The reality is that the CCSS were never meant to represent the totality of what states expected students to know and be able to do, particularly in ELA, where the introduction specifically warns:

The CCSS were never meant to represent the totality of what states expected students to know and be able to do,

Furthermore, while the Standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot—enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn.

Yet, despite the freedom that states have to take ownership over the standards and add the critical content teachers and leaders need to guide curriculum and instruction, only eleven states added even a single new word to the core. And in many cases, what was added was barely more than window dressing. Some of the eleven states focused on changing the format, with minimal changes to the content. Others added minor statements, phrases or clarification. (Alabama, for instance, added three standards to the K-12 math standards and seventeen “statements” to the K-12 ELA standards. Montana merely added “cultural context” to the existing CCSS.) And a few added some specific content to further clarify the intent of the standards.

That’s why, in the absence of further clarification from state leaders about what ELA content should be added atop the standards, critics and supporters alike have taken to deconstructing virtually every speech or presentation that David Coleman has given since CCSS adoption. In fact, it’s become a bit of a cottage industry to pick apart every offhand comment he’s made and every presentation he’s given. Of course, there is much we can learn about the intent of the standards from Coleman, but it’s foolish for leaders to look to these isolated and illustrative examples for specific guidance about the content teachers should focus on when aligning their curriculum and instruction to the Common Core. To do justice to that question, teachers need the additional 15 percent, coupled with a content-rich curriculum.

And yet, that’s precisely what critics seek to do. As just one example, Jim Stergios penned a blog post for the Boston Globe last week where he criticized a video created by David Coleman that was meant to draw attention to the specific skills (analysis, drawing evidence from the text, etc.) that the Common Core ELA ask teachers of science and history/social studies to focus on. Stergios took particular issue with an offhand comment Coleman made about Federalist 51, arguing:

Madison’s Federalist #51 isn’t about “faction.” I know you repeat this point over and over in the video tutorial. But, as any well-educated 10th-grader knows (at least in Massachusetts before we switched to the national standards), Federalist #51 is actually about checks and balances.

Nevermind that the CCSS ELA standards for history/social studies do not actually replace the existing Massachusetts standards for those subjects, which Stergios seems to imply. The larger point is that Coleman’s exemplar has no connection to any actual curriculum. Instead, it is merely meant to explain the kinds of close reading that social students and science teachers should engage in as they read important informational text in class. (Something it does effectively.)

The fundamental problem is that too many states have left such a huge void in their Common Core implementation and communication plans that reporters and critics are left to pick through old Coleman YouTube videos to try and figure out exactly what should be taught.

A simpler approach would be to look to Coleman for guidance about the intent of the standards themselves, and to look to states to fill in the content gaps that the CCSS authors have always acknowledged were there.

Download "Future shock: Early Common Core implementation lessons from Ohio."

There isn’t a Common Core supporter in the nation who hasn’t qualified her enthusiasm for what the standards can do with “if they are implemented properly.” On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s a Common Core opponent who isn’t standing in the wings, waiting for implementation to fail.

She went on to explain why Common Core implementers must be willing to take risks, fail, and, most importantly, learn from their mistakes if the project is to succeed. Now, Fordham’s Ohio team has released a useful tool for Common Core advocates looking to avoid miscues by learning from the challenges others have already faced in the implementation process. In a new report, “Future shock: Early Common Core implementation lessons from Ohio,” veteran journalist Ellen Belcher provides the perspectives of educators working at schools around the Buckeye State that are leading the way at putting the rigorous new standards into practice. With luck, these insights into what is working—and what hasn’t worked so far—will help educators around the country through the implementation hurdles that lie ahead.

To learn more about the challenges of Common Core implementation download the full report and sign up to attend or webcast our upcoming Fordham LIVE! discussion, “Pricing the Common Core: How Much Will Smart Implementation Cost States and Districts,” on May 30.

