Leeah

Baltimore, Maryland

9/21/16

Dear Future President,

Although I am very thankful to be granted with education, I've detected some problems in the public education system, I'm referring to Common Core State Standards. CCSS is a set standard of knowledge that is expected to be taught & learned by the end of a school year. I believe that CCSS is having a negative impact on kids and teachers.

School testing and common core state standards have negative impacts on teachers and students. According to NEA Today's survey, many teachers leave the profession of teaching rather than deal with the massive changes involving the new curriculum. The new standards bring more pressure to students, and teachers on their student’s performance. For students if they fail to understand the curriculum they tend to feel discouraged and stressed, and that leads to loss of curiosity in learning. According to the survey 72% of teachers stated that they felt moderate and/or extreme pressure in the classroom, which lead to teachers leaving their profession. In America teacher shortages are becoming a big problem, as stated in The Washington Post there has been a 35% decline of teacher enrolments in 2014, and also they were short 60,000 teachers as of last year. And the costs to recruit are averaged around $15,000 for every teacher who leaves. So losing teachers and staff isn’t easy because its costs a lot to hire replacements.

Let's go back to where this all began; CCSS was developed after the use of exams in 2002 in the "No child left behind" law. Now after this was developed there was reportedly less learning time, reduced content knowledge, harmful stress, and internalized failure. We want kids to feel encouraged about coming to school, not dreading it each morning. We want to increase their knowledge and their creativity but with the massive amount of tests every school year there is reportedly less learning time, which leads to less knowledge and understanding of content.

Imagine your child coming home from school on the verge of tears because he/she was not understanding the content learned in class. There has been many reports of children that come home in tears because "they don’t understand the material" or that "they weren't ready for a certain test". We cannot have children feeling this way about school we do not want them to lose interest in learning new things, because they often feel as if they have failed a certain task. On teenhelp.com they conducted a survey in Baltimore city on the youth’s top 5 reasons for stress and not surprisingly, schoolwork was number one, 78% of kids felt that schoolwork was their number one cause of stress. Stress at a young age is very unhealthy and an excessive amount of it can cause lifelong chronic diseases, panic and paralysis.

In the next year I'm hoping for a decreased amount of standardized testing and also I am hoping that the standards should be ranked on different ideas, for example; we should instead be monitored on our behavior and creativity, this will discipline kids and also have them enjoy school at the same time. Grading them on things like creativity will help them become more encouraged and excited for school. I am in no way saying to take away grading kids on their content knowledge I am suggesting that we add more ideas so our next generation of adults will feel welcome and encouraged to come to school.

I hope you take my letter seriously and my ideas in to consideration because I do believe it will make a massive impact on student’s lives. Keep in mind that the kids in school now are our future workers and educators of America and I hope you understand that it is important for everyone in America, because without them the world would be chaos.