Common Core State Standards for School Leaders

How do you prepare a child for the working world? Experts say the same courses, skills are needed.

The District of Columbia has devoted many resources to the standards, resulting in hopes, frustrations, and the knowledge that changes are necessary.

"The district has done this more comprehensively than most places in the country," says Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which analyzed the district's emerging common-core program. "DCPS is in full tilt, whole-hog."

"Mr. Casserly's report pointed out a pivotal trickle-down challenge facing the district as it puts the common core into practice: "how the reforms conceived at the central-office level are put into place in schools and classrooms." Also daunting: the "significant" amount of professional development teachers need and the "enormous gaps" in students' skills and knowledge."

In this post, we suggest asking Who is doing the work? as one lens for analyzing and evaluating Common Core lessons.

A $2.2 million grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust will help Khan Academy expand offerings to help teachers and students with the common-core math standards.

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.

An organization that focuses on advancing professional development for educators has said that it's time for state education leaders to reform their training efforts to address the transition to the Common Core State Standards.

Speaking at an event sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers(CCSSO) incoming Council President, Kentucky Education Commissioner, Terry Holiday, had some choice words for school reformers and Common Core detractors.

Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Indiana, asked U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan what academic standards besides the Common Core are college- and career-ready.

Duncan said..."Both Virginia and Minnesota have college- and career-ready standards and aren’t in common core. (Actually, Minnesota is a halfway state. It’s adopted common core in language arts, but not math.)"

It’s likely whatever Indiana ends up with will build on the nationally-crafted academic standards currently adopted by 45 states.

Critical thinking and analytical thinking are not the same thing. To clarify the difference between these words, let's look at their etymology (word origins). According to the dictionary, "analyze" means to break apart into essential elements. The opposite of analyze is synthesize, or put together. "Criticize" means to evaluate or make a judgment regarding the merits or faults. The opposite of criticize in one sense would be praise, or in another sense absence of judgment. Simply looking at the two definitions, it is glaringly obvious that two different skill sets are required. So why are they often lumped together? The dictionary definition of this answer would be a stupor of thought, or the condition of not thinking.

In a rebuttal to the AFT president's call for a moratorium on high-stakes consequences for the common core, Chiefs for Change calls for holding fast to accountability.

Academic preparation isn’t the only factor in college readiness. Also helping to determine whether students get to (college) graduation are social behaviors, like whether they show up for class, engage with professors and make eye contact. A new assessment from the Education Testing Service (ETS) seeks to measure those non-academic variables.

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.