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In the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine, FL, we are struggling with the issue of Advanced 7th grade and Algebra 1 8th grade, too. We don’t WANT to offer these courses because we believe enrichment is the way to go for the few truly gifted students we have in each of our 23 elementary schools and the Common Core is already advanced, both in its content and its critical thinking expectations. But, we compete with public schools offering IB programs, 8th grade Honors Alg. 1, etc. and our tuition paying parents insist that their students be placed in “accelerated” courses in 7th and 8th grades. For now, we will need to accommodate.
On that note, does anyone know of a “placement test” that might reliably tell us if an incoming 7th grader is capable of handling the Common Core 7th Grade Advanced course and also one for the 8th Grade Algebra 1? And, are there already tests available that we might give quarterly in each of these courses that could be used as formative assessments to help us figure out what to do with students who might be having difficulty? The PARCC assessments will likely tell us what we need to know, but we can’t wait until 2014-2015.
Also, ALL teachers in the Diocese, including those in the 4 high schools will be using the problems from illustrativemathematics.org in their daily lessons. Thank you for these excellent problems! They are awesome.
