College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

Expectations for first-year community college students are very low, and math requirements often don't match the kind of skills needed in most careers, says a new report.

Edward Frenkel and Hung-Hsi Wu write that national standards can revive the way we teach math and science.

Andrew Ujifusa covers state education policy for Education Week, from new legislation and trends to eye-catching political battles. He previously worked at newspapers in Maryland and Mississippi, and taught high school English in Japan.

Recently released figures show the following failure rates:

• Geometry - 62 percent for high school students taking the county’s geometry final and
• Algebra 2 - 57 percent for those taking the Algebra 2 exam.
• Algebra 1 - 61% failed the exam
• Honors Failures - Among students taking the same courses on the honors level, 30 percent to 36 percent failed the end-of-semester tests in January, according to data from the school system.

By Kati Haycock

President, The Education Trust

"The ambitions of national and state leaders to get all of our students "college and career ready" have raced far ahead of our ability to support the simultaneous transformation of multiple parts of the system."

"There is no Nebraska algebra or Virginia reading. 

There is little disagreement about what constitute good outcomes in reading writing and math, yet by allowing the states to define those outcomes, place them willy-nilly in different grades, and test for them idiosyncratically we put students in a mobile society at a great disadvantage."

Technological breakdowns are plaguing statewide assessments in Indiana, not long after testing woes surfaced in Minnesota and Oklahoma.

Randi Weingarten argues that no high-stakes decisions based on the common core should be made about students, teachers, or schools until adequate support has been provided.

"If you came into our classes and asked our students what close reading is, what they’d probably describe is something that can be boiled down to this: the careful interpretation of a text wherein which readers pay close attention to the way ideas unfold as they read. Often, this involves annotating texts for the sake of slowing ourselves down and recording our thinking so that we can do cool stuff with what you read."

We need to stop having these extreme arguments, between "No excuses!" on one side and "It's all about poverty!" on the other. Poverty matters immensely. Schools matter immensely. Let's get on with addressing both.

Recently, a number of teachers and administrators have asked me if UDL aligns to the Common Core. The answer is unequivocally yes. UDL is built upon principles of effective instruction, or “the Guidelines,” which embody the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

"I do not share her (Randi Weingarten) optimism that this additional time will do more than forestall the disaster these tests will be for our schools."

May 2013 - Academic Vocabulary

California Common Core State Standards: Professional Learning Modules

In Tennessee, only 16 percent of high school graduates are prepared for college.

Common Core...could 

• transform dual enrollment programs
• transform placement tests
• transform remediation
• could force colleges within state systems, and even across states, to agree on what it means to be "college ready," and to work alongside K-12 to help students who are unprepared for college before they graduate from high school
• force changes in credit-bearing courses too, to better align with what students are supposed to have mastered by high school graduation

"Here are a few areas that keep surfacing as places we need to focus on balance:

• Decoding and negotiating the print vs. reading for meaning.

• Connecting to text vs. text-based responses.

• Student choice vs. teacher direction.

• Informational vs. Literary texts.

• Small group instruction vs. Whole group instruction

• Instructional level texts vs. Grade level texts

There is a surge of late in criticisms of the Common Core State Standards, which most states, including Georgia, are in the process of incorporating into their classrooms.