College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

A veteran teacher finds it tough going to lead her students toward mastery of the common standards in English/language arts.

Far too many U.S. teens leave high school unprepared for college — not to mention the job market

All students in Tennessee take the ACT test, but only 15 percent meet college readiness benchmarks in English, math, reading, and science.

 As a former English major and avid book lover, I love the focus on fiction and non-fiction texts as part of the ELA standards. What does it mean in practice?

Arun Ramanathan is executive director of The Education Trust–West, a statewide education advocacy organization

"...the prospects of children who don’t learn to read at grade level are terrifyingly bleak. As the curriculum increases in complexity, struggling readers fall further behind, placing them at risk of special education identification, tracking into lower-level coursework, failing to graduate and worse."

Computer adaptive tests produced by Smarter Balance will test students in four categories for English Language Arts. They will be expected to demonstrate mastery on reading, writing, and speaking/listening and research/inquiry tasks.

The Smarter Balanced Practice Tests provide an early look at sets of assessment questions aligned to the Common Core for grades 3–8 and 11 in both English language arts/literacy and mathematics. The release of the Practice Tests follows the Smarter Balanced Pilot Test, the first large-scale tryout of items and performance tasks, conducted February – May 2013.

Jefferson County Board member Debbie Wesslund writes about the Common Core and choosing progress.

Students across North Carolina are taking a raft of new state exams, but their teachers are the ones being graded.

Framing lessons through the lens of the Universal Design for Learning isn't about more time so much as it is about more strategic thinking, says Elizabeth Stein.

The Common Core Conversation

With so much to cover in one short (though it may not always feel like it) school year, one way to ensure students are well rounded and still working within the CCSS is through an interdisciplinary approach.

The presidents of Idaho’s three public universities and Lewis Clark State College are backing Idaho’s Core Standards, which demands a rigorous education rooted in problem solving and critical thinking.

Common Core education standards — meant to align America's school districts around a set of subject-specific principles — are coming under increasing fire.

"low-income parents have neither the funds nor the connections to make these opportunities available. As such, our public schools must have the capacity and the mission to fill the gap. They must take the lead in providing students a 21st century education to climb out of poverty."

The Council of Chief State School Officers says it needs flexibility from federal officials to manage the common core transition.

New York Times

Editorial Board

May 27, 2013

"give states the flexibility to refrain from penalizing schools or teachers based on the test data for at least a year, until an evaluation system for the Common Core is validated. This would only be common sense."

"...need to give the states some flexibility so that teachers — who themselves are under pressure to meet evaluation standards — can adjust to the new curriculum."

The Common Core..."will require states to change just about everything: curriculum, principal and teacher training, textbooks. At the same time, agreements that most states have made with the Department of Education will require them to institute teacher and school evaluation systems that take student test scores into account, based on year-to-year progress."

Connecting the Standards for Mathematical Practice to the Standards for Mathematical Content

I'd share a few handouts that I've been using in class this year to teach nonfiction reading skills in my sixth grade science classroom.

Each lesson is tied directly to a standard in the Common Core Literacy in History, Science and Technical Subjects