Common Core State Standards for School Leaders

Marc Tucker addresses recent backlash against the Common Core State Standards and explains why they will benefit disadvantaged students.

Look at a job description that a company owner passed along to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a piece he wrote about the paucity of trained American workers. The company owner was looking for a welder and was complaining about the quality of some who had applied:

"They could make beautiful welds," she said, "but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques" and how different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be combined. Moreover, in small manufacturing businesses like hers, explained [Traci] Tapani, "unlike a Chinese firm that does high-volume, low-tech jobs, we do a lot of low-volume, high-tech jobs, and each one has its own design drawings. So a welder has to be able to read and understand five different design drawings in a single day ... I can't think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it's bent to a certain angle."

A spokesman for the U.S. Secretary of Education said federal officials are thinking through the concerns about high stakes tied to the common core "carefully."

NCEE has just released What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?, a study of the English Literacy and Mathematics required for success in the first year of community college. On May 7th, during a day-long meeting, key education and policy leaders joined NCEE to discuss the results of the study and its implications for community college reform, school reform, teacher education, the common core state standards, and vocational education and the workplace.

In my own teaching practice, I felt that if I coaxed a non-reader to pick up a magazine or graphic novel or just about anything, I was succeeding. I tried to get them to fall in love with reading and learning by allowing them time to read whatever they wanted. I still believe offering such choices is important, but I have now come to understand that a balance is needed.

Renee Moore The majority of high school graduates in America do not go to college, at least not directly.

"while almost 50 percent of four-year college graduates are unemployed, 60 percent of all nursing graduates in the U.S. come from the nation's community colleges. Add to them the dental hygienists, plumbers, electricians, heating and air conditioning technicians, auto mechanics, chefs, office workers, medical-equipment operators and technicians, cosmetologists, barbers, truck drivers, and machine handlers, just to name a few of the people on whom we rely daily, and we realize it's the traditional college route that should be called alternative."

The Common Core Conversation

As the deadline for Common Core implementation nears, several states including Florida are hedging their bets as to whether all the pieces will be ready on time.

Common Core has teachers rushing to prepare,The clock is ticking on Common Core, and educators are rushing to learn how to effectively teach those new rigorous standards in the fall.

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post

I often despair over the sorry state of writing and research in our high schools. Only private schools and public schools with the International Baccalaureate diploma program require research papers of significant length. Two million new high school graduates head to college every year — but only 10 percent, by my reckoning — have had to write a long paper or do a major project.

The SBAC consortium has posted minimum computing requirements and a bandwidth calculator that schools can use to measure capacity. It has also said that it would supply paper-and-pencil versions of the assessments for the first three years. Willhoft predicted that some schools in California may decide to do both in the transition, trying computer-based tests in some grades, paper and pencil in others. (The paper version will cost $10 to $12 per student more to administer.)

What Close Reading Actually Means

Thus, what “close reading” really means in practice is disciplined re-reading of inherently complex and worthy texts.

As Tim Shanahan puts it in his helpful blog entry, “Because challenging texts do not give up their meanings easily, it is essential that readers re-read such texts,” while noting that “not all texts are worth close reading.”

Assessment 2.0 will need lots of work to get to version 2.1 and 2.2. States and districts will improve implementation as they learn from pilots and field tests. And teachers will play an absolutely critical role in providing the consortia feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.

In The Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern and Joel Klein write that the curriculum standards adopted by 45 states require students to read America's Founding texts.

one of the most promising education initiatives of the past half century

Each of the 12 original Race to the Top states, plus the seven third-round winners, promised to adopt and implement the common core standards.

Marc Tucker

Because about half of the high school graduates who go to college go to these institutions and because, of those who do, close to half go into programs designed to prepare them for careers and the other half goes into a program designed to enable them to transfer to four year colleges after two years.

"Say what you will about the Common Core authors, but for better or for worse, they were out to get things done, not get into debates, including the traditional debates over phonics.

“English language teachers have, for the most part, been treated as an afterthought in the discussions on the Common Core,” said TESOL Executive Director Rosa Aronson. “We held the convening to bring them into the conversation.”