College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

A blue-ribbon panel offers a 10-year plan for assessment systems that go beyond accountability.

"As the new tests aim to measure students' preparation in new and more subtle ways than the current set of state assessments -- including the measuring of writing abilities at every grade level -- they'll require more time in addition to more computers."

• Try telling kids you’re going to read like writers,”
• “We had to change the way [they] thought about text.
• Teachers needed to change their planning and get to know their texts really well.”
• teach close reading in all classes, not just English
• Common Core-aligned texts... are harder than any their students have faced before.
• With a focus on textual evidence under the new standards, “there’s a real ‘right is right’ approach that I’ve never felt as an ELA teacher.”
• “The teacher is prompting and coaching as compared to direct teaching,” “And that means teachers giving up control. That’s hard.”
• “The focus on questions could be really helpful to us.”
• finding texts is one of the hardest parts of adapting classes to the new standards.

The goal of the Common Core assessments, as with the curricula itself, is to devise a richer, more thoughtful approach to K-12 learning, one that is – in the words of the Common Core developers – “fewer, clearer, higher.”...

• CCSS “will have a huge impact on how teachers are expected to teach, students are taught to think, and how both students and teachers are evaluated.”
• a truly foundational change.
• “With the new standards, teachers will have to have increased content knowledge -- knowledge that looks different than it did in the past,”
• We are going to make sure that we are teaching differently.”
• “But it’s been a really short timeline,”
• The goal of the tests, as with the curricula itself, is to devise a richer, more thoughtful approach to K-12 learning, one that is -- in the words of Common Core developers -- “fewer, clearer, higher.” But while the aim is simplicity, the tasks involved in meeting that goal are exceedingly complex.

A Key Common Core Skill > Eye On Education

The importance of critical thinking is noted in the new national standards. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative directly identifies higher-order thinking skills as critical to achieving career and college readiness for all students.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) today announced a new planning tool and guidance for schools and districts that will help them get ready for new, 21st century assessments in the 2014-2015 school year.

The PARCC assessments will include a rich set of performance-based tasks that address a long standing concern among educators about large scale, pencil and paper assessments - they have been unable to capture some of the most important skills that we strive to develop in students. The PARCC assessments are being carefully crafted to accomplish this important goal. They will enable teachers, schools, students and their parents to gain important insights into how well critical knowledge, skills and abilities essential for young people to thrive in college and careers are being mastered in ways that only computer-based assessments can measure.