College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

It would be an understatement to say that it's been an eventful five years since the feds offered $350 million grants to states to design tests for the common core.

Common Core Assessment Competition Was Five Years Ago.
Catherine Gewertz writes at the Education Week (4/3) “Curriculum Matters” blog about the fifth anniversary of the Race to the Top-Assessment competition, “which offered $350 million to cash-starved states to band together and design tests for the Common Core State Standards.” She explores the goals of the competition and how close the consortia have come meeting them in the subsequent years.

How can we reconcile college and career as a national vision if college is not affordable for every student and if student loans are too onerous for young adults?

• school is not something you finish but a place to acquire relevant skills needed for successful futures
• focus on clarifying how academic skills are relevant to students’ futures
• According to a new multi-year cross state study by the Southern Regional Education Board, complexity and communication of how college and career readiness standards inform new approaches to instruction was found to be a consistent challenge for educators in the 14 states surveyed.
• only 46 percent of employed Millennials believe their education was very useful in preparing them for a job or career

ATLANTA — In the political uproar over Common Core, various myths are peddled as fact

The AP (3/27, Barrow, Hefling) reports that there are a number of “myths” surrounding the Common Core Standards which are being “peddled as fact” by potential members of the 2016 GOP field. The piece features “a quick primer on Common Core,” and continues with a series of fact-check bullets about claims that various Republican contenders have made about the standards.

Some student test scores have inched up, but it's not clear whether Common Core is the reason.

Research On Common Core’s Impact As Yet Inconclusive.
US News & World Report (3/25) reports that two new studies fail to shed any light on whether the Common Core Standards are having a significant impact on academic performance five years into the initiative. Studies from the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy and the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research “showed small gains on students’ scores nationally on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and in Kentucky on the ACT,” though there is no proof of a causal relationship with the standards.

Common Core has impacted my teaching in many ways. I feel that my lessons and texts are richer and that my students, while they are struggling at times, overall tend to rise to the challenges of CCSS. I have more flexibility with the curriculum in my classroom. I am not “teaching to a test.” I am teaching skills that my students will take with them to college and the work force because the new aligned assessments measures skills, not content knowledge. In the classroom, I see students tackling difficult tasks yet succeeding with help. Some students are frustrated, but with continued encouragement and practice, they, too, are improving. I especially see this in my Literacy Ready course, where students’ ACT scores have gone up an average of four points.

To most of our middle level students, college and careers seem light-years away. But we old codgers (meaning anyone not in their teens) sense with much trepidation how close our students are to their graduation. “Six years ain’t nothin’, kid,” we say in our gravelly, ancient voices.
So here’s the question: How do we promote young adolescents’ readiness for postsecondary challenges while they’re in middle school? Clearly, there must be more to it than...

Students in 29 states are taking the Common Core tests for the first time this spring. A few years ago, one school in Washington, D.C., changed how it prepares for standardized tests, adopting home visits, pep rallies and new curricula to give students a boost. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza reports on how the educators and students are getting ready to handle the more challenging tests.

Washington, D.C. – Results from the first state to adopt the Common Core State Standards—Kentucky—show that students with more exposure to the standards “made faster progress in learning” than peers who followed the older state standards, according to a study conducted by the Ame

The storm of criticism recently rained down on test publisher Pearson Education after the revelation that it regularly monitors social-media sites for public posts that contain secure content from standardized tests it publishes.

The nationwide pushback against the education standards hasn't been very successful.

Common Core Critics Are Loud But Losing Governing: Most states are now four or five years into the process. Ending Common Core would mean a lot of wasted effort and money. In places like Indiana, the brand name may have gotten dropped, but the essential elements remain intact. This spring, standardized tests based on the standards are being rolled out in schools all over the country.