States Find Common (Core) Ground
By Jennifer Ginn
Former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise likens American students’ academic performance to the recent Winter Olympics.
“What if I told you these were the results—15th in speed skating, in bobsledding 21st, skiing at 24th and luge 25th. Anybody remember it happening that way?” said Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a nonprofit group dedicated to all children graduating high school ready for college or a career.
“That, of course, is not what happened at the Winter Olympics. It is what happened in 2007 for the academic Olympics. That is when our 15-year-olds, in a demographically weighted sample, took the same test as did 15-year-olds in the 30 most developed nations in the world. … This is how we came out—15th in reading, 21st in science, 24th in problem-solving and 25th in math.”
The college graduation rates aren’t much better for the U.S.
In 1995, the U.S. was second of developed nations in students graduating high school and going on to receive four-year degrees, Wise said. In 10 years, the U.S. dropped to 15th, he said. The U.S. is a little better on two-year programs, but has dropped from second to 10th place.
Raising Standards
So how does America compete in the global marketplace when its students are performing at about the same level—or worse—as former Soviet bloc nations on international tests? One possible answer getting a lot of play nationally is Common Core State Standards.
Each state has its own set of academic standards, which generally are adopted by the state board of education. The standards shape what students should know and be able to do in each grade. Those standards are used to develop a curriculum, adopt textbooks, make lesson plans and create state assessments.
In the past, each state set its own standards, some varying drastically. When students move from one state to another, there’s often a problem with which classes transfer and which ones the student has to retake due to different standards. Colleges, universities and even employers can’t be sure a high school graduate from Nevada will have the same skills as one from Ohio.
That’s where the Common Core State Standards Initiative comes into play. Led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, experts from across the country came together the past two years to develop a common set of standards in mathematics and English language arts. Although common core standards were attempted at the federal level in the 1990s and failed, this project is led by the states. Forty-eight states (all except for Alaska and Texas) and Washington, D.C., signed on to work on the standards; so far, 35 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted them.
The rallying cry of the Common Core State Standards movement is, “Fewer, Clearer, Higher.”
On average, there is one standard in the common core for every two or three typical state standards, said Keith Gayler, program director of standards, assessment and accountability for the Council of Chief State School Officers. The reduced number of standards, said Gayler, is good when most states have so many things packed into their standards that teachers literally cannot cover them all in a school year. Fewer, more focused standards mean teachers can go in-depth and promote deeper understanding, he said.
“Clearer means more obvious learning expectations in the end,” Gayler said. Current standards are often vague. For instance, the standard could be “understand.” “So what does that mean for the classroom teacher? How do you show understanding with a student? You want to make sure it’s something that’s teachable and assessable in terms of standards.”
Higher standards are connected to college and career readiness. Students should be prepared to pass basic college math or English language arts courses, he said. “That’s really the goal in terms of college readiness here,” said Gayler.
A State Movement
One of the biggest hurdles facing Common Core State Standards has been the belief that it is a push by the federal government to tell states how to educate children. That belief only deepened when adopting common core became one way states could earn more points on their Race to the Top application, a $4.35 billion Department of Education competitive grant fund designed to encourage states to make education reforms.
“I think the biggest obstacle is the perception that Washington is involved,” said Rep. Rob Eissler, chairman of the House Public Education Committee in Texas. “… In Texas, people see what the reach of the federal government can be and they don’t see a lot of good in that. If this is even close, it doesn’t have a chance.”
Eissler sees positives with common core—efficiency, resources and instructional materials. “There are a lot of good things about it, but Texas doesn’t trust Washington,” he said.
Rebecca Garland, chief academic officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, said the states have a say in how common core works. “It’s voluntary whether your state wants to do it. … People don’t like for the federal government to tell them what to do in education. This takes that part of the equation away because it is state-driven. It is bottom up, not top down.”
Adoption Is the Easy Part
Although more than half of all states have adopted common core, the process is far from over. Implementation of the new standards is expected to take two to three years. Teacher education programs will need to adapt to teach the new standards, professional development for current teachers will have to take place, new curricula must be written and textbooks adopted, as well as new assessments developed to measure how well students are learning.
