"The Common Core asks us to increase text complexity and to use less scaffolding. But exposing students to frustration-level text can cause them to feel inferior and lose motivation. To meet the needs of a diverse student population and the Common Core...
Journalism, Arts, and Media (JAM) is an emerging network of after school programs that support elementary school age students in meeting the new Common Core State Standards...
...by moving students from the passive recall of content to being the creators and producers of their very own content.
The video starts out with a young girl holding an iPad, getting ready to film another girl who is about to speak. This is all part of the new program, JAM. JAM is a Journalism, Arts, and Media course that is incorporated into the common core standards to help students become “college ready”. First of all, I didn’t understand what college actually was until very late middle school. I’ve heard of the word college, but it didn’t mean anything until about 8th or 9th grade. Preparing students to become “college ready” makes me a little sad at times because I understand it is important for children to have a set skill set to take with them to college, but I feel that preparing students for college at the elementary level is too soon. Elementary school was all about learning, exploring, and having fun. By imposing big goals, such as college, some students may stress about what their futures will hold, thus creating a society of overlyfuture-obsessed adults instead of students who live for the moment and in the present.
Anyways, overall, the JAM program is actually very interesting and cool. JAM uses the media – video, images, and audio to make a product of students’ work, instead of just handing in a paper. Ed Madison, an instructor at the Media Arts Institute comments that when he was in school he had to write a term paper, whereas now with the new common core standards a “term paper” includes images, video, and audio. This is actually pretty great because by adding different methods of expressing what a student learns makes learning more exciting. Instead of writing a paper, a student can make a video and present his argument on camera! An elementary school student commented in the video saying “it’s kinda fun because you sorta get to see your ideas sorta come to life instead of just writing them” and hearing a child say he is enjoying the method is great because that means that the child is learning and enjoying seeing his work and what he learned orally and visually. This is a new way to approach measuring success, and I think it’s a good step in the right direction because not everyone will become an exceptional writer or what-have-you. Some students may have strengths in other areas, such as photography, for instance. This will also engage students in participation and social skills. Students will enjoy seeing their work right in front of them. Incorporating JAM into all the common core programs seems that it will help students in gaining multiple skills and approaches to learning.
"Georgia is moving away from its experiment with integrated math in its adoption of the Common Core State Standards."
"Common Core Georgia Performance Standards is not Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 of days gone by. Statistics content is integrated into every CCGPS high school math class. So, parents will not be seeing a return to the math that they took in high school."
"State School Superintendent John Barge stopped short of saying local school systems must switch to the more traditional method of teaching math. But he said school systems that continue with integrated math could find that “risky,” once states start testing on the Common Core.
Officials in several school districts — including Gwinnett and Cobb — said they’re already planning to teach traditional math in next year’s change-up to the Common Core, with a curriculum and, eventually, testing that’s similar across the states and allows for state-to-state comparisons.
“What is really frustrating is that we have spent tremendous resources to train teachers, spent substantial time in pulling additional resources to align with the integrated curriculum, and, subsequently, asked students to perform at high levels while the curriculum has been in flux,” he said. “Now, we begin the process over again.”
Susan Andrews, school superintendent in Muscogee County, said many students did well with the integrated approach. “But it was difficult to communicate to parents and out-of-state universities and hard on students moving in and out of state.”
Education leaders say the Internet will be a powerful tool for sharing resources and best practices across state and district lines.
Common Standards Mean More Sharing
“We’ve always had the ability to share resources, but now those resources are aligned with the same student expectations,” said Greta Bornemann, the project director for the implementation of the common standards for the office of public instruction in Washington state.
Sharing Saves Money
“Especially during the fiscal crisis that we’re in, we can really tap into the power of working together [as a nation] around professional development.”
Many Take Wait-and-See Attitude
But many states have not begun to take the essential steps toward putting in place the work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, including providing face-to-face or online professional development for teachers and other education stakeholders, according to a survey released in September by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy.
In fact, more than half the 315 districts surveyed indicated they had not provided professional development for teachers of mathematics or English/language arts—the two common-core subject areas—and were not planning to provide PD for implementing common core for those teachers during the 2011-12 school year.
No Funding, Lack of Guidance
Inadequate funding and a lack of state guidance on the new standards were cited as two top challenges in their implementation, the survey found.
