They are responsible for shaping the lives of our children. Now, five of Albuquerque's former and current teachers said they are facing major challenges in that mission.
"My biggest concern as a middle school teacher is the loss of instruction time I have with my kids,"said Karen Kiefer, who teaches at Taft Middle School.
Regular readers of my Huffington Post columns have seen my position on the national Common Core Standards change during the last two years. At first I opposed the standards as mandates but thought they could be useful as guidelines. When the standards were paired with high-stakes assessments, both for students and teachers, my opposition intensified. As a teacher and teacher educator, and as a parent and grandparent, when curriculum was rewritten and instruction became constant test prep, I was angry. In this and my next post I directly challenge the Common Core approach to teaching younger children to read and older students to better comprehend sophisticated written material. The more I look at the Common Core approach to reading, the more it seems to be a shill for publishers like Pearson to sell new "Common Core" aligned textbooks, workbooks, and online packaged learning programs. - Read More