“We spent most of our summer adapting the Common Core so we can deliver it to our students before they’re tested in the spring of this [school] year,” Padalino said. “We’re starting school a week later this year so we can have four days of intense professional development to make sure our teachers know where they are and where they need to go. We’ve had about 48 different development teams working together this summer to put together the curriculum, and we’re going to be rolling that out for our staff. Our whole professional development calendar, which we put up on the web for the first time is something the administrative team sat down and said, ‘These people need to know they’re going to get the support they need.’ And so we put together the professional development calendar that’s been available since Aug. 1, so our teachers know we’re frontloading a lot of it in the beginning, and then providing those boosters throughout the year. We’re focused on effectively implementing the Common Core.”
Measuring Montessori
While that may be enough of a challenge in most of the district, it’s especially so at George Washington Elementary School, the district’s lone Montessori program which has struggled to keep pace with the rest of the district on standardized testing in the past. 2012-13 was no different.
Though the Montessori method eschews traditional grade levels, students were tested based on the grade they would be in elsewhere based on their age. For George Washington students taking third-grade tests, just 3.4 percent met or exceeded standards in ELA testing in 2012-13, compared to 24.4 percent one year earlier. That same group saw 4.9 percent of its students meeting, but not exceeding, standards this year, compared to 28.6 in 2011-12.
Of the George Washington students taking the fourth-grade test in ELA, just 5.3 percent met or exceeded standards this year, compared to 43.5 percent last year. And in math, 5.3 percent met, but did not exceed, standards, compared to 46.7 percent last year.
Students taking the fifth-grade tests saw 18 percent meet or exceed standards in ELA, compared to 15.8 last year, the only area where the school saw an improvement. And in math, 6 percent met or exceeded standards in 2012-13, compared to 19.3 percent last year.
George Washington Principal Valerie Hannum was unavailable for comment, but Padalino said the Common Core is being adapted as much as possible to fit the school’s different method of teaching.
“It’s going to be an interesting year for George Washington,” Padalino said. “Even the old curriculum was a stretch in the Montessori program, but they were able to adapt. And they’re working the same way this year, adapting the standards with the message. With the Common Core, they’re telling us what to teach, not how to teach it. And I think that’s kind of the slogan for our Montessori program. We know what we want our students to learn, how they get there, honestly, I don’t care as long as they get there. The students will have what they need to know, they’re just doing it differently than they are in other buildings.”
Padalino said that he expects the next round of test scores to show improvement across the board, but that it’s likely that improvement will happen incrementally over time because the standards are so much more stringent than in years past.
“I think it will be gradual,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to see a spike up like you did with our spike down. The Common Core is a more rigorous curriculum. Some things we taught in the fifth grade we’re now teaching in the third or the fourth. It’s going to take some time to get used to the pace and the depth of knowledge that’s expected.”
