(Editor’s Note: The Common Core has been much in the news in the last few months. Here’s a comment from the president of Greater Atlanta Christian School on the subject. –eeb)
By Dr. David Fincher | To ensure we are on the same page, Common Core is an educational initiative in the U.S. that details what K-12 students should know in math and English. It’s been a political football at times – but that’s not our focus.
Fincher
Our focus at Greater Atlanta Christian School is the best interest of our students, to think, thrive, and lead ahead. Common Core seeks to create a national platform so that children might find the same learning standards, so to give American students a chance to catch up to the rising international learning of developed nations. It also focuses on a new set of skills and knowledge that 21st-century kids need to know, but which many local public districts haven’t adopted.
Here are four outlooks of where GAC stands on the Common Core:
- As a Christian school with a vision of uncommon, faith-filled learning for our students, we are thrilled to be independent, not under the auspices of state and local government school requirements. We hold dear our independence because we’ve seen too often various layers of local, state, and federal bureaucracies impose the latest initiatives, only to run to the opposite pole shortly after. GAC is not required to adopt government school policies in this area—or our students would lose a key portion of the engine that makes us special, in our independence to think differently and autonomously.
- GAC is always observant and quick to adopt research-based best practices in uncommon, unmatched learning for our students, no matter where we find it. We don’t ever reject a concept or a great practice simply because it was born in a state or federal department. Our view is that the Common Core has some values, some standards that are good, even great. Yet Common Core standards are not the cap, the peak to which we take our students. They can serve as a baseline upon which GAC can build even more for our students.
We believe there are risks in external standards, both to our school’s heart of faith and to the fire of creativity we want to build in students. GAC has no plans to steal from our students’ creativity to force them into a national singular mold of learning. In addition, any standards we adopt must provide great room for faith in Christ and all of his character and ethics for our children.
- Extraordinary Christian teachers play a mighty hand in uncommon outcomes for students. Standards are good, but they pale in comparison to the impact of superb, caring teachers. That is why GAC administrators are dedicating attention to finding and attracting the absolute best teachers to join our faculty, and then committing extraordinary attention to their success, additional education, and evaluation for improvement. Uncommon Christian teachers are the linchpins of student success, far above written standards.
So do we favor defined outcomes (standards) for learning? Absolutely. We already have adopted outcomes – and will regularly adopt new and higher standards in the future.
Some of those will match Common Core, and many others will surpass it. Yet we hold even dearer the creativity standards, our freedom from governmental bureaucracy, deep commitment to attracting and growing superb Christian faculty, and the essence of Christian faith and ethics in every lesson.
The formula for GAC success for a generation of students…is anything but common.
Dr. David Fincher is president of Greater Atlanta Christian School.
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