Parents’ Guides to Student Success
This guide, based on the Common Core State Standards, provides an overview for parents on key mathematics and English language arts/literacy content that their children will learn by the end of each year, from kindergarten through 12th grade. It also offers parents ideas for activities to help their children at home and topics that parents can raise with their children’s teachers when discussing academic progress.
This National PTA Guide’s title page, with its several bullets, effectively describes the purposes of this resource. While a fair number of these purposes are met, the Guide’s attempt to cover such an expansive topic across K-12 education in just 24 pages leads to a fair number of compromises. The authors have had to narrow the standards in grades K through 8 and even more severely in high school, which is treated as a single subtopic. A fair amount of the actual text is repeated for each grade and some of the text is a bit confusing, as seen in this example for Kindergarten: “Ask your child questions that require counting as many as 20 things. For example, ask, ‘Do many children have more than 20 books about wild animals?”” While clarity is generally one of the resource’s strengths, some parents – especially those whose first language is other than English – may find some sentences long or concepts confusing. Utility is likely to be highest at the early elementary level. Because this document covers so much content, it seems unlikely to have a major effect on learning.