College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

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Readers know that I am a strong supporter of Standards generally and the Common Core specifically. To me it is simply a no-brainer: there is no such thing as Georgia Algebra or Montana Writing. In ...

Technology has the potential to transform teaching and learning. It is already sparking a revolution in standardized tests.

He's (Coleman) heard from organization members, who have said they want the SAT to test things that are relevant to college success. They've told him that students should be able to read and write clearly, and also have mastered a core set of mathematical concepts. "The core aspiration is to build an exam that much more clearly focuses on the skills that matter most," he said. Instead of obscure vocabulary words, students should be expected to show deep understanding of academic terms such as "synthesis" and "transform." Overall, Coleman hopes the exam will be more relevant to high school learning. "It has to engage teachers more deeply," he said.

Most respondents to a PDK/Gallup poll had never heard of the common standards—and among those who had, fewer than half said the standards would help make students more competitive internationally.

The results of this year's PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Towards the Public Schools offers some heartening news for public education advocates.

Before taking the poll, only 38 percent of respondents had heard of the Common Core State Standards -- and just 45 percent of public school parentshad heard of them.

Just because a question comes from a higher grade level doesn’t make it rigorous. And rigor is surely not an absolute but relative criterion, referring to the intersection of the learner’s prior learning and the demands of the question. (This will make mass testing very difficult, of course).

To me, rigor has (at least) 3 other aspects when testing:

1. learners must face a novel (-seeming) question,
2. do something with an atypically high degree of precision and skill
3. both invent and double-check the approach and result, be it in math or writing a paper.

The novel (or novel-seeming) aspect to the challenge typically means that there is some new context, look and feel, changed constraint, or other superficial oddness than what happened in prior instruction and testing. (i.e. what Bloom said had to be true of any “application” task in the Taxonomy).

In California, the new tests will replace the traditional Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments, which were established by the legislature in 1997. The STAR tests passed into history on July 1 although the state has not yet decided what tests, if any, will be used for the current academic year.

The Common Core State Standards have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia with the goal of better preparing the nation's students for college or a job.

Mission Statement

By The Jose Vilson

This week, a few of us got into a discussion, and involved Grant Wiggins. He calls himself a troublemaker, but I don’t remember seeing him at the last few meetings, and I’m the treasurer.