—Colin Powell

There isn’t a Common Core supporter in the nation who hasn’t qualified her enthusiasm for what the standards can do with “if they are implemented properly.” On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s a Common Core opponent who isn’t standing in the wings, waiting for implementation to fail.

It’s only by allowing the chance for failure that standards can have any real meaning.

This is often the point in a new initiative when supporters feel most vulnerable and start scrambling to figure out how to avoid high profile failures. But, if we’ve going to succeed in this venture, we shouldn’t be trying to avoid failure, we should be looking to shine a spotlight on it and embrace it as a key element of change. It’s only by allowing the chance for failure that standards can have any real meaning.

This is something that KIPP understands intimately. KIPP has become perhaps the most well-known charter model not just because it was the first CMO to achieve national scale, but also because it’s been consistently the most successful. There are KIPP schools around the country that beat the odds and that do amazing things for the students in their care.

Of course, there are also KIPP schools that haven’t lived up to the promise of the best among them. Schools that opened to great promise, but whose achievement lagged, or whose doors were forced to close due to poor management, low test scores, or a failure to raise enough money.

The reason KIPP has so many schools worth celebrating is exactly because they accept that failure may well be a critical element of success.

Some may point to those schools—the “failures”—as proof that network isn’t worthy of the praise it often receives. In reality, though, the opposite is true. The reason KIPP has so many schools worth celebrating is exactly because they accept that failure may well be a critical element of success.

The KIPP model differs from many traditional public school districts in a few important ways. First, their model is entrepreneurial. Whereas most principals serve effectively as middle managers who report to—and are often constrained by—state and district leaders, KIPP principals are true CEOs. While they receive support from the network, they are free to use or ignore whatever suggestions they’re given. And they rise and fall on their own merit.

This freedom is no doubt scary to the central office, which watches as school leaders make less-than-ideal decisions. But it’s also what allows for the innovation that has enabled KIPP schools to make extraordinary gains in difficult situations.

Second, KIPP doesn’t hide its failure. On the contrary, they set a clear standard, and shine an unflinching spotlight on both their successes and their failures through the KIPP report cards.

Third, KIPP has learned from the often-cited business maxim that organizations should “feed success and starve failure.” KIPP leaders focus their energy on growing success—on investing heavily in the teachers, leaders, and schools that demonstrate the greatest promise and that deserve to see their work reach the lives of more kids. Schools that fail year after year to meet this high standard are shut down or removed from the network.

This tolerance for failure and investment in success is fairly unique to KIPP. Too many state and district policies are focused on avoiding failure—sometimes at all costs. And, while such policies might avoid catastrophic failure, they are a poor recipe for success.

As we look towards Common Core implementation, and even as we see sharks in the water circling and waiting for us to fail, we need to focus our efforts on setting a high bar for successful implementation, highlighting both what is working and what is not, and then vigorously pursuing a policy of scaling up what works and shutting down what doesn’t. Having the confidence to embrace the necessity of these failures is what will allow us to succeed.

It remains to be seen whether these common standards willl avoid the pitfalls that plague too many state standards; their "commonness" alone certainly doesn't guarantee they will be better than existing standards. Still, this is a crucial step in a multi-year process, one that may significantly alter American science education—and it couldn’t come at a better time. Fordham will be publishing a formal review of the draft standards in coming weeks (and Achieve is soliciting feedback, so sharpen your pencils), but regardless of how the NGSS drafts stack up, something needs to change. Our recent study of state science standards in every state revealed a dismal situation: A majority of states received a D or F grade in the review, with the national average a low C. States will need to think hard about whether they can live with the status quo—and whether the NGSS offers a viable alternative.

To give a better sense of the decisions states will need to make in the coming months, this table provides the state science ratings from our State of State Science Standards 2012 report, divided by a state’s participation in the NGSS drafting process as lead state partners. (For more information on the grading rubric and explanations of each states grades, download the full report.)