We Need to Develop Capacity
Regardless, professional development is critical to the overall success of the common standards, said Timothy Kanold, the past president of the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, a Denver-based leadership network that provides professional development for math teachers.
“To help the stakeholders—teachers, counselors, administrators, paraprofessionals—in order for them to be confident in the common core and teaching deeper into the standards, they need meaningful and supportive professional development,” he said.
Fewer, But Deeper
For most states, shifting to the common standards will require a shift in instruction. “There are only 28 standards [for math], which is fewer standards than ever before, but you now have to teach them and drill much deeper into them,” Mr. Kanold said. “Students are expected to conjecture and reason and problem-solve. That’s a new day in math. That’s a shift for everyone; therefore, we have real professional development that needs to get done.”
PD Must Be Ongoing
And PD should not be confined to a one-time conference or class, said Mr. Kanold, but rather become an ongoing process for teachers. Online professional development, in particular, may help teachers embed those PD opportunities into their daily schedules more naturally because it is so easily accessed, he said.
Writing Poses Additional Challenge
The writing portion of the standards also represents a shift to a richer and more rigorous understanding of writing.
“Teachers with a significant amount of experience might not have very much experience with the kind of teaching that would lead kids to be successful with these standards.
Must Overcome
1. One size fits all
2. Identify quality resources
YouTube a Resource
The James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, an affiliate center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Durham, N.C., is one of the providers of online resources on the common core. The organization has created a series of videos, posted on YouTube, that describe various aspects of the common core, such as how the standards were developed, what the key changes are in the subject areas involved, and the reasoning behind those changes.
Everyone Means Everyone
“Everyone needs to understand this—not just the teacher in the classroom,” Ms. Davy said.
An Overwhelming Task?
And while providing much professional development for teachers on the scale that’s needed may seem overwhelming, Ms. Davy is hopeful that the common core will provide the economies of scale, especially with online professional development, needed to overcome some of the most persistent problems in K-12 education.
CCSS have created an opportunity to change the way we view education and the way we teach. This is a struggle for many of us as we create lessons and units without the usual textbooks.
Technology will assist us in this new endeavor. Youtube has great videos for parents, teachers and administrators. We will need to be aggressive in our communication with all stakeholders regarding CCSS, the new testing with CAASPP and allowing parents to understand how this new and adaptive test present new challenges for our students.
The Common Core State Standards are one of the most significant initiatives in American education in decades. Yet the swiftness with which they were developed and adopted has left educators uncertain about exactly what they are. A number of myths about the standards have emerged.
Myth #1 The Common Core State Standards are a national curriculum.
Myth #2 The Common Core State Standards are an Obama administration initiative.
Myth #3 The Common Core standards represent a modest change from current practice.
Myth #4 States cannot implement the Common Core standards in the current budget climate.
Myth #5 The Common Core State Standards will transform schools.
Advocates have high hopes for the Common Core State Standards. They believe that a common set of expectations that are geared toward what students need to know to succeed after high school and that are benchmarked to the expectations of high-performing countries will lead to substantial improvements in student learning.
Yet even the most passionate advocate of standards will acknowledge that standards, by themselves, do not improve education. Standards can do a great deal: they can set clear goals for learning for students and teachers, and establish guidelines for instruction and performance. But to have an effect on the day-to-day interaction between students and teachers, and thus improve learning, states and districts will have to implement the standards. That will require changes in curricula and assessments to align with the standards, professional development to ensure that teachers know what they are expected to teach, and ultimately, changes in teacher education so that all teachers have the capability to teach all students to the standards. The standards are only the first step on the road to higher levels of learning.
The following is a summary of a report published by the Center for Educational Progress.
Common Core State Standards: Progress and Challenges in School Districts' Implementation Author(s): Nancy Kober and Diane Stark Rentner Published: September 14, 2011
This report, based on a nationally representative sample of school districts, examines school districts’ perceptions and early implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
1. More Rigorous - three-fifths of the districts in states that have adopted the CCSS agree that the new standards in math and English language arts are more rigorous than the ones they are replacing
2. Will improve student learning - similar proportion of districts expect the CCSS to improve students’ skills in these subjects.
