It's quite the indoctrination program, from Zaner Bloser.

Make sure you watch the You-Tube. Mind-numbing.

http://www.missourieducationwatchdog.co ... souri.html

I see the first post was last August, but I have to say that having experienced Common Core, this is appalling. Let me preface this post with the fact that we are beginning homeschool now for our ds and youngest dd. There are many reasons for bringing them home, but CCSS is a big factor. Since our oldest dd fared the best with CCSS and only has 3 years to graduate, she will be continuing at the public high school. We are watching closely and ready to pull her out at a moment's notice, if necessary, though.

Our background: we homeschooled our oldest dd to the end of 4th grade and ds to the end of 1st grade. Through a series of unfortunate events, they ended up in the public school system. God was gracious and provided them and our youngest dd with quite a few good teachers that outweighed the bad ones. Even so, we experienced a bit of CCSS when the school system we were in started implementing them. Ds suffered the most under this system, but we moved to a smaller community that had not started implementing the standards. We enjoyed the last semester of 2011-2012 school year without the added struggle, but then the public schools started implementing the CCSS.

Last fall, I started to see a change for the worse in my children.
Oldest dd: started to experience more drama with other students, had teachers who could not effectively communicate the goal of the assignments to her and experienced a lot of jumping around the material because the teachers could not figure out what they were supposed to be doing. In spite of the struggles, she managed to maintain a high GPA while maintaining her walk with the Lord.

Ds: was doing okay spiritually, continuing to exhibit great Godly character traits as always, but he started struggling with the progressively negative attitudes of his peers. In addition to feeling more of a disconnect from the students, he began to struggle with following the material being covered in class. Without the use of real textbooks in exchange for copies of random worksheets without lessons that were rarely handed back or gone over, there was nothing to "look back at" for reference and studying. It took me a while to figure all of this out, but we did manage to help him maintain all A's and B's.

Youngest dd: Dd is extremely intelligent and the teacher could not keep up with her. With the implementation of CCSS, it seemed that the teacher struggled with doing anything outside of the lessons that she and the other second grade teachers had planned. Dd started coming home with behavior problems from the beginning of the school year. I was shocked to see that she could not maintain expected behavior for a month. It took until February to realize that she was coming home with behavior marks because she was bored. I sent some supplemental materials to school for her to work on after completing assignments, but instead of giving her the materials, the teacher made dd her personal helper. She was not being challenged educationally, and she was coming home with a very negative attitude toward us. We are now having to reverse the undermining of our authority in her life as well as how she relates to others who are not her age. Thankfully we have the flexibility to challenge her with mostlly 4th grade work while she is still young enough to work on parental respect and consideration of others.

I am looking forward to homeschooling but also wonder how outspoken I need to be on the CCSS subject since the implementation of the standards did not serve our family well. The thing that amazes me the most is the number of curricula publishers who are jumping on the CCSS bandwagon. I am riddled with so many questions: Why are so many publishers so quick to join forces? Who makes the decision about whether to align curricula to CCSS? How many companies out there already exceed the standards (as do all of our curriculum choices)? Are we going to eventually have to struggle to find curricula that does not merely meet the standards but exceeds them?

As most homeschoolers do, I have high educational standards for my children. Common Core State Standards may not be infringing on our ability or right to homeschool our children, but I do believe this is an issue that cannot be ignored long-term. At what point do our states begin to try to require that all curricula be aligned to CCSS? I live in North Carolina where every homeschool is a privately named private school under the Division of Non-Public Education. I am thankful for the freedom we have to choose our curricula. It is due to the pioneers of home education in our state who fought via legislation for the right to homeschool and issue a diploma upon graduation without having to go through another organization. As the administrators of our school, my dh and I have the privilege of determining what course work constitutes a credit, completing a transcript and issuing a diploma when all credits required for graduation have been earned.

I am interested in what others have to say about Common Core Standards because it is not going away. If you are one of the fortunate ones in a state refusing to adopt CCSS, you are fortunate; however, I do think it wise for everyone to become educated on this issue. I do not want to start any arguments, but I do love to discuss issues so that we can all learn more about the issue.

I know I'm one to steer clear of anything that's "standards", but I do know that many homeschoolers have to abide by whatever their state guidelines are, which is really sad. I believe Indiana didn't go with CCS nor did MO. I think there is one other state as well that I can't remember.

I think there's a lot of parents that don't take an active roll in the way they should putting too much reliance on government.

Excellent post.

On another board I was on, one of the moms posted that she'd been at Mardel's looking at all the stuff that's labeled as aligned with Common Core -- she was looking at 6th grade stuff and said that it looked to her more like what she would expect of a 3rd grader...

And it's not going to get any better!

Texas is another state that does not do common core thank god.