Mt. Eden Children's Academy (MECA)

Since 2010, there were 45 states that have adopted the same educational standards called Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers and seeks to establish consistent education standards across the states. The Common Core Standards is initiative state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English and Mathematical standards. These standards help to educate all of the students equally, they help children who move from state to state, as well as they help to prepare students for college and workplace. The common core standard helps to provide a clear understanding

The goal of the Common Core State Standards is to prepare students for college and work expectations and help them compete and succeed in a global economy and society. Furthermore, this policy has shaped current educational thinking by providing established learning standards with rigorous content and application of higher knowledge through higher order thinking skills.

According to the National Education Association (2017) The common core state standards benefit all students because it provides equal access to the same curriculum as other students across the nation. The standards focus specifically on English Language Arts and Mathematics. The Common Core is designed to encompass a clear set of broad standards to prepare students for post-secondary opportunities. The standards were meant to be more challenging than current set of standards in each state and to provide clarity and consistency about what was expected of students at each grade level.

The students at Summit Charter Collegiate Academy, also known as SCCA, are bright young students with potential to make their future an outstanding work of art. They are students who are serious about their education and will do anything to get to the highest pinnacle in life. But besides being determined and solemn scholars, they are still only teenagers in high school who just want to have fun. The culture at SCCA lacks fun, excitement, and freedom, and the main reason for that is because of the Burton School District that runs the facility. There needs to be some changes in the Burton School District and in the culture of SCCA.

Common Core is built as an infective for education to all schools, but what it is, is a policy that all students learn the same. Common Core has been adopted in forty-three states around the nation. Common Core is designed to get students ready for college and career ready from grades Kindergarten through twelfth grade. “The basic definition of what Common Core is, a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy.” (Board)“The college- and career-readiness standards were developed first and then incoporated into the K-12 standards in the final cersion of the Common Core we have today.” (Practices) The construction of Common Core was by seeing which state standards were already the best, using experienced teachers, leading-thinkers, content experts, and also public feedback about their child’s education. Common Core is currently being endorsed by the White House. “Common Core is currently costing the United States eighty billion dollars.” (Board) Common Core was created by state educational chiefs and governors from forty-eight states. Common Core states that it will get students ready for their futures, but has only hurt them by not truly completing the goals set. Common Core is developmentally inappropriate for students because the cost of Common Core, it is pushed by the government for competition between states, and the strong implantation of standardized testing.

What is Common Core? According to the Common Core organization website, the Common Core is a set of high-quality standards in Math and English. The goals laid in place by the Common Core govern what information a student should know, and what skills they should be able to perform at the end of each grade. With no regard to student background, or where they came from, the standards were constructed to ensure that all students enter the real-world with proper knowledge and skills in which are essential to succeed. In 2009, state school chiefs and governors that recognized the value and need for collaborated and coinciding goals across the nation coordinated a state-led effort to create the Common Core State Standards.

The lack of educational benchmarks and standardization in the United States of America, USA is disjointed and subpar leaving students ill prepared to enter the workforce and college. As evidenced by the persistent problem of students graduating and passing required exit exams in high school; yet, they still needed remediation upon entry to college. The Common Core is good because it provides a set of age appropriate learning goals and sets a national high-quality academic standard for Math and English to prepare students for college and career readiness. In essence, the Common Core defines what a student should know and be able to do at different grade levels.

Structuring on the best of existing state standards, the Common Core State Standards provide a clear and reliable learning goal to help prepare students for college, career, and life. The standards clearly demonstrate what students are expected to learn at each grade level, so that every parent and teacher can understand and support their learning. From Kindergarten through 8th grade, grade-by-grade standards exist in English language arts/literacy and mathematics. From 9th through 12th grade, the standards are grouped into grade sets of 9th through 10th grade standards and 11th through 12th grade standards. Moreover, the CCSS stress the importance of using primary texts in the classroom to build literacy, along with many other things. While the standards set grade-specific goals, they do not define how the standards should be taught or which materials should be used to support students. States and districts know that there will need to be a range of supports in place to guarantee that all students, including those with special needs and English language learners, can master the standards. It is up to the states to outline the full range of supports appropriate for these students.