3. Little Resistance - Only 10% surveyed view resistance from staff and community as a "major challenge."
4. Funding - "Adequate funding to implement all aspects of the CCSS was viewed as a major challenge by 76% of districts in CCSS-adopting states, and as a minor challenge among 21% of such districts.
All that anxiety about Virginia, Texas, and the other Common Core-holdout states prior to the formal announcement of the ESEA flexibility package? Completely misplaced. Instead, it’s the 46 Common Core adopters that warrant our concern.
"We know now that all states – whether they’ve adopted Common Core or not – can successfully apply for one of the administration’s new ESEA waivers. Non-Common Core states simply need to demonstrate they have adopted college- and career-ready standards in reading and math… and that the state’s network of higher education institutions agree that “students who meet these standards will not need remedial coursework at the postsecondary level.”
This requirement is just common sense. If a state has adopted standards that truly measure whether students are ready for college and careers, proficiency in those standards should mean they can bypass developmental courses and go straight to college-level work. It’s good policy sense too: if we want to even come close to the President’s goal of leading the world in college completion by 2020, we must reduce the number of students needing remediation. As my colleague Susan Headden has written, “the remedial placement process is ground zero for college non-completion in America.” Nearly 60% of students entering community colleges are referred to remedial classes before they can enroll in credit-bearing courses. For these students, fewer than a quarter of them complete their 2-year degree or certificate within 8 years.
With this requirement, all that anxiety about Virginia, Texas, and the other Common Core-holdout states prior to the formal announcement of the ESEA flexibility package? Completely misplaced. Instead, it’s the 46 Common Core adopters that warrant our concern. When they apply for waivers, they get to check the Option A box. They don’t have to prove their state’s colleges and universities will accept proficiency in Common Core as a proxy for readiness at all. All they need to do is show they adopted Common Core and move on."
"This is a huge – and misguided – gamble on the administration’s part. Successful implementation of the Common Core standards and their corresponding assessments will depend on unprecedented alignment between K-12 educators and higher education. If the whole point of the standards is college and career readiness, higher education (and employers, for that matter) must be on board with Common Core and believe it meets expectations for postsecondary success. To assume that higher education institutions notoriously impervious to change will abandon their inadequate remedial placement policies simply because the state adopted Common Core is naive. To be sure, higher ed has been part of the conversation in developing the Common Core. But token representation on task forces doesn’t equate to agreement among college presidents and professors that the standards include the right things, at the right level of complexity.
With Option A, the Obama administration missed a huge opportunity to encourage dialogue between the K-12 proponents of Common Core and the higher education institutions that will ultimately determine whether proficiency in Common Core really means anything at all."
"Information and frequently asked questions about the new academic content standards adopted by the State Board of Education on August 2, 2010."
"The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were developed through a state-led initiative to establish consistent and clear education standards for English-language arts and mathematics that would better prepare students for success in college, career, and the competitive global economy. The California State Board of Education (SBE) adopted the standards on August 2, 2010. Visit the adoption process Web page to learn more about the process."
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction was awarded a $10.5 million, four-year grant by the U.S. Department of Education last week to create an online English-language proficiency assessment pegged to the Common Core standards.
Wisconsin is leading a 28-state consortium that will work with the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment consortium, or WIDA, and several other partners to create an online tool to assess English-language learners' skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking English. You can see a list of all the states involved and get some background here.
Wisconsin's project is called ASSETS: Assessment Services Supporting ELs through Technology Systems and includes formative assessments, benchmark assessments, an annual summative test, and more—all computer-based. The grant will also fund training and evaluation for the program. Wisconsin's proposal talks about helping students "reach college and career readiness." Here's a link to the proposal if you're interested in learning more specifics.
The following guest post was written by Amy Benjamin. Amy is the co-author of Vocabulary at the Center with John T. Crow.
In a recent New York Times piece, "How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores," Hirsch argues that the drop in reading and writing scores is alarming but fixable. He explains that the average verbal score of 17-year-olds "correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and hold down a job. It also predicts future income." With payoffs like that, we need to take vocabulary instruction more seriously.
Old Way of Teaching Vocabulary
The traditional model of teaching vocabulary doesn't work, yet it is still being used across the country. That model consists of giving students lists of random words, and then requiring students to copy the definitions, use the words in a sentence, and take a fill-in-the-blanks quiz. (Sound familiar?) Students memorize the words, pass the quiz, and never use their "vocabulary words" again.
