In the latest entry in the Alliance’s “Core of the Matter” blog series focusing on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and struggling students, Tom Murray, the Alliance’s director of state and district digital learning, relays a conversation he overheard in the checkout line between two moms about the CCSS. He notes that most of the moms’ information was based on something they read on Facebook. Tom’s experience is not atypical—according to the recent “PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools” mentioned in the article above, nearly half of all respondents said they first heard about the CCSS from “television, newspapers, and the radio.” An additional 8 percent cited social media as their information source. Only 17 percent first heard about the CCSS from teachers or other education professionals.
“I left the store saddened,” Murray writes, “sad that those moms were getting the information about their own children’s education … from Facebook—often the modern day version of a gossip column. I was saddened by the misconceptions; saddened that the lives of our kids, the future foundation of our nation, had become a political football.”
Using that conversation as a jumping-off point, Murray reflects on the tools and technology used to prepare students in past decades compared to the incredible work he’s seeing today—from teachers personalizing learning for every child to utilizing real-time data to make instructional decisions on the fly.
Read Murray’s complete blog post at http://bit.ly/Z5RRxQ and access previous blog posts from the Alliance’s Core of the Matter series at http://bit.ly/1tDwmRU.