Why Home Schoolers Should Care About Common Core Standards

My Disclaimer and Introduction
I am going to begin this post with a disclaimer in stead of a true introduction.  I know that this is not the post most of you are expecting to, or frankly wanting to, read.  Over the last few weeks I have read many articles about the Common Core Standards that discouraged me greatly.  Please keep in mind that I wrote in the title "Standards" and will continue to base my argument on Common Core Standards (CCS), not the specific curriculum proposed or supported by the government at various levels. I will also not make many statements about the elementary level of these standards because I do not teach elementary students; this is mostly due to the fact that I can barely handle the way a 7th grader crafts a sentence and can't add or subtract without the use of my fingers even when my life actually depends on it. However, based on what I have studied of the secondary level of these standards in my content areas, the primary level cannot be too terribly different at least in their level of expectations for students.

My Credentials
I'm not sure if all of these things I'm about to list really qualify as "credentials," but they will answer your question "Why is she qualified to even have an opinion on this?"
I was home schooled from Kindergarten through 4th grade with no real supplemental classes but many group field trips and activities.  In 5th grade I went to a tiny elementary school in Canton, Ga where I stayed through 6th grade.  In 7th grade I went to a slightly larger, but still small in comparison, middle school in the same area for exactly 6 weeks when I had to transfer to a large and brand new middle school in a different county due to a move.  I hated that school so much that, after finding out my 3 sisters got into a private school which didn't have room for me, I decided to revert to being home schooled so I didn't have to go back.  I spent 8th grade being guided by my mother but essentially teaching myself science, history, and language arts while taking supplemental classes for Algebra I.  I spent all of High School at a school which, at the time, we called a "Home-school school" but is now considered a University Style School. As the name implies, students spend fewer days in class being taught by a teacher than they do on their own doing homework. They come out of school with a High School Diploma from an accredited educational institution.  I even joint-enrolled at my chosen university my senior year (which I learned later was very wise and was the only reason I was able to graduate on time).  It was awesome.
After high school, I attended a state university with the 3rd largest education program in the state and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in History Education.  I acquired other state certifications in Middle School Social Studies and Science and spent my first year teaching supplemental classes at a church-affiliated home school program before getting a job at the school I graduated from teaching 7th Grade Science.  This year, my second year at the school and third year teaching, I added World History and Economics making me a busy and diverse addition to the faculty.  Oh, and I also added a child to their (free to staff) pre-school.
All of this to say, I am a home school graduate, certified teacher to home school students (and their parents), and future home school mom.  I am "qualified" to discuss both the "real teacher" and "home school" perspectives of this issue, in case you were in doubt.

My Argument
So, what is my argument?  It is as follows: The new Common Core Standards are one of the most valuable tools the Federal Government has ever made available to the home-educating public.

My Reasoning
Here are just a few reasons I disagree with many home schoolers' fear of the Common Core Standards and support their usage by public schools as well as home schoolers both affiliated with a school or completely independent.

1. They answer the question "What should my 3rd grader be able to do?" with resounding clarity.
I just recently looked at the common core standards for my classes (7th Grade Science, 10th Grade History, and 12th Grade Economics) and nearly laughed.  This is it? THIS is what all the fuss is about?  It's a list of things these kids should be able to do by the end of the year, or set of years.  Things like "Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text."  If a 12th grade Social Studies student can't do this by the time they graduate, their success in further education (whether college or a job-specific training program) is in severe jeopardy. These expectations are tiered based on age.  A 6th grader is only expected to be able to figure out a word's meaning based on context while a 12th grader needs to be able to easily do that as well as differentiate the dictionary definition from how the author uses the word. These standards establish grade, not age level, expectations.  If the standards for 3rd grade expect more than what your 8 year old is capable of even attempting, maybe your 8 year old should not be in 3rd grade.  This tool gives parents, both public and home educating, power to place their child in the correct educational group based on ability and not on age. It also gives legitimacy to educational institutions' placement tests.  If your student is a senior and having trouble with accomplishing many of the tasks expected of them in these standards but still expects to attend college classes next year, you may want to consider some sort of college-prep program before asking or expecting them to succeed in those classes.