Building Background and Context Clues
Rocks are to a rock wall what your already-known vocabulary is to language growth. If you know enough of the context, you have enough to grab onto to reach that next level of comprehension. The instructional implication is this: Excellent teachers elevate their vocabulary level when speaking to students, but at the same time, they provide sufficient contextual clues and internal translations within their discourse that students can get a toehold to learn new words. Less-than-excellent teachers dilute their vocabulary into a thin gruel, a discourse even lower than the one they might use in their own social situations. They do this because they want students to understand them, to not feel intimidated or alienated by the teacher’s speech. But the students in most need of an academic register of language are the ones least likely to be exposed to academic language outside of school. When new words are used in context, students can grasp their meanings, if imperfectly at first.
Practice and Repetition
Students need "opportunities to try the new words.
These experiences include:
1. finding multiple forms of a given word (morphology)
2. using it as different parts of speech
3. understanding its nuances and register
4. knowing its synonyms, antonyms, collocations (words that tend to go along with it), and relatives (etymology).
Note: Simple matching exercises do not accomplish this deep-and necessary-understanding of new words.
Vocabulary and Language-learners
"Language-learners need to be comfortable using new words in speech and writing. Word games and puzzles build students' confidence and let them learn while having fun. An environment of exploration and playfulness goes a long way towards durable vocabulary growth."
Under-resourced students...
"come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to import the knowledge base affluent children take for granted."
Under-resourced students "need pervasive, informed, aggressive, and embedded vocabulary instruction" in every classroom, every day, every year that they are in school.
"On Tuesday at Durand Middle School, cameras were trained on a teacher professional development session and then on individual teachers as they were interviewed by a director at the Association For Supervision and Curriculum Development, a national educational organization that is making the documentary.
The film crew, scheduled to set up lights and cameras in classrooms Wednesday, will return throughout the school year to capture the district’s progress on film.
“This has developed into a national project we’re involved in,” Durand Superintendent Cindy Weber said at the middle school Tuesday. “They’re using our district as a model.”The idea behind the documentary is to show how one school district is embracing a challenge districts across the country may soon take on: implementing national core curriculum standards in order to better prepare students for college and careers.
“We want to show other schools how this district tackled integrating common core standards into their curriculum,” Cary Goldweber, executive producer for the Virginia-based ASCD, which publishes educational books and magazines, and produces educational videos."
Oct. 7, 2011 — On March 26, 2009, Gov. Steve Beshear signed Senate Bill 1 into law; revising the state’s public school testing and accountability procedures in hopes of making Kentucky students better prepared for college and work.
The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) and other professional boards, along with postsecondary academic officers, have revised the educational content standards to meet the requirements within Senate Bill 1.
Five Years to Implement
Allison Mathews, Rowan County assessment and curriculum coordinator, said the complete implementation process would take up to five years.
“This is our second year of implementation of what we now call ‘Unbridled Learning,’” said Mathews. “Full implementation may take five years but we are accountable for the work this year.”
Leading Change
Principals attended another network to learn strategies for executing the changes and new standards.
Administrators from each district attended their own network meetings to deal with facilitating change district-wide and to gain knowledge on ways to support other administrators, teachers and students with the new standards and school accountability measures.
EOC Exams
Students at the high school level will be given End of Course (EOC) assessments after completing English II, Algebra II, Biology and U.S. History.
In February 2010, Kentucky became the first state to adopt the nationally-recognized common core college and career standards for English and mathematics, according to the KDE.
“Change is often difficult, but the teachers and staff have been working to break the learning standards down into daily targets.”
Rowan County teachers and staff are very positive about the new standards.
“It’s exciting to hear a teacher comment that students in Morehead will be learning the same things as students across the country and, that with the adoption of national core standards, our students will be able to compete for jobs not only in Kentucky, but globally.”
"Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education 2011, a Southern Poverty Law Center study, shows that most states fail when it comes to teaching the U.S. Civil Rights movement to students."
"Common Core standards “clearly communicate what is expected of students at each grade level,” but as the Southern Poverty Law Center study points out, “the only way to measure the nature of our common expectations about student knowledge of the civil rights movement is to look at state standards and frameworks.”
According to the National Council for Social Studies, 18 states — Florida is not included — and 15 organizations have been meeting “to discuss working together on Common State Standards for Social Studies.”
