College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

The department doesn't have the money to maintain it.

According to Massie Ritsch, the department had no money for Doing What Works. He said in an e-mail:

"The ED office managing Doing What Works did not have sufficient funding to continue operating the website and producing new material, but we are working to place the archive of resources on another site for educators to use."

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has told U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that the state will pull out of a consortia developing common-core-aligned tests, the Associated Press says.

PARCC lost a defender (of a sort) in Florida in August, when then-Commissioner of Education Tony Bennett resigned amid political controversy centered on his actions unrelated to common core while serving as Indiana's superintendent last year.

Indiana and Georgia have also left the PARCC consortium this year, but Florida's departure might be particularly worrisome for supporters of PARCC and common-core aligned tests. 

The new school year offers teachers an unprecedented opportunity to prepare their students for college and career and the real possibility of losing their jobs.

"The Common Core State Standards that have been adopted by 46 states are designed to help teachers create lessons plans that focus on standards that are fewer in number, higher in substance and clearer in content than those that existed before ("What Every Child Can Learn from Kentucky," Time, Sept. 30). I hope that teachers will regard them as targets rather than as straitjackets. If they are implemented properly, teachers will still be able to be as creative as ever."

By Catherine Gewertz

"States are considering a range of options now that the U.S. Department of Education has offered flexibility on giving their own tests or field tests of new assessments aligned to the common core."

What is "determination flexibility"?

That would allow schools to maintain their current federal accountability designations—such as “priority” or “focus” school—for one year, along with the interventions designed to help them improve.

Standards are measurable end of year expectations, while curriculum is how we get there."

"It was her analogy to football that really brought the distinction to life: the expectation for a team’s offense is to make it ten yards for a first down, while the playbook guides how the team gets there."

By Catherine Gewertz

"The Education Department offers states the chance to suspend their current tests this spring if they give common-core-aligned field tests in math and English/language arts, and if students take full-length tests in both subjects."

by Susan Weston

1. "complex texts" are what students must master."
2. "reading literary texts--both fiction and eloquent non-fiction--is part of what students should be able to do, but not all of what they need. They also must be able to read about community, national, and global issues, political challenges, scientific discoveries, and technical applications of those discoveries."

"Some lawmakers and educators worried last week, after the state Board of Education overwhelmingly approved new "common core" education standards, that the protocol would raise the graduation bar too high for some districts and students.

That's not a frivolous concern. Some of Pennsylvania's districts are deeply stressed and lack the resources they should have to help students. Many students lack the family, social and financial resources they need to achieve proficiency."

Burkins & Yaris

This text is the second in a series of posts exploring the role of biography and autobiography in the informational text distributions required by the Common Core State Standards.

Tim Shanahan on Literacy

Why do some students embrace math with such enthusiasm when the subject intimidates so many children?

It begins with a concept known as Deep Practice. In sports, when we swing a bat and miss the ball, we receive instant feedback through our senses. Players learn easily and naturally through a practice loop where proficiency is attained through immediate awareness of success or failure (feedback).

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Sept. 17, 2013) – As kids nationwide are getting back into the homework routine, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) teamed up with Google to ask parents the question many silently dread each fall – are you ever unable to help your kids with their homework?

The new survey revealed that not only do nearly 50 percent of parents (49.1 percent)* admit to struggling with providing kids the homework help they need, but also nearly half (46.5 percent)** of parents with children in grades one through 12 who feel unable to lend a helping hand struggle because they themselves don’t understand the subject matter.

Overall, Fairfax students last year saw declining pass rates in reading and writingand stagnant pass rates in math compared with the year before. The new reading and writing tests for the 2012-13 school year were based on more rigorous standards that also judged students’ problem solving and critical thinking abilities.

The decline in reading and writing passing rates for 2012-13 mirrored a similar decrease seen across the county for math pass rates from the 2011-12 year, when more stringent standards were introduced for those tests as well.

"Common Core" and "state standards" are two phrases that have been batted around in education circles and in the media for some time. For the average Staten Island family, barely two weeks into a new school year, the two phrases translate into one thing: more homework time spent around the kitchen table and less time for other activities on school nights, including sports, television and video games."

While the style of teaching may be upping the standards, it can also be foreign to parents.

This rubric helps teachers guide students in grades 9-12 in making effective presentations in a project, and it can be used to assess their performance. Alignment with CCSS is noted.

Matt Sellers of Perry is studying at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom as a Marshall Scholar.

"the fact remains that the state did not hold me to the high standards of states like Massachusetts, which has significant consequences on Georgia’s educational performance."