College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

by Kathleen Porter-Magee at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

"I want to talk about the Common Core as a vehicle to bring three fundamental rights to all students, but particularly our Latino and ELL students:

1.      First, this is about the right of all students to read the authentic, complex texts.

2.      Second, it’s about giving all students access to the vocabulary of power—the academic vocabulary we know students need to succeed.

3.      Finally, it’s about giving all students the support they need to exceed the expectations we’ve set."

As states surge toward full implementation of Common Core State Standards for public schools, the din is rising from some fronts to pull back. In Florida, Gov.

A major requirement for the Common Core State Standards was that they be internationally benchmarked. But there has been debate about how well the standards match those of countries like Singapore.

The Center for Investigative Reporting

Common Core also encourages teachers to spend less time lecturing and more time getting students to be actively involved in learning.

"The Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010) for reading focus heavily on students gathering evidence, knowledge, and insights from what they read. In fact, 80-90% of the reading standards in every grade require text-dependent analysis — being able to answer questions only by referring back to the assigned text, not by drawing upon and referencing prior knowledge and experiences."

By Tim Shanahan

With the Common Core State Standards, instruction in English language arts will dramatically change. Unlike prior state standards, these new standards place a greater emphasis on reading challenging texts.

Common Core skill: Showing evidence from the text to support your answer

California students are thankfully done with the old Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program, and for better or worse, are moving on to the Common Core aligned Smarter Balanced assessment...

Even in the Common Core era, local leaders and school-level educators determine the programs that get taught and the books that get assigned.

Dr. William Schmidt today released key conclusions from his research detailing how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics can potentially improve the performance of U.S. students if implemented appropriately. In an event co-sponsored by Achieve, Chiefs for Change and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Dr. Schmidt presented a briefing on his work: Common Core State Standards Math: The Relationship Between High Standards, Systemic Implementation and Student Achievement. Download the PowerPoint.

R&D is needed if new standards are going to improve learning, say educators and researchers, but making that happen could be a tricky business.

Assessments are supposed to help students learn their strengths and weaknesses, but state assessment results only come as a number for schools, which makes them useless.