Teaching the Movement adds that the “civil rights movement is one of the defining events in American history, providing a bracing example of Americans fighting for the ideals of justice and equality.”
"Reading teacher Linda Unser is a little overwhelmed and a little worried."
Linda has spent the new school year at Frankfort Elementary School pulling together books for the two units each grade is teaching under the state’s new common core state standards (CCSS).
CCSS are "very different"
The new standards are very different than what the state has had since 2005, and the books kids are expected to read are tough.
CCSS are "a lot more difficult"
“A lot of these materials are a lot more difficult than what we’re currently using,” Unser said. “It’s very overwhelming. It just kind of changes the way teachers will be teaching.”
College and Career-Ready
They’re based on one overarching goal – to make students college-and-career ready by the time they graduate from high school.
- That might seem obvious, but this summer the state determined that less than 40 percent of students across the state met that goal in 2010.
Teachers are being introduced to the new standards with example units – series of related lessons on a specific topic – and aided in building their lesson plans by teams from BOCES.
Year 1
This year, schools are required to teach two units at each grade level to the new standards so teachers can try them out.
Year 2
Next year, more example units will be available, and during the 2013-14 school year they will be completely rolled out.
The new standards more or less start with what a college student needs to be able to do: study independently, glean information from complex textbooks without help and be ready to take college-level mathematics.
Math
The standards give suggested course pairings in math to get the best use of high school courses.
Reading
In reading and the other subjects, the common core suggests increasingly difficult books with speaking and writing tasks that demand students back up their arguments and answers to questions with evidence.
Increasing Text Complexity
“Really the breakdown comes in the type of text that we’re reading,” said Ken Slentz, deputy commissioner for P-12 Education.
Books are slightly more complex than what they read now, Indermill said. At the elementary level half are literature, half are informational text. At the secondary level, information texts make 70 percent of the reading.
Different Type of Reading
Students are required to do “close reading” and provide answers based on what they’ve read.
Under the current standards, a student might be asked how he or she feels about what they just read.
That’s “a very different setup” than asking a student why they believe their answer is correct based on evidence in a specific text.
New Textbooks
The new curriculum means new textbooks and supplementary materials, something each district will have to pay for.
Copyright 2011 The Observer-Dispatch, Utica, New York. Some rights reserved
National Writing Project (NWP) is developing a variety of resources and online spaces to help educators provide the professional development necessary to implement the work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
"The common-core standards in English/language arts and mathematics are generally aligned to the leading state standards, international standards, and university standards at the high-school-exit level, but are more rigorous in some content areas."
EPIC compared CCSS with
- Texas College and Career Readiness Standards
- International Baccalaureate Standards
- Knowledge and Skills for University Success (used by College Board and endorsed by 28 research universities)
- California Standards
- Massachusetts Standards
Study Findings
- "found alignment in the topics covered and the range of content between the common-core standards and the five others"
- "the common core demanded a bit more cognitive complexity in some topics, particularly English/language arts"
- "comparison standards lacked the depth of challenge in reading for informational texts, writing, and reading and writing for literacy"
- 'comparison standards lacked the depth of challenge geometry'
Conclusions
- “The study continues a line of evidence that the core standards that states have adopted have a solid research base and will help teachers and students,” said Chris Minnich, the senior membership director at the Council of Chief State School Officers."
- "While Michael W. Kirst, a professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, had not yet seen the report, he said the comparison and alignment of the “long-standing, well-respected” IB standards with the common core was particularly noteworthy, given that the common-core crafters have claimed that they are internationally benchmarked, and the results of the study could give some support to the claim."
- "According to a related study EPIC released in August, most entry-level college professors found the common-core high school standards were relevant to college-level courses."
Personal Perspective
I spent 2/3 of my career in Advanced Placement schools and 1/3 in IB schools. If these standards align with IB Standards that is indeed "noteworthy."
My students were scheduled by their college advisors based on their "predicted IB scores." That alone is evidence that these students are considered college-ready. In fact, their outstanding performance in college confirmed that fact again and again.
"Since their adoption, the Illinois State Board of Education has expected that a separate set of social studies Common Core standards was being developed for the 2013-2014 school year, according to Mary Fergus, a board representative.
