LCS Grades 7-8 Course Descriptions 2011-2012

Chasing A Shiny Penny

By:  Bob Schaffer, LCHS Principal

Liberty’s students are fortunate they are surrounded by loving parents who are actively involved in deciding not only how their kids learn but what their kids learn.  It’s the trademark advantage of an excellent charter school.

A full sprint toward national academic standards has been underway for the past few years.  With the financial backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, two serious groups – the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers – have designed and are implementing something called “The Common Core Standards.” 

Within just a few months of unveiling of the Common-Core plan on June 2, 2010, over 40 states had officially committed themselves to adopting it.  By just one vote, Colorado did, too.   

Only the Common-Core standards for mathematics and English language arts have been introduced so far.  To entice swift conformity, the U.S. Department of Education is writing big checks to states that adopt the new national standards as part of their “reform” plans.  

Embracing the idea of core standards is nothing new at Liberty.  In fact, it’s a concept that brands Liberty and the Liberty family.  Liberty’s core standards are, of course, built upon the privately developed and time-tested Core Knowledge Curriculum. 

Colorado’s adoption of the Common Core standards will clearly have an impact on Liberty and not always for the better.  (CLICK HERE to see why I opposed Colorado’s adoption of the plan).  The national standards will drive the state’s assessment system which is applied to all public-school students including ours.

Last year’s CSAP test (Colorado’s foremost assessment tool) was the last CSAP test your kids will ever take.  Next spring, your kids will be required to take the state’s new transitional test – called TCAP – which will be half based on the new standards and half based on existing standards.  The full transition will be completed in 2014.

Liberty is not constrained to teaching to the state standards as most public schools are.  Our teachers are clearly knowledgeable of the state standards and we certainly accommodate them until they depart too much from our more-ambitious Core Knowledge Sequence.  Yet, because we do so very well on state assessments, we brag about our high scores all the time. 

Parents are asking me with greater frequency these days about the Common Core standards and what they mean for Liberty. Since they’re still in the development stage, it’s hard to say with precision.  Carefulness, however, is certainly in order.

Going forward, it is clear Liberty needs to be vigilant never losing sight of our foundational vision and dedication to our philosophy and curriculum.  The temptation to chase the shiny penny of the newest national trend will surely tug at our classical, time-tested methods which, by comparison, may likely be panned by some as old fashioned, obsolete and dull.  

Already, there is concern about the politics that went into the Common Core’s math standards.  There’s the reality that Colorado’s standards seem fine when compared to say Wyoming’s, but seem anemic when compared to Finland’s and Taiwan’s.  More on that next week. 

In the meantime, amid these immense national discussions, asserting active judgment on the parent-derived standards of our excellent charter school continues to give a very powerful advantage to all Liberty students.