2. They do not answer the question "What should my 6th grader know?" nor do they attempt to.
These are performance standards.  Performance standards do not address what someone should know, only what they should be able to do.  The state of Georgia has something called Georgia Performance Standards (which are misnamed presumably for the favorable acronym of GPS) that lay out what content each class should contain.  The World History standards are both exceedingly broad and void of interesting detail, but are helpful in paring down (even if only slightly) what of all 6000+ years of history is really important for my students to know before they leave my class.  This helps guide me in both planning my daily lessons and test writing.  The new CCS should do the same--the state standards (which my school adapts to fit our specific educational and religious goals as home school parents do) guide content while the CCS guides cognitive development.  Technically, my students will get smarter if I teach the same exact way to my 7th graders, my 10th graders, and my 12th graders because they will be adding content.  Your home schooled student will too. The differentiation that the CCS lays out for each level, however, guides cognitive development and aids students in gradually becoming more independent learners.  This can be accomplished in a home school setting, for example, through having your student read gradually more involved texts with gradually less guidance.  As a teacher, I don't expect my 7th graders to glean much from reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle without guided questions.  However, I do expect my 10th graders to read parts of the Magna Carta and explain to me, with only a few general questions, what it means and how it impacted both government and society.  My Seniors get very little guidance—they read about Keynesian and Classical economics on their own and then come to class and solve all of the government's problems from both perspectives in 30 minutes or less.  As you can see, the Federal Government is not laying out content expectations that each teacher must convey but asking for teachers to foster cognitive development by giving them clear guidelines as to what each group of students should be able to do by the end of the year or set of years.

3. They can not accomplish a "teach to the test" class format.
Content-based standards, such as GPS,  foster a teach to the test attitude by setting up exact items a teacher needs to teach and test on in a given year.  For the CCS, the standards (for secondary education) are broken up into 3 groups: 6-8th grade, 9-10th grade, 11-12th grade.  This disallows for any one teacher to 1) Teach ONLY what is in his or her standards, or 2) Formulate one test to prove proficiency in each area.  Could such a test be formulated and given at the end of each level? Possibly.  But why would you? Success on tests such as the SAT's and ACT's already show whether students have mastered many of these abilities.  SAT's and ACT's are cognitive abilities tests, not content tests, and  through them schools and states were "graded" on these standards long before the "rubric" of the CCS came into existence.  One note, the new CCS do create problems for teachers, especially those who have 120+ students.  Teachers do need to have some sort of evaluations to make sure that their students are on track and teachers with this many students have a hard time performing these evaluations.  Sure, some of these standards can be assessed by normal multiple choice tests that are graded on a Scantron machine, but many require written answers which overworked and underpaid teachers do not have time for.  I have slightly more time for this as my class sizes are smaller and I have fewer in-class hours a week, however I teach 3 different subjects to roughly 85 students and do have a hard time carving out 3-5 hours of my home (read: unpaid) time every 2 weeks to carefully grade and provide feedback on each evaluation.  This leads to my next point...

4.  They could foster interdepartmental cooperation.
How do I know if my student in history is capable of determining the meaning of words in a text from the context?  Ask the language arts teacher to see his grades from their literature test.  How does the language arts teacher know if a student shows domain-specific literacy?  She asks me to see the matching section from Life Science test.  I'm not super creative in this realm and and probably too independent as a teacher for my own or my student's good, but I see the possibility of actually using the village in which I am a part to teach each student.  For a home schooling parent this process of evaluation is much easier; you grade all their tests, so you are able to see patterns of weakness or strength more clearly.  You are also able to more easily merge subjects.  While reading a history textbook will not satisfy literature class requirements, it is a very simple way to accomplish history work as well as testing for reading and vocabulary proficiencies simultaneously.  Stopping students to re-read ares they have fumbled (for younger students reading aloud) or giving a list of words at the beginning of the text that students must define accurately as they read (for older students) are ways of assessing multiple proficiencies all at once.

5. They have downsides, which prove they were written by humans and not computers.
Someone has to decide what makes the cut and what doesn't and there is a reason that person's name isn't published next to the title.  Some will say the standards are too advanced for certain age groups while being too easy for others.  Some will say it creates too much work for teachers while others say this is what teachers have been doing all along.  Some will say the federal government is trying to socialize and standardize all education while others will say having standards to meet is the only way to prove a student's progress.  All of these arguments have a certain level of legitimacy but none of them discount the invaluable nature of these standards to teachers and parents.

Conclusion
While I am certain that many fears will be realized through these new CCS, I cannot discount their helpfulness. When a brand new teacher looks at her rowdy bunch of 5 year olds beginning a new year of Kindergarten with varying levels of abilities, she can look at these standards as a guide to help all of her students exceed most of these standards by the end of they year and know that she has done a good job.  When a home schooling parent looks at their 8th grader's work and wonders if 4 years is enough time to get them to college or other future readiness, they have tools to evaluate their current strengths and weaknesses and standards to help guide them so they can meet the future prepared for whatever it holds. When I look at the test of a Senior who intends to go to college in a 9 months I can give specific feedback to help them improve skills that they will need to have in order to succeed in higher education.      This is the reality of the Common Core Standards—a way to help each student make sure they at least meet, but hopefully exceed, the expectations that educational institutions and society will inevitably place on them for their future. No tool is perfect, each has its weakness.  But, if used for its intended purpose, it usually creates a finished product worth its weight.

Primary Sources from the Common Core State Standards Initiative website:
1. http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RH/11-12 (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.4 quoted in pint one of the "My Reasoning" section.) 
2. http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/6-8
3. http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RH/9-10