Perhaps surprisingly, the Lead State Partners are actually in slightly better shape than those states that sat the standards-development process out, but both groups are, on average, mediocre. States with lousy standards—yes you, Wisconsin—will need to consider if they can afford to sit on the sidelines, while stars like California must weigh the possibility that new common standards will actually be a step down. All that’s certain is some action is necessary to ensure America’s next generation of scientists makes the grade.

In December, the organization of conservative state lawmakers adopted two Common Core resolutions in its education committee. One—the subject of the vote tomorrow at the board of directors level—calls on states to back out of the common standards initiative altogether. The second—which has already become ALEC policy—focuses instead on the federal role in the initiative, and tells Uncle Sam to back off.

Here’s the first resolution:

The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void ab initio. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature.

And the second:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the {legislative body} vigorously opposes any effort by the federal government to deny the authority of any state to set its own education academic content standards or to attempt to overturn decisions made duly by a state regarding any education standards deemed by the constitutionally-designated authorities in that state to be in the best interest of that state’s children.

So which is the true “conservative” resolution? The one that tells states what to do and demands a one-size-fits-all approach (pulling out of the Common Core)? Or the one that trusts states to make up their own minds—without interference from Washington? If you chose the latter, you will be relieved to know that Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Tony Bennett, and Jeb Bush—Common Core supporters all—agree.

Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less—the soft bigotry of low expectations.

It turns out that there are also some pretty deep, possibly unconscious, biases at work that manifest themselves through the way we praise students.

It was a powerful turn of phrase that ended up emerging as the signature phrase of Bush’s reform agenda. There has been evidence around for some time that students of color or those from disadvantaged backgrounds have not been exposed to the same rigorous content as their white, middle class and affluent peers. But it turns out that there are also some pretty deep, possibly unconscious, biases at work that go beyond exposure to rigorous content and that manifest themselves through the way we praise students.

For a new study recently published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Rutgers-Newark psychology professor Kent D. Harber and his team gave a poorly written essay to 113 white middle and high school teachers. The teachers were told that the essay was written by a black, a white, or a Latino student and that their feedback would be given directly to the student to help him/her improve. According to one article:

The results showed that the teachers displayed a “positive feedback bias.” The teachers provided more praise and less criticism if they thought that the student who wrote the essay was Black or Hispanic.

If we had to invest a phrase to describe this kind of pattern, I’m not sure we could do better than “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

How can we ensure we hold the bar equally high for all students?

The standards movement is grounded in the idea that children benefit from clear and high expectations. But this research suggests that, even when students are exposed to the same content and given the same assignments, the expectations we have for study work may be very, very different. So how can we ensure we hold the bar equally high for all students? Yes, we need to adopt and implement rigorous standards and/or curricula. But, what if teachers are systematically adjusting their feedback to praise children of color for meeting a lower bar?

We actually are all too familiar with how this plays out in the real world, and these findings would be unsurprising to the many minority students who graduated from high school at the top of their class, but who’ve had culture shock when they matriculated to elite colleges and universities. One such student, Darryl Robinson, recently penned a piece for the Washington Post detailing how far behind he was when he started at Georgetown. He explained:

Even though I attended some of the District’s better schools…the gap between what I can do and what my college classmates are capable of is enormous. This goes beyond knowing calculus or world history…My former teachers simply did not push me to think past a basic level, to apply concepts, to move beyond memorizing facts and figures.

Since the third grade, my teachers told me I was exceptional, but they never pushed me to think for myself.

Interestingly, it wasn’t until Robinson pushed his way into Advanced Placement courses that he felt like he was being really pushed. “Suddenly,” Robinson explained, “I was expected to think about concepts, such as public policy’s cause and effect, and apply these ideas to real-life situations.”

But, what was the difference? Robinson was seen as an exceptional student. He clearly had the aptitude and the drive necessary to achieve at high levels. So why did it take until late high school to ask of Robinson what teachers had no doubt been asking of his white, middle class and affluent peers for years?