But Medill Reports has learned from the National Governors Association, one of the two coalitions that wrote the Common Core, that no such standards are being developed."
The English Common Core has a short appendix of standards dedicated to teaching literacy in history classrooms. Many educators expected that content-specific history standards would follow.
Molly Myers, history department chair at Lindblom Math and Science Academy in the West Englewood neighborhood, attended summer training on how to implement the English core’s appendix of history standardsand prepare for the assumed release of the full set of history standards.
If the Common Core State Standards increases our emphasis on writing (and reading) across the curriculum, they will have served their purpose.
"The other night, a bunch of folks in the Writing & Common Core: Deeper Learning for All course at P2PU (Peer to Peer University) gathered together in a Webinar to chat about expectations of the course, which runs about six weeks, and began some initial discussions around topics that are on our mind with the Common Core. These included: shifting towards more information/expository writing; writing across the content areas; the references to digital media; implementation at various states; and more. It was quite interesting and is an indication of some intriguing discussions to come."
Read the entire post by clicking on the headline above.
This site contains hundreds of ideas for Writing Prompts.
"These are some of the daily writing prompts that I use in class. The prompts and pictures are scraped together from so many sources - forgotten websites, old journals, overheard conversations, the crusty recesses of my hard drive - that attribution is difficult.
Since my concentration is in math, this was an incredibly helpful website to come across. There was a ton of really useful information; there was even a video with cartoon drawings to help explain the mathematics standards! I found myself searching through all of the links out of curiosity and interest- I definitely recommend this link to everyone, even if their concentration isn't in math. Knowing the requirements for teaching math will really help to create an effective PBL.
The latest enthusiasm about new Common Core State Assessments "may be justified."
Why?
1. A Common Reference Point - Instead of 50 different sets of tests based on 50 different sets of standards, we have assessments based on one set of standards agreed upon by 46 states--from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
2. Improved Quality of Assessments - Instead of "multiple guess" these standards "anticipate a focus on higher-order thinking, problem solving, and inquiry, which will encourage teachers to focus more energy on that kind of teaching."
3. Building Teacher Capacity - There already is a decided increase in professional development that focuses on improving the quality of classroom instruction. "Schools and districts are already doing widespread professional development for teachers and administrators on the new standards."
4. Cross-Fertilization - States and districts can share strategies and curricula because they "can have some confidence that a curriculum they created and successfully evaluated in Maine would also fit standards in Arizona and Oregon."
5. Improved Instruction - The CCSS will necessitate a fundamental change in classroom instruction. "Adopting new standards and assessments does not automatically improve outcomes for students, but it can provide opportunities to improve teaching and learning."
Greene, Head of the Dept. of Education Reform at the Univ. of Arkansas, testified that centralized national standards will harm progress in education reform.
"As states now begin their transition to the Common Core State Standards, seven organizations have united to provide advice on issues related to the implementations of the mathematics curriculum and assessments. The newly formed Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) includes input from and consists of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM), the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE), the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics (ASSM), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).
“The Common Core State Standards present an unusual opportunity to guide and shape the future of mathematics education in the United States,” according to Mike Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and chair of the coalition. The group will review, research and develop common messages; provide content and assessment expertise from communities of mathematics education for the framework of the assessments; and collect, analyze and disseminate information about CCSSM to inform future revisions of the assessments. To learn more about the coalition, visit www.mathccc.org."
NCTE offers new publication for teachers on the Common Core State Standards.
Supporting Students in a Time of Core Standards: Grades 9-12...by Sarah Brown Wessling
"This book reinforces a focus on student learning by demonstrating ways of addressing the Common Core State Standards in grades 9-12 while also adhering to NCTE principles of effective teaching."
Sample chapters and a table of contents are available for download at the NCTE site.
Caught In the Middle: Local schools seek relief from No Child Left Behind
Texas, Virginia, Nebraska, Montana, and Alaska have not adopted the Common Core State Standards.
"Last month, President Barack Obama detailed several education reforms that states must fulfill before he grants waivers to the bill’s stringent requirement that 100 percent of students reach math and reading proficiency by 2014."
"But Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott recently hinted the White House has not convinced him the state needs to apply for a waiver."
However: that relief depends on the willingness of the State of Texas to apply for a waiver. Until this is resolved, schools are caught in the middle.
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