Education Week - August 7, 2013 - 30

30 EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 7, 2013 www.edweek.org
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COMMENTARY
www.edweek.org/go/commentary
The Call of the Common Core
By Carol Thomas
I
f Big Brother were behind
the new academic standards
for public school
students in 46 states,
you would expect private
schools these days to be
reveling in their independence.
But as I work in Florida to build
parent engagement in the nation’s
largest tax-credit-scholarship program
for economically disadvantaged
students, private educators
in the state are tugging at my
sleeve with a remarkable request:
Let us use the Common Core
State Standards.
These are not idle musings. Our
nonprofit, Step Up For Students,
oversees the scholarship program,
which will serve more than 60,000
low-income students this fall in
more than 1,400 private schools
in the state. Three-fourths of those
schools are faith-based, and all of
them covet their educational independence.

As part of our outreach to scholarship
parents and schools, we
are conducting a pilot project to
find ways to promote stronger relationships
between parents and
teachers. To help educators chart
the progress of each student, we
have built an online tool that ties
their conversations to the benchmarks
described in the common
core. We have no relationship with
the common-core developers or
the consortia that are preparing
the related tests, and, frankly, we
have kept our distance from the
political developments in Florida
public schools. Our main motivation
is practical. We wanted a rigorous
set of standards that could
be shared across these schools.
For example, the 3rd grade literature
standard is: “Compare
and contrast the themes, settings,
and plots of stories written
by the same author about the
same or similar characters.” In
our “student learning compact,”
the teacher selects the teaching
methodology and the specific parent
and student responsibilities
that are related to mastery of the
standard.
Our target for the state pilot was
to find 100 scholarship schools
that would volunteer to participate.
We already have more than
140, and my phone is still ringing.
These principals aren’t calling to
lecture me on state sovereignty
or intrusive regulation. They are
calling because they think the
common standards will help them
guide the learning plans in their
schools.
We call our pilot the “Success
Partners” and have toured
the state to spread the word to
schools. In a recent meeting with
principals of Seventh-day Adventist
schools, 13 of the 15 attendees
had decided to enroll their schools
in the program before I could even
finish the presentation. Catholic
diocesan schools throughout the
state are moving forward with
the standards, and many of the
teachers are also signing up for
state-run workshops that were intended
primarily for public school
teachers. In one Christian school,
after learning about the common
core, the headmaster purchased a
laptop computer for every teacher
to use for his or her own research
about learning and implementing
the standards.
Suzette Dean is the principal at
Bible Truth Ministries Academy,
a small mission-driven school in
Tampa that serves mostly AfricanAmerican
students. Of the common
core, she emailed me with her
reaction: “Finally, we are all on the
same page [with the standards],
our teachers know what to teach,
and the parents know what their
children should be doing in school.
Sure, it is a change, but it is real
change that is needed if we are
going to prepare our students for
college and a successful future.”
The teachers with whom I now
work, like the teachers in public
schools with whom I used to work,
“
[P]rivate
educators in
[Florida] are
tugging at my
sleeve with a
remarkable
request: Let us use
the Common Core
State Standards.”
Schools Can—and Must—Do More
About Bullying, Violence, and Suicide
By Mariam Azin
T
iStockphoto.com/Yezik
“
Schools have a responsibility not
only to help students learn, but also to
keep them safe, physically and
emotionally, while they are in our care.”
he story is all too familiar: accusations of
sexual violence, public shaming, and relentless
bullying followed by the tragic end of a
young life full of promise. Rehtaeh Parsons,
a Nova Scotia teenager, hanged herself in
early April more than a year after a photo
from her alleged 2011 rape circulated through her high
school and community. Just as we did after the suicides
of high school students Amanda Todd and Audrie Pott,
we find ourselves asking what could have been done
differently to prevent Rehtaeh’s death at 17. Did she
get the help that she needed? Did her family?
Now, her family members are asking questions of
their own. In an interview with The Toronto Star, her
mother’s longtime boyfriend said: “The justice system
failed us completely. The education system didn’t do
much of anything.” Rehtaeh’s father wrote on his website:
“[S]he was disappointed to death. Disappointed in
people she thought she could trust, in her school, and
the police.”
Is it fair to hold her school accountable for her death?
A review of Halifax school board policy requested by
Nova Scotia Minister of Education Ramona Jennex
found that Rehtaeh’s lengthy absences from school
should have been cause for concern by school officials,
although reviewers did not lay blame for the girl’s
death on the schools.
We know, according to news reports, that she confided
in at least one teacher, and that peers were well
aware of the cyberbullying leading up to her suicide.
We also know that she was getting help. She switched
schools, and the CTV television network reported that
she checked herself into a hospital for six weeks to deal
with depression and suicidal thoughts. Sadly, even a
loving and proactive family and the best mental-health
care cannot erase all pain and do not guarantee a
happy ending.
But all of us in the education community need to ask
ourselves if we are doing everything possible to prevent
the toxic and damaging social environments that lead
to tragedies like Rehtaeh’s. Her mother reports that she
was shunned, bullied, and humiliated by classmates as
a picture spread through social media. Did teachers and
school staff members witness bullying in the classroom,
the lunchroom, and the hallways? If they did, what was
done to address the issue not only with Rehtaeh, but
also with those perpetrating the bullying?
Do we really know what’s going on with our kids, on
and off school grounds? Recent events have made it all
too clear that the answer is often no. This year’s trial
in Steubenville, Ohio, in which two high school football
players were found guilty of raping an unconscious girl
and carrying her from party to party, highlights just
how disconnected adults in the community were from
the culture of substance abuse and sexual assault happening
right under their noses.
This kind of disconnect, whether we are talking about
bullying, substance abuse, or sexual assault, is unacceptable.
Obviously, parents have the primary responsibility
for their children’s well-being. But teachers
and other staff members know much more about
what is happening with kids than those school employees
ever report. We know which kids are showing
up hung over, which kids hide in the library to avoid
the lunchroom, which kids are suddenly ostracized
from a group they were once part of. We observe kids
together at school in ways that parents never can,
and often have them in our care for more of their
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Education Week - August 7, 2013

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