College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

A spokesman for the U.S. Secretary of Education said federal officials are thinking through the concerns about high stakes tied to the common core "carefully."

NCEE has just released What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?, a study of the English Literacy and Mathematics required for success in the first year of community college. On May 7th, during a day-long meeting, key education and policy leaders joined NCEE to discuss the results of the study and its implications for community college reform, school reform, teacher education, the common core state standards, and vocational education and the workplace.

In my own teaching practice, I felt that if I coaxed a non-reader to pick up a magazine or graphic novel or just about anything, I was succeeding. I tried to get them to fall in love with reading and learning by allowing them time to read whatever they wanted. I still believe offering such choices is important, but I have now come to understand that a balance is needed.

Renee Moore The majority of high school graduates in America do not go to college, at least not directly.

"while almost 50 percent of four-year college graduates are unemployed, 60 percent of all nursing graduates in the U.S. come from the nation's community colleges. Add to them the dental hygienists, plumbers, electricians, heating and air conditioning technicians, auto mechanics, chefs, office workers, medical-equipment operators and technicians, cosmetologists, barbers, truck drivers, and machine handlers, just to name a few of the people on whom we rely daily, and we realize it's the traditional college route that should be called alternative."

The Common Core Conversation

As the deadline for Common Core implementation nears, several states including Florida are hedging their bets as to whether all the pieces will be ready on time.

Common Core has teachers rushing to prepare,The clock is ticking on Common Core, and educators are rushing to learn how to effectively teach those new rigorous standards in the fall.

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post

I often despair over the sorry state of writing and research in our high schools. Only private schools and public schools with the International Baccalaureate diploma program require research papers of significant length. Two million new high school graduates head to college every year — but only 10 percent, by my reckoning — have had to write a long paper or do a major project.

The SBAC consortium has posted minimum computing requirements and a bandwidth calculator that schools can use to measure capacity. It has also said that it would supply paper-and-pencil versions of the assessments for the first three years. Willhoft predicted that some schools in California may decide to do both in the transition, trying computer-based tests in some grades, paper and pencil in others. (The paper version will cost $10 to $12 per student more to administer.)

A 14-year-old boy in New York details what he found so annoying about the new Common Core-aligned English test he and other students around the state just took.

Taken together:

• the subjective and even nonsensical nature of questions and answers,
• product placement,
• more time-consuming test format

made the state assessments the most frustrating and unpleasant standardized test I have ever taken.

In part three of ‘The Future of Common Core,’ Peg Tyre examines the controversial shift in how kids will be taught reading and writing.

Rapid change in education—and society—has intensified the debate to a level not seen since the battles over school desegregation.

Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized, observers say, for rarely before has an institution that historically is slow to change been forced to deal with so much change at once.

In The Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern and Joel Klein write that the curriculum standards adopted by 45 states require students to read America's Founding texts.

one of the most promising education initiatives of the past half century

Each of the 12 original Race to the Top states, plus the seven third-round winners, promised to adopt and implement the common core standards.

Marc Tucker

Because about half of the high school graduates who go to college go to these institutions and because, of those who do, close to half go into programs designed to prepare them for careers and the other half goes into a program designed to enable them to transfer to four year colleges after two years.

"Say what you will about the Common Core authors, but for better or for worse, they were out to get things done, not get into debates, including the traditional debates over phonics.

“English language teachers have, for the most part, been treated as an afterthought in the discussions on the Common Core,” said TESOL Executive Director Rosa Aronson. “We held the convening to bring them into the conversation.”

Technical glitches during recent online assessments in a number of states are prompting worries about schools' ability to administer common-core testing in 2014-15.

The small group of parents hovered over a list of words, deciding where to sort “cloud,” “photosynthesis,” and “google.”  They paid particular attention to words indicating facts, evidence or conclusions.

What exactly do the Common Core standards say about technology?