Admissions

The Common Core is a set of learning standards in the core subjects (math and English-language arts with the Common Core-related NGSS standards in science) that have been developed by educational experts to delineate what students should be learning at each grade level.

As part of our curriculum review cycle, a process in which all our curriculum is reviewed every four years, we compare our learning expectations to a variety of standards including California state standards and Common Core standards. In this process we carefully consider areas where we may not be currently developing student learning and assess whether we should add or modify our curriculum to include those standards.

Standards are essential for student learning. They ensure that our teacher instruction is guided and intentional. Good instruction is always built on good standards.

There is very little controversy in the actual Common Core standards. The concern that many parents and specifically some Christian parents have had with Common Core has been in the pedagogical approach used to instruct with the standards. The standards themselves have nothing to do with pedagogy (the word “pedagogy” refers to “how we teach”). Dominant instructional methods in much of education today reflect a worldview that fails to reflect aspects of a biblical worldview. A Christian approach to instruction reflects the fact that the children we are teaching have the ability to learn because they are made in the image of God and like their Creator have creative capacity themselves. They are uniquely made and possess significant capacity, innate curiosity, a joy in discovery, and a desire to make sense of the world around them. At the same time, because of the Fall, they are incapable of avoiding doing bad things. Therefore, good learning requires structure, consequences to poor behavior and good classroom management. Instruction that denies an objective reality fails to reflect the world for the way the world really is and is destined for eventual failure. We embrace a pedagogy that reflects a biblical understanding of the world knowing that this will ensure student success. As new ideas emerge in education we assess them against this lens of understanding provided by the biblical worldview framework. This reflects the axiom that all truth is God’s truth.

Absolutely. The great thing about being an independent school is that we can make our own curriculum decisions. We can selectively choose the best elements to include in our curriculum and the best resources to support our teachers in instructing students in that curriculum.