College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

Guest Blogger Susan Weston says at long last, we're inviting our children--all our children--to play varsity ball

To fully appreciate the academics of rural schools, let’s dig into three data points that were not components of the state’s rating system.

A blog posting over at Schools Matter @ The Chalk Face has gathered a lot of interest--78 comments, many of them outraged. The New York State Education Dept. has a website that is meant to help...

Shout it from the rooftops, tell all your friends: The Common Core era signals a return of history, civics, literature, science, and the fine arts to the elementary school curriculum

"Student scores on language arts tests are the single most reliable academic predictors of later income. The new language arts standards of the Common Core represent an historic opportunity for beneficial change in American schools—if they are put into effect intelligently.

From bandwidth issues to playing nice with assistive technologies, there's a lot that can go wrong in the world of high-stakes online testing. Our new legal columnist shares why it's not just states and testing companies with a lot on the line.

A California advocacy group for ELLs has published a toolkit for educators who want to help support the success of second-language learners with the new common standards.

New survey data suggest that most middle school math teachers believe the common core standards are more rigorous than their state's prior standards.

We’re excited to announce that Khan Academy has created lots of new math practice problems for the start of the school year! We now have 100,000 problems.

A look at the results from the first round of exams linked to new learning standards show that the state has a long way to go in adequately educating students.

Year 3 of Implementing the Common Core State Standards: An Overview of States’ Progress and Challenges, a report by by Diane Stark Rentner at the Center on Education Policy in Washington, DC, USA...

"So, we've covered no mandate for curriculum, no mandate for textbooks, no national assessments," said Department of Education Deputy Secretary Carolyn Dumaresq nearly 20 minutes into a Monday hearing.

Recognizing the need for example assessment items that teachers can use for professional learning, Smarter Balanced developed online practice tests for grades 3–8 and 11 in English language arts/literacy (ELA/literacy) and mathematics. The practice tests are available through the Smarter Balanced website.

The practice tests include test questions with the same features that students will experience in 2014–15, including

• Selected-response items;
• Constructed-response items;
• Technology-enhanced items; and
• Performance tasks—extended activities that challenge students to apply their knowledge and skills to respond to real-world problems. (Currently, the practice tests include performance tasks for ELA/literacy; math performance tasks will be added over the summer.)

Find out how the National Geographic Society is connecting to the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

The report finds that, although a direct federal role in implementing the Common Core State Standards has been controversial, a majority of states in the survey support legislative and/or regulatory changes to the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act to help them with their implementation efforts. The report also addresses the issue of within-state opposition to standards and finds that the vast majority of survey states do not anticipate their state’s decision to adopt the standards will be reversed, limited or changed in 2013-14.

See more at:

http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=420#sthash.mLG4WhPY.dpuf

On the surface, some educators might think the higher level thinking skills needed to be successful on the Smarter Balanced Assessments are too much to ask of special education students, but I propose those higher level thinking skills are just what special education students need.

Here’s why:

Common Core: 5 Technology Tools To Measure Text Complexity