There are no doubt multiple explanations, but it’s hard for me to ignore that, in AP classes, there are not only rigorous standards and quality curricular materials, but there are also assessments to which all students will be held, regardless of their background, prior knowledge, or experience. And these assessments set a clear bar for where all students should be. Such clarity makes it more difficult to allow personal biases—whether deliberate or subconscious—to subtly lower standards for students from whom you don’t expect quite as much.

It’s become popular in many education circles to decry “teaching to the test,” but this latest research provides one more reason why these independent checks on what students have actually learned are a critical element of an effort to close America’s achievement gap.

These findings may be disconcerting, but they're not new. Politicians, policymakers, educators, parents, and even students have long understood that far too many American students leave high school without having mastered the essential knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college and on the job.

There is no shortage of reforms put forth by earnest education advocates eager to improve student achievement. But who is right?

Of course, there is no shortage of reforms put forth by earnest education advocates eager to improve student achievement. Many believe that small classes are our best route to closing the achievement gap. Others feel similarly about setting clear and rigorous standards. And still others push for accountability reforms that use results from assessments to hold students, teachers, and leaders accountable.

Who is right?

There is a saying among high performing schools that there is no 100 percent solution to helping students learn. Instead, there are a hundred 1 percent solutions that add up to big results.

The same is true in the world of education policy. Our best hope to improve student achievement is to find the right mix of policies that, taken together, have the greatest potential to drive achievement.

Fortunately, over the past two decades, we've seen tremendous education innovation and have a sense of what reforms hold the greatest promise. While we can't do everything at once, we can learn from the most successful gap-closing public, charter, and private schools and districts. Looking to the best among them, there are four policy principles that can lay the foundation for the educational improvement and innovation we need to once again lead the world:

The power to lead.

Much attention has been paid lately to teachers. This is unsurprising given that research consistently shows that an individual outstanding teacher can have a lasting impact on her student's long-term achievement - an impact that lasts well beyond the years they've worked together.

There are too many outstanding teachers who are islands of excellence.

That said, there are too many outstanding teachers who are islands of excellence. These teachers can do amazing things, but they alone cannot transform a school community. To ensure all students get a great education, schools need to be led by transformative leaders who can set clear goals and chart a path to reaching them. And these leaders have to be given the power to lead—to hire the best team for their students, to reward the best teachers, and to decide which teachers should be laid off or fired, particularly in times of financial strain.

Setting uniform, high standards.

One thing is clear: The only hope we have for students to achieve at equally high levels is to ensure that all students are held to equally rigorous standards. For too long, the expectations for students of color and those who come from disadvantaged families were far lower than the expectations to which we held students from middle class and affluent families. We have no hope of closing the achievement gap unless all students, regardless of their ZIP code, are held to the same rigorous standards.

Tying accountability to results.

Setting clear standards is virtually meaningless if those do little more than adorn classroom bookshelves. In order for them to have traction, expectations need to be aligned to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. And student performance—and performance gains—on formative and summative assessments need to be used not only to guide planning and instruction, but also hold students, teachers and leaders accountable.

Teacher autonomy.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of accountability-driven reforms is that state and local leaders can give teachers the freedom to actually teach—to plan their lessons and to use the materials and pedagogy that they think will best help students reach the goals they've set. Because teachers are the front-line educators who know the students best, they need this flexibility and autonomy. Too often, policies seek to dictate how teachers teach. It's appropriate to set goals (standards) and to ask teachers to ensure students reach those goals, but they then need the flexibility (and support) to help students meet them.

In isolation, none of these policies will transform our schools. But used as a starting point and combined with additional reforms developed in the years ahead, they can jump-start innovation, allow flexibility, and ultimately drive student achievement so that America can regain its leadership position in the world.

This post was originally published as an op-ed in the Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star.

Common Core supporters would do well to keep the champagne on ice.

Whitehurst’s study has emerged as the rallying cry of Common Core skeptics, with fellow Brookings scholar Tom Loveless using it to argue that the implementation of the Common Core doesn’t matter and won’t make a different in improving student reading or math achievement.

