Milford School Official: Common Core Gets Less Personal

Under the new Common Core State Standards, students will be required to read deeper into texts, sometimes reading a passage two or three times over before coming to a conclusion that more or less leaves them out of it.

“In the past you could read something and as long as you made a text-to-self connection it was perfectly fine,” Milford Assistant Superintendent Michael Cummings said at a community forum earlier this month.

Cummings was speaking in reference to CMT testing, which the Common Core’s Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is replacing in the spring of 2015.

To prepare students for the SBAC next school year, teachers in the district have started to discreetly embed sample “common assessments” in their curricula this year.

The SBAC is shorter than the CMT and CAPT, which it is also replacing, but is more in-depth than both tests, school officials say. Also, the new assessment is entirely on a computer and the ability to navigate a screen is graded.

Reading assessments under Common Core require that students present specific evidence from the text in their answers. This emphasis is a change from previous testing, Cummings said.

Cummings said the CMT might have asked a student, How does this passage relate to your life? The SBAC, by contrast, is more concerned with the richness of the work itself so the questions will be less personal and more textual.

The new state standards also require teachers to increase their focus on non-fiction. And texts will become increasingly complex as grades advance.

“Simply reading the things you’re comfortable reading isn’t going to make you a better reader,” Cummings said.

The last of three community forums on the Common Core State Standards is Wednesday, Dec. 4, at Harborside Middle School, at 6:30 p.m. For more on the sweeping educational state standards, see our original report here.