core Standards. In all, there were 135 people on those panels. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional.”

The Common Core removes many empirically proven techniques from the Kindergarten room.  As sited in the article:

“1.  The K-3 standards will lead to long hours of direct instruction in literacy and math. This kind of “drill and grill” teaching has already pushed active, play-based learning out of many kindergartens.

2. The standards will intensify the push for more standardized testing, which is highly unreliable for children under age eight.

3. Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other crucial areas of young children’s learning: active, hands-on exploration, and developing social, emotional, problem-solving, and self-regulation skills—all of which are difficult to standardize or measure but are the essential building blocks for academic and social accomplishment and responsible citizenship.”