There is one small problem: The Whitehurst study doesn’t address Common Core standards because they didn’t exist when he did his research.

Enter Dr. William Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University. Rather than resurrecting the Whitehurst study—or the Fordham evaluations of state standards—Schmidt did his own original analysis. And the findings from this study seem to suggest that Loveless—and anyone else trotting Whitehurst out to undermine the Common Core—may have gotten things exactly wrong.

The difference between the studies is critical to the debate over the CCSS. In short, while Whitehurst relied on Fordham's and the AFT's appraisals of state standards, Schmidt used his own original analysis to get much more directly to the question at hand: Will the particular changes Common Core is likely to usher in make a difference? He looked at every state’s existing or previous (i.e.: non Common Core) standards with an eye towards how similar they were to the new expectations. Then, he compared how students from each state fared on the 2009 NAEP math exam.

The results are important. Whereas Whitehurst found no correlation between quality standards and student NAEP performance, Schmidt found a statistically significant correlation: States with standards that were more similar to the Common Core did better on the NAEP than those in states whose standards were substantially different.

Of course, as Schmidt himself cautioned:

this does not prove anything…it’s a reasonable approximation of what might be possible.[emphasis added]

So, Common Core supporters would do well to keep the champagne on ice. There is much work to be done before we can spike the football and declare victory. But, these findings do suggest that Common Core may be getting something very right in the way the standards are written and that spending the time and money necessary to get implementation right may well be exactly what our students need. Or, Robert Frost famously cautioned: There are promises to keep. And miles to go before we sleep.

The educators in Ohio interviewed by Belcher, the people on the frontlines of our schools who work daily with our kids, see the move towards the Common Core as a positive. But, they worry seriously about the implementation challenges, and they fear that somehow our political leadership class will screw all of this up and turn a good into something bad. Or, as one Cleveland educator remarked, “the Common Core is the right work we should be doing as a country.” “But let’s not make this the metric system of our time…and all of sudden stop.” This is thoughtful guidance from someone actually doing the work.

Common sense, increasingly scarce in the public debate around the Common Core among talking heads and the chattering class, still prevails in the heartland. I take some solace in this fact and I hope others do as well.

The entire post is worth a read. It’s a helpful reminder of the importance of listening to front-line educators and not getting swept up in the knee-jerk negativism that too often clouds policy discussions in Washington and on Twitter.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, it was just two short years ago that a remarkably broad and bipartisan coalition that united union leaders and market reformers helped secure passage of the new standards.

What a difference a couple years makes.

What’s interesting, though, is that, with some limited exceptions, the debate over the Common Core standards has very little to do with the standards themselves. In fact, on all sides of the ed reform aisle, people seem to agree that these particular standards are rigorous, clear, and better than the vast majority of the state standards that were in place previously.

Instead, the debate over the Common Core is now caught up in a larger fight about the merits of education reform writ large. In this increasingly toxic environment, Common Core has become one more conspiracy to uncover, one more grand scheme for the fringe on the right and left to fight against.

Every day brings a new line of attack, each less comprehensible than the last. Some believe the standards are part of a giant corporate plot, the main goal of which is to pad the pockets of testing companies. Others believe they’re part of a grand scheme—led by “corporate reformers”—to privatize public education. (As if it’s impossible to believe that many well-intentioned educators are trying to leverage the considerable resources at their disposal—some given by corporate philanthropy—for the good of our students.)

The view of the the Common Core in America's classrooms is much more pragmatic than it is among wonks.  Photo by frankjuarex.

Still others blame standards and testing for what amounts to the end of democracy. (In a particularly hyperbolic post, Susan Ohanian claims “the reality is that if people who care about public education don't find a way to fight [the Common Core standards], public schools are dead—and so is democracy.”) To round it out, we have those who believe it’s part of the long-term effort by the federal government to take over everything in the states that isn’t nailed down.

