Tech Solves Teachers' Common Core Woes

Common Core continues to receive poor grades from teachers.  A poll released by Gallup reveals that 60-65% of America’s teachers are “frustrated” or “worried” about Common Core.

A main concern is the standardized testing that measures students’ performance on a benchmark curriculum.  Educators are expected to teach at a faster pace than ever before, which can be especially difficult for more intangible subjects, like writing. One tech company believes it can fix this though. Citelighter says its writing platform reduces the burden of Common Core on teachers.  Saad Alam, CEO of Citelighter says, “We shifted our focus to teachers and finding out what problems they were having and built this platform to fix Common Core writing issues.”   The Citelighter platform allows students to take information from the internet, compile it into a main idea, and then organize those ideas into a full research paper. Alam says, “Teachers are able to create Common Core-aligned writing assignments with templates and outlines…the teacher can communicate directly with the student through the platform and see exactly where they are struggling.”   The platform is also saving teachers' valuable time.  Citelighter boasts that it can save teachers 310 hours over the year.   And it’s not only the teachers who are benefitting from the platform.  Eight-year old students at Norwood Elementary, a low-income school in Maryland, were able to write research papers in two and half weeks.  Lincoln High School in Detroit saw students improve their writing skills by 40% in just three months. Citelighter is currently being used in 3,000 schools over 50 countries.  Its success shows that the private sector can fix problems that the public sector just can’t figure out.