The Common Core State Standards are considered to be a high-quality group of academic standards. Before the standards were developed, it seemed as if the progress of the students in the United States was remaining stagnant and that America students were falling behind their international peers. The blame for this setback has fallen on the fact that standards are not consistent and from state-to-state students are required to know different things at different grade levels. As a result students are not graduating with the same set of skills (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2014).

From the word ‘core’ reveals that the Common Core State Standards has higher chances of success than other educational initiative where other improvement determinations have failed. The standards characterise one of the most promising developments in the struggles made to improve a nation’s transformation. The Common Core State Standards are not intended to replace any other standards that might be considered as weak or strong. Rather, they seek to reinforce all other standards in use by enhancing an integrated model of literacy in stating the details of content required for students in terms of grade (Drake, 2012).

Common Core State Standards, or Common Core for short, has been making headlines in 2014. Not a curriculum, Common Core is a set of standards defining the skills in which students from kindergarten through 12th grade need to have each year in order to be prepared for the next grade. Creating these national academic standards was a state-led initiative that included a coalition of educators and governors. Administrators, educators and parents participated in the developement of the actual standards. Here's a look at how Common Core evolved.

In 2009, many states adopted a new schooling standard called the Common Core State Standards. These are a set of popular K-12 standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics with future standards in other subjects like Social Studies. They were created for the “poor quality of content” (Polikoff) standards and to ensure that every student will learn the same things at the same pace. Researchers claim that the standards are better than the current state standards, raising the expectations of performance for students. Although Common Core is supposed to be higher quality, there are many challenges it would face such as technology upgrades, content coverage, computer scoring, etc. Before the Common Core State Standards, each state set its own standards similar to one another. With Common Core Standards, every state will have the same standards to base student performance off of. Another reason these new standards were put into place is to ensure that America will be able to

My agency volunteer work takes place at Busch Middle School of Character, it is through Urban Future which offers after school tutoring, mentoring, transportation, and many other opportunities for the student’s education to be enriched. Busch Middle School typically enrolls around 300-400 6th, 7th, and 8th graders each year. Urban future relays mainly on volunteers to assist with the after school services they provide as well as project mangers that are in charge of running the programs at Busch Middle School. My volunteer work included tutoring 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in the resource lab, during this time the students worked on their reading skills in a program called Achieve3000. Achieve3000 is a program that steadily increases students’ ability to read, comprehend, apply, and communicate information derived from complex text. My role in the resource lab was to make sure every student was understanding the material, and if not, to sit down one on one with a student to help them with their current Achieve3000 lesson. In the resource lab, each student did their very best to engage themselves in the program and expand their level of knowledge.

Common Core state standards are a regulation where the federal government requires states and counties to follow a curriculum. These rules are mandatory and if the state does not implement common core, the federal government can withhold educational funding for that state. For example, Janelle Cox, an elementary expert states that common core state standards are a set of learning standards that provide a clear and consistent understanding of what students are expected to learn throughout the school year. The standards are designed to provide teachers with a guideline of what skills and knowledge students need, so that they can prepare students for future success (Cox 2015). In addition, this plans has tried to guarantee some forms of success

The Common Core is known as the top notch academic guidelines in Arithmetic and English expressions/proficiency (ELA). These learning objectives diagram what a student should know and have the capacity to do toward the end of every evaluation. The guidelines were made to guarantee that all students move on from secondary school with the abilities and learning importance to succeed in school, vocation, and life, paying little respect to where they live. Common Core standards are effective in many students that will lead each and every student to succeed in their selected careers, including, “Forty-three states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have voluntarily adopted and are