It’s reasonable to wonder if the entire education reform debate has turned nihilistic. But then you realize that this fight is really a debate among policy elites. At the classroom level, the conversation remains much more pragmatic—with discussions centering on the pros and cons of the content in the standards themselves, or about the best way to help students achieve the goals.

And for many classroom teachers, the basic appeal of these standards remains as strong as it’s ever been. Even teachers whose instinct is to reject the standards and what they represent often reluctantly agree that the expectations laid out in the Common Core are worth aspiring to. In an online forum, for instance, one ELA teacher put a challenge out to all teachers. She said:

…if you want to criticize David Coleman and the CCSS, then do so. But, do not criticize until you have read the standards, specifically Appendix A. I challenge all teachers that criticism of the CCSS be not personal or political; but be based on solid assertions and well-informed evidence.

Well said. The critics who are trying to politicize the standards would do well to heed this teacher’s sage advice. The question now is whether this brand of classroom-level pragmatism will hold or whether this fighting among an elite chattering class will drive the whole debate in an even more contentious and destructive direction.

Loveless’s main point—which is mostly right—is that statewide standards implementation has not led to dramatic student achievement gains. He notes, for instance, that “from 2003 to 2009, states with terrific standards raised their National Assessment of Educational Progress scores by roughly the same margin as states with awful ones.”

It’s not easy to get right, but when effectively implemented this playbook gets results.

Yet, we do know that teachers, schools, and even districts that set high standards for student learning, hold teachers and principals accountable for reaching specified goals, align curriculum and instruction to the standards, and intentionally use short- and long-term data to drive instruction are able to make significant gains for kids. It’s not easy to get right, but when effectively implemented this playbook gets results. At least on the school and district level.

Therein lies the challenge: we have yet to see equally dramatic results on the state level.

Of course, we at Fordham have long argued that standards alone won’t drive achievement—they need to be linked to meaningful implementation and accountability to have any hope to impact student learning.

Loveless does try to address this by arguing that existing standards—good and bad—have been implemented. He reasons:

Past standards-setters were neither as naive nor passive as the portrait suggests. Professional development, curriculum, assessment, and accountability were not invented yesterday—nor was alignment. As a 6th-grade teacher in California for most of the 1980s, I experienced the adoption of several sets of new standards (called "frameworks") and new textbooks in all of the academic subjects. I was professionally developed up one side and down the other. Once a year, my school's test scores were published in the local newspaper. In case we teachers ignored the scores—or the standards—a "program quality review" team visited the school every three years to remind us of what the state recommended. And the team wrote reports that suggested curricular materials and teaching strategies as alternatives to those we were using.

Let’s be clear, though: There is an important difference between engaging in implementation “busy work” at the state level, and meaningfully using expectations to drive planning, assessment, and instruction at the classroom level. The implementation described above sounds like classic “paint-by-numbers” implementation. It’s pro forma and empty. I suppose you can argue that states that have followed a similar path have implemented the standards and that that proves that standards don’t matter. But to me, that’s like saying that, if a state gives a treadmill to every obese person in the state and the obesity epidemic continues, then that proves that treadmills don’t aid in weight loss. It’s just not true.

In the end, though, Loveless is right to challenge us with the hard facts of the failed approaches of the past. And the only way for states to see the kinds of achievement gains that the small handful of gap-closing schools have seen is to focus less on forcing the compliance-oriented implementation that Loveless describes and more on trying to understand how to empower teachers and leaders on the ground level to embrace the standards and to actually use them as the starting point for all curriculum development, formative and summative assessment, and instruction.

The citrus fruit that rocked education reform.  Photo by Richard North.

The passage on the exam needs to be read in full to be believed. It’s a perfect storm of bad writing, poor structure, and inexplicable questions. If you haven’t read it—and you should—it’s enough to know that the moral of the story—included in bold at the end—is this:

Moral of the story: Pineapples don't have sleeves.

Haimson and her fellow testing foes are right to call out this passage as ridiculous. And critics of accountability can and should play this role, helping surface problems and draw attention to the need for change.

