If you’re to believe the rhetoric around Common Core, these new college- and career-ready standards are poised to usher in major education changes—changes that will help better prepare American students for the rigors of university coursework and the workplace.
On the other hand, if you’re to read individual states’ own descriptions...
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"Believing we can improve schooling with more tests,” Robert Schaeffer of FairTest once argued, “is like believing you can make yourself grow taller by measuring your height.”
It’s a great line. Such statements are the seductive battle cries of the anti-standards and anti-assessment crowd. But is...
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No matter where you live, chances are it’s a Common Core state. In total, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core and are developing plans to implement those standards over the next several years. While much of the work around implementation is taking place behind...
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The final drafts of the Common Core State Standards were released a year and a half ago—almost to the day. Anyone who’s read the Race to the Top applications or the ESEA waivers knows that state departments of education have begun to put together statewide CCSS implementation plans. Some states...
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A few weeks ago, the two groups charged with creating assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)—the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)—released “content specifications/frameworks” (guidelines that can helpful inform curriculum) for public review and feedback.
Below is an...
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A few weeks ago, the two groups charged with creating assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)—the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)—released “content specifications/frameworks” (guidelines that can helpful inform curriculum) for public review and feedback.
These...
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Last June, the Wyoming Board of Education adopted the Common Core, making the Equality State one of the first states to do so. And implementation of the core standards has begun in earnest, with teachers around the state beginning to align their curriculum and instruction to the new standards.
Now it...
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Adding fuel to a small but growing anti-Common Core fire, Andrew Porter penned an op-ed in Education Week this week that questioned the value and rigor of the Common Core ELA and math standards. He explains:
I hoped that new national curriculum standards would be better than the state standards they...
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Every so often educators and reformers think, if we’re educating kids for the future, we need to do a better job of adapting our education system to meet the needs of tomorrow. That our education systems needs to, in some sense, “get with the times” so that we can better...
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I’ve already wondered aloud (see here) whether states’ quick adoption of the Common Core was more an example of people seeing what they wanted to see than evidence of some broad consensus about what the actual standards meant for curriculum, instruction, and assessment. An article in last week’s Education Week...
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