#parentsmatter

We Care for Parents as Much as Students

At Sethi International, we don’t just handle visas — we build trust. Our team keeps parents informed with honest updates, helps with safety planning, and recommends the best accommodation options. We make sure parents feel confident that their child is in safe hands, even when they are thousands of miles away.

Imagine being a parent after a global disaster, which left behind a world where survivors fend for themselves however they can.  Society gone, compassion ignored, morality forgotten.  You’d think you could protect and parent your child however you saw fit, but what if you lived in a survivor camp where the decision wasn’t up to you?

Could you spend much time with your children with so much to do?  

Could you calm an angry youth who won’t listen when they don’t get their way?  

Could you abide watching someone teach a child how to fight zombies rather than allowing grownups to protect them?  

Could you stand watching others with children after you had lost your own?

Q: What is Common Core?

At the heart of Common Core is an organized set of expectations for student learning. That's it - a list of things to know in each grade that builds with each level you reach.

Q: Why is Common Core hated so much?

When Common Core State Standards were introduced, it served as an easy catch-phrase for the political world to use for anything they didn't like about the education system as a whole. In reality, everybody wholly agrees that students should be held to appropriate standards of learning that develop skills throughout each grade level.

Q: So what's the problem?

People disagree on two things: (1) *what skills* a child should learn at each grade level, and (2) *how* a child should learn those skills.

Q: That doesn't make sense - the government doesn’t know my child. How does "the government" know what and how my child should learn?

Well, they do and they don't. How an individual learns is complicated, but researchers have discovered in the past few decades much about how we learn. Yes, everybody is different, but there are skills that must develop in a particular pattern in order for higher-level learning to make sense.

Q: OK, but why are states requiring these standards in the first place?

Before standards, schools focused on what the teacher was teaching rather than what the student was learning.

In 1997 each state released their own standards for learning. It turned out that different states felt their students should be held to higher or lower standards of learning. Some states had much higher graduation rates because there state expectations were so low - it was easy to get a high school diploma in these states, but those graduates were less prepared for the new global job market. Other states had higher standards of learning causing lower graduation rates.

In 2007, a "common" set of standards fixed that problem and set a minimum bar for "core" skills that all states must require to ensure students are learning the necessary set of skills to compete in the global job market.

Q: What does it matter? Don't we all learn the same things anyway?

If you were in school before 1997, you were only ever expected to learn what your teacher was teaching which was probably different than every other teacher and school in the country.

If you were in school between 1997 and 2007, you were expected to learn what your state was requiring teachers to teach - which was different from state to state.

Q: How do we know these states were so different?

In 2005, a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was given to various schools in 32 states. Wyoming, which had an estimated 39% proficiency rate (grade 8), scored HIGHEST on this national assessment. North Carolina, which had an estimated 88% proficiency rate (grade 8), scored LOWEST on this national assessment. It wasn't the exact scores that were of concern - it was the significant difference in scores and proficiency rates between states that caused such great concern.

Q: I still think Common Core isn't right.

Remember that the Common Core State Standards are only a list of things your child should know - it may help to consider these lists as guidelines. Use them to help *your* child develop the skills that are necessary to succeed in education. Separate these guidelines and learning objectives from the politics/money involved - don't blur the two - focus on the objective: your child needs to know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide in increasingly complicated ways. Use these standards as a path for success as your child grows and is developmentally prepared to move forward down that path.

Q: How will I know what steps to take?