Photo Credit: Shutterstock By Liz Klimas.
Susan Sluyter has been a teacher for more than two decades. One can imagine that she’s seen and adjusted to her fair share of change within the educational system during her 25 years in the field, but the more recent shift in requirements was so dramatic that she resigned last month.
“In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the public schools, I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in the classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment for learning for each of our children,” Sluyter wrote in her resignation letter to the Cambridge Public School District in Massachusetts in February.
The kindergarten and pre-K teacher said she’s watched her job requirements “[swing] away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them.”
As a teacher, requirements for Sluyter included attending classes and workshops that filled her in on new content for her students, which she wrote were like the academic demands for a first- or second-grade student. In addition, she wrote that she has needed to schedule more meetings to address the “extreme behaviors” of her students, which she believed were the result of them not being able to fully comprehend the content.
“I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, ‘I can’t do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me!’ Sluyter’s resignation read.
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Common Core spawns widespread political fights
By Associated Press.
More than five years after U.S. governors began a bipartisan effort to set new standards in American schools, the Common Core initiative has morphed into a political tempest fueling division among Republicans.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads establishment voices — such as possible presidential contender Jeb Bush — who hail the standards as a way to improve student performance and, over the long term, competitiveness of American workers.
Many archconservatives — tea party heroes Rand Paul and Ted Cruz among them — decry the system as a top-down takeover of local schools. The standards were developed and are being implemented by states, though Common Core opponents argue that President Barack Obama’s administration has encouraged adoption of the standards by various parameters it set for states applying to get lucrative federal education grants.
Tea party-aligned officials and candidates want to delay the standards or abandon them altogether in at least a dozen of the 45 states that adopted some part of the guidelines. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Monday signed the first Common Core repeal to make it through a legislature.
“Common Core is like Obamacare: They passed it before they knew what was in it,” said William Evers, a Hoover Institute research fellow and lead author of a California Republican Party resolution denouncing Common Core.
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