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  • 2018-03-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Ditching Common Core Cause a Florida School's Test Results to Improve? (en)
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  • The Common Core State Standards Initiative, commonly known as Common Core, has provoked almost endless debate since the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama introduced it in 2010. Critics say the program — which entails a set of national standards for English and mathematics among K-12 students — is too rigid and does not allow individual states, school districts, and schools enough leeway or freedom to improvise and make adjustments in how they teach their students. To that end, the conspiracy theorist web site YourNewsWire.com seized upon on what appeared to be an argument for abandoning Common Core, in the example of an independent charter school in Florida. In July 2017, the blog posted an article with the headline Florida School Ditches Common Core — Soars to Number One. The article read, in part: Earlier that summer, good test results by students at the Mason Classical Academy in Naples, Florida also prompted articles by FreedomProject.com (a web site that promotes classical education and Judeo-Christian values) and the disreputable alternative health blog NaturalNews.com, which wrote, Florida school dumps common core then skyrockets to number one in English Language Arts, with 90 percent scoring proficient. The clear message in all these reports was that a decision by the school to abandon the Common Core standards had caused its students' statewide test results to improve dramatically. This is false. In reality, the Mason Classical Academy has never used Common Core; therefore, the improvement in its students' test results between 2016 and 2017 could not have had any connection to Common Core. As its principal, David Hull, wrote in 2014: In 2017, Hull revisited the issue, comparing Common Core to Big Brother: Furthermore, while the school's students did have outstanding results in English Language Arts in 2017, their mathematics results were not quite as good, though still among the best in the Collier County school district. FreedomProject.com reported that when it comes to the statewide Florida Standards Assessment, the Mason Classical Academy scored number one in English Language Arts (ELA) in the county, with 90 percent of its third graders scoring proficient. This is only partly true. The school's third-graders did rank first among 33 schools in the county for English, as did the fifth-graders, although the fourth-graders ranked 7th. When it comes to mathematics, the second discipline relevant to Common Core, the school's students didn't perform as well. In 2017, the Mason Academy ranked fifth in the school district across all three grades with, on average, 81 percent of students receiving a score of at least proficient across all three grades. The four schools that outperformed the Mason Classical Academy on Florida Standards Assessment mathematics testing in 2017 — the basis of the argument put forward by FreedomProject.com and others — were all public schools implementing the Common Core set of standards. This significantly undermines the causal connection that FreedomProject.com and others made between higher test results and the absence of Common Core. (en)
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