Core Questions: Answers to Your Questions About the Common Core

Background

What do you want to know about the new Common Core education standards?

Ohio and 45 other states and the District of Columbia have fully adopted these new academic standards and are putting the curricula and tests that accompany them into place by 2015–and sooner in Ohio and other states.

But many parents are still unclear about how this will affect their children. Many teachers aren’t sure how they’ll teach to the new standards. And many school administrators are struggling with managing all the change.

Send us your questions about these changes. You can email us at ohio@stateimpact.org. You can also send us a message on Twitter or Facebook.

Please tell us if you’re a parent, teacher, principal, policy maker or concerned citizen who cares about how the Common Core is going to change education in our state. We’ll find answers and share them here at StateImpact Ohio.

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April 17, 2013

Core Questions: Will the Common Core Hurt Your Chances of Getting Into College?

StateImpact is answering reader-submitted questions about the Common Core, a new set of expectations for what students should know and be able to do in math and English at each grade level. Ohio is one of 45 states that have fully adopted the Common Core. Today, we answer a question about college admissions. The Common Core is supposed to raise expectations [...]

March 5, 2013

Ohio Students to Spend More Time Taking Tests Under New Common Core Testing Plan

erskinelibrary / Flickr Across all grades, Ohio students will spend an additional 49 hours a year taking standardized tests starting in 2014-15. But the Ohio Department of Education says the way the tests will be administered will actually be less disruptive than the state’s current testing system. “Even though there may be more hours of testing, we [...]

March 4, 2013

What Do You Want to Know About the Common Core?

StateImpact Ohio wants to help answer your questions about the big changes the Common Core is bringing to schools in Ohio.

January 2, 2013

No, the Common Core Curriculum Does Not Ban The Catcher in the Rye

masaaki miyara / Flickr Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, the new Common Core curriculum coming to Ohio and most other states by 2014 does not mandate that schools toss books like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird from what they teach. Christina Hank, a curriculum director for the Medina [...]

December 5, 2012

Some Educators Question Whether iPads are the Solution to Everything

Fred Dufour / AFP/Getty Images The iPad is becoming one of the most popular purchases in the world of educational technology. Schools are using the tablets to teach the principles of physics, get students excited about spelling, and help students collaborate on class projects. Now some schools plan to use iPads to administer state tests which soon [...]

November 21, 2012

Ohio High School Students to Take More and Different State Tests

Alexandre Vialle / Flickr Starting as early as next year, a new battery of state tests will replace the Ohio Graduation Tests that Ohio high-school students must pass to complete high school. The new tests are part of Ohio’s adoption of the Common Core, a national set of standards about what students should know and be [...]

June 12, 2012

Why Ohio Schools Will See Their Test Scores Plummet in 2014

The worry is that in 2014 Ohio schools will fall off a cliff, performance-wise. State officials are predicting that passing rates on state reading and math tests will plummet. The students in classrooms in fall 2014 are going to be more or less the same kids in schools in 2013. What’s changing is the content [...]

March 9, 2012

Ohio PTA Explains What Parents Should Know About the New “Common Core” Curriculum

Most Ohio teachers are already familiar with the new curriculum they’re supposed to start teaching within the next new years — if they’re not already teaching it. But if you mention this new curriculum — the Common Core — to many parents, the response is often, “Huh? What’s that?” So we sat down with Ohio [...]

March 2, 2012

Why the New National Common Core Curriculum Won’t Fix Everything Wrong with American Schools

The Library of Congress / Flickr Across the nation, teachers are going through convolutions to learn how to teach the Common Core. It’s the new set of guidelines on what students are expected to learn at each grade level in math and English that 46 states, including Ohio, have adopted. These new guidelines are supposed [...]

March 1, 2012

Four Things You Should Know About Ohio’s New Curriculum, the Common Core

Cassidy Curtis / Flickr By the start of the 2014-15 school year, Ohio schools will be teaching a new set of lessons. It’s called the Common Core. The Common Core is a set of expectations for what students should know and be able to do in math and English. It was developed by teachers, math [...]