September 20, 2016

School District News

From Superintendent

Robert Vian

Orofino Jr. High

OJSHS's new seventh grade class is made up of true leaders! In the class elections this fall 21 of the 53 students ran for class office, and several more participated as campaign managers. The speeches were well-written and confidently presented. The vote was incredibly tight; the vice president position had to be decided in a run-off election. This year's seventh grade officers are President Kamryn Turcott, Vice President Ruby Kessinger, Secretary Peyton Cochran, and Secretary Reid Thomas.? Congratulations to all!

Common Core

Every couple of weeks someone asks me about Common Core, which I assume refers to Idaho Common Core Standards.  There seems to be a lot of confusion, mostly created by politicians who don’t understand what Common Core is about..

From Dictionary.com we learn that Common means “belonging equally to, or shared alike by, two or more…”

Core is defined as “central, innermost, or most essential part of anything.”

Standards refer to “something considered by an authority or by general consent as a basis of comparison.”

In Idaho we refer to a set of standards as the Idaho Common Core standards.  These standards have been developed by and adopted in 45 states and four U.S. Territories, thus the word Common.  A few large states developed their own standards.  The process of developing standards can be very time consuming and expensive.  Most states including Idaho, do not have the resources to develop their own standards.  Eight states have not adopted standards.

Core standards are those items that educational expects, not politicians, feel every student should know at a particular grade level.  The standards were developed from scratch and each grade level serves as a building block for the following year.  We have always had standards, but with each passing year new items were added and the former standards looked like the 1949,50,51,52,53 Ford that Johnny Cash sang about when he carried car parts out of the factory to build his own car.  The process took so many years even the headlights were not the same, with two on one side and one on the other.

Kindergarten Math standards call for all kindergarten students to 1) know number names and to be able to count to 100 by ones and tens, 2) count to tell the number of objects, 3) compare numbers (greater than and less than), 4) understand that addition is putting together and subtraction is taking apart 5) identify and describe shapes.

By seventh grade students should be able to understand and apply proportional relationships, understand operations with rational numbers and work with expressions and linear equations, be able to solve problems involving scale, draw inferences about populations based on samples.

Concepts that are not radical or new to math.  Concepts that students have been taught for generations.

Not only do the new standards provide a well thought out plan for children to learn from, but they also provide a way to compare the results of education in Idaho to education in other states.  Those politicians who want accountability should be happy to see that for once we can compare what Idaho kids know in the third grade to what a student in Kentucky knows.

Only then can we begin to see if students in Idaho are getting a good education.   The salary of a teacher in Idaho compared the salary of a teacher in Oregon does not tell us one thing about the quality of the teaching.  It only tells us that it costs more to live in Oregon than in Idaho.

If, after comparing how students perform, Idaho is lacking, then changes need to be made, but everyone needs to keep in mind that the single biggest predictor of success shown on the Idaho State Assessment Test is the poverty level of the school district. 

Kids are not widgets, each one comes to us in a different package and each one needs individual attention to be successful.