But even with that added workload, states can expect to save money in the long run. Two national consortia of states have formed to compete for federal money to develop common assessments, which are expected to be in place by the 2014–15 school year. States spend $1.3 billion each year for assessments that fit their own standards; Illinois alone spends $60 million annually. By sharing those costs with a common assessment, states could potentially save millions.
“We know this work isn’t going to be cheap; it isn’t simple,” Gayler said. “But it’s work that states do all the time. They revise their standards. If they don’t revise their standards, they’re irrelevant. So these costs are going to come up for you in the future as standards get revised. This might be a way to share some of those costs.”
Garland agrees there are economic benefits. “If publishers know these standards are being used across a variety of states, they can spend more in the development of resources because the potential market for those resources will be larger. They can put more into making them higher quality and we can benefit from economies of scale,” she said.
Economy is the Challenge
But perhaps the biggest challenge to adopting and implementing common core has nothing to do with education–it’s the economy.
Pennsylvania Rep. James Roebuck, who chairs the House Education Committee and serves on the state’s board of education, views the common core as a positive, but, “again, there’s a resistance (by local school districts) to being told what to do. … Also the perception of when you’re telling people what to do, it has a price tag with it. If there’s no money to go with it, there’s also resistance. Everything we do, there’s always the question of how much is it going to cost.”
Illinois Rep. Roger Eddy, chair of the House Public Education Committee and superintendent of a small school district for 15 years, agrees.
“The big concern is the climate, the recession, the way funding is affecting current programs,” he said. “I don’t care what it is, it’s hard to talk about something now except how we’re going to get through the next year, year and a half.”
Regardless of the poor economy, Eddy noted, moving ahead with implementing common core is important.
“The key reason it’s a good thing is it … emphasizes career readiness,” Eddy said. “Right now, people look at the standards and say, ‘If I’m not going to college, why are they important to me?’ It’s because of the career readiness.”
CSG Educating States About Common Core
By Jennifer Ginn
The Council of State Governments’ Education Policy Group is playing a key role in helping states begin the discussion of how to implement Common Core State Standards.
CSG has conducted five regional meetings across the country to inform legislators about what common core is—a common core 101 discussion. It also is working on 16 state-specific meetings this summer to get all of the stakeholders in a particular state involved in planning how best to implement the new standards.
The meetings are possible through generous educational support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“We always say that the adoption of common core is the easy part,” said Pam Goins, CSG’s director of education policy. “It’s the implementation where the real heavy lifting comes in. It is so important that every state has all of its stakeholders on board and working together to make this a successful transition.”
Those stakeholders are legislators, departments of education, parents, business and industry, teachers, local education administrators and, especially, higher education officials. In many states, said Goins, there is a disconnect between higher education and K-12 systems. While colleges say students graduating from high school aren’t ready for college work, school districts are saying college graduates aren’t prepared to teach when they come into the classroom.
“I think unfortunately, there’s a sense that you have K-12 education and higher education and the two worlds will never meet or overlap,” said Pennsylvania Rep. James Roebuck, who chairs the House Education Committee and serves on the state’s board of education and the board of the Community College of Philadelphia. “I spent a lot of years on a college faculty. I really see the need to understand what’s happening in basic education. … There’s just not much dialogue.”
Keith Gayler, program director of standards, assessment and accountability for the Council of Chief State School Officers, said because many states have community colleges, private universities, public universities and even online universities, it can be hard to figure out who the right players are.
“You also have problems of trying to share information from higher education to K-12,” Gayler said. “They’ve typically not talked together. While the national higher education organizations are all very on board with this, there’s a letter of 20 national higher education organizations that support it, doing the actual work and identifying who should be sitting around the table is much harder.”
While it may be hard, said Goins, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.
“We’ve been talking for years about how to build a seamless pathway from pre-kindergarten all the way through postsecondary education,” she said. “Common Core State Standards gives us a golden opportunity to not just talk about aligning all of our systems to make education meaningful and easier to navigate for students. This gives us the opportunity to work together to make that kind of education system a reality. It’s a very exciting time to be working in education right now.”
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