Dear Parents,
In the past few days, we have received several questions from parents about the Common Core and its relevance at Brother Martin High School. We have also heard that there have been several news stories recently about parents of Catholic school students who are questioning the effectiveness and appropriateness of this program in their sons’ and daughters’ schools. I want to take a few minutes of your time to explain the relationship between the Common Core and Brother Martin High School to address any questions and/or concerns you might have.
The goal of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is to develop a set of shared national standards ensuring that students in every state are held to the same level of academic expectations.
As you may know, the CCSS have been adopted by over forty states in our country. Prior to the CCSS, states had their own set of academic standards.
The push for consistent and high expectations comes in response to the failure of American students to live up to the standards reached by children in many other countries, including our European and Asian counterparts.
The CCSS are NOT curriculum. Rather, they are an articulation of content and skills that students should know at specific benchmark grade levels.
The CCSS are aligned with college and work expectations.
At Brother Martin, key administrators, department chairs, and some members of departments have attended workshops related to the integration of the Common Core.
While Brother Martin cooperates fully with the expectations of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ Office of Catholic Schools, we are autonomous in terms of developing our curriculum, choosing our instructional strategies, and developing assessments. We do follow and exceed curriculum guidelines mandated by the Louisiana State Department of Education for courses earning high school credit.
Brother Martin is excited about aspects of the Common Core that will immediately benefit our students. The Common Core advocates best practices in education that have been utilized in schools for the last thirty years. Strategies such as project-based learning, close reading of texts, increased use of informational texts, and student-centered activities that require thinking skills on the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Thinking Skills are all strategies we have been using and want to increase using for the betterment of our students.
Our departmental curriculum work in developing a scope and sequence based on ACT’s College Readiness skills is in direct alignment with Common Core expectations.
Brother Martin has not fully adopted the CCSS. We will use the best part of the CCSS to supplement our own already-effective instruction. We will continue to teach, assess, and form students in the charism of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, as we have been doing for 144 years; prepare students for college and beyond; teach boys not how only “to make a living but how to make a life,” as espoused by our namesake Brother Martin Hernandez, S.C.; and learn from the best in educational research to constantly improve what we do with our students so that we can “meet the needs of a changing world,” as identified in our mission statement.
Please feel free to contact me or any of our academic department chairs if you have any specific questions about our curriculum, our classroom instructional strategies and assessments, and our use of Common Core practices. We welcome your questions and your feedback, and we hope this email has answered some of the questions you might have about the Common Core.
Sincerely,
Thomas Mavor
Vice Principal for Academics