But the real outrage among those of us who care deeply about accountability is why these problems aren’t being caught earlier. For too long, we have been focusing our attention on expanding the use of tests to more grades and more subject areas and increasing the consequences tied to the results of these tests without taking a hard look at the uneven quality of the tests themselves.

So let’s dig a little deeper. A lot of attention has been paid to the company that is responsible for the question (Pearson) and the length of time it has been around (seven years across exams used in Florida, Illinois, Delaware, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Alabama).

More interesting, however, is how this passage came to be included in the assessment in the first place. It turns out that the passage that was included on the state exams was not at all what the author himself had written. (See here and scroll down to the author’s—Daniel’s—reply.)

The original story was far shorter and was, frankly, far more interesting. (For one thing, the moral of the actual story—“Never bet on an eggplant”—actually makes some sense in the context of the original passage!) I am still not convinced it’s appropriate for a state test, but it comes much closer.

The author himself has no idea why the story was changed, though I’d be willing to bet it was to make the language somehow more politically correct. Whatever the reason, someone on the editorial staff made the change and then it passed through whatever stringent review process Pearson has in place without further edits to allow it to make sense again.

I’m sure this story will only add fuel to the anti-testing fire, and frankly, it’s hard to argue that it shouldn’t. After all, how can we possibly hold students accountable to such poorly written questions aligned to such poorly written prose?

In the end, though, I think this points to how sloppy testing companies—and no doubt some education reformers—have gotten in the rush to meet the demand for so many tests on such tight budgets. If we expect students and teachers to be held to higher standards, then we sure had best do the same for ourselves. And the starting point is taking the production of tests and test items much more seriously than we have to date.

Moral of the story: Never allow a pineapple to trump reason.

Updated April 26, 2011.

"What to read?" will become the next debate in education policy.  Photo by Duncan Harris

There are two camps in debate over how to select and assign texts. The first is what I’ll call the “Just Right” or “Goldilocks” books approach. The second I will call the “Grade Appropriate” approach.

The prevailing view among many educators in the United States today is that the best way to improve student reading comprehension is to assign lots books that are “just right” for individual students. The theory is that every student has three reading levels: an independent reading level (what the student can read without teacher scaffolding or support), an instructional reading level (something just above the student’s independent level, but something that they can access with scaffolding and support), and a frustration level (something that will cause the student to throw up his hands in frustration). In class, the theory goes, teachers should assign (or students should select) books that are pitched at their instructional reading level—not too easy so that they don’t stretch themselves but not too hard so that they don’t get turned off to learning.

Teachers strictly following this approach are challenged to frequently assess student comprehension and carefully monitor student progress, all the while gently push them up levels with incrementally more difficult texts.

Makes sense, right?

Not necessarily.

Let’s take, as one example, a ninth grade student –Maria—who has the equivalent of a fifth grade reading level. Her peers are reading things like Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemmingway. Maria is reading Maniac Magee. If we assume that both comprehension and cultural and background knowledge build over time, how we will ever get Maria to the same place as her peers? How do you get her from Maniac Magee to Macbeth?

The reality is that, the incremental increases in complexity that the “just right” books theory demands simply will never close the gap between Maria and her peers.

Enter the Common Core. The “Grade Appropriate” approach that drives its ELA standards is based on a very different assumption. Teachers who follow the “Grade Appropriate” theory select books, poems, articles, and stories that are appropriate for the grade level, even if that level is above the students’ instructional or independent reading level.

Teaching with this approach can be more challenging, particularly in schools where many students are far behind grade level. A great deal more scaffolding is needed to ensure that all students—including those who are reading far below grade level—are able to understand grade-appropriate texts. And there’s no easy way to ensure that students do more of the “heavy lifting” of the reading on their own, rather than to rely on teachers to help them struggle through.

Figuring out how to target remediation and how to scaffold difficult texts is exactly the kind of work that needs to happen to make a serious push to close the reading gap. And for those looking at whether CCSS is going to live up to its promise to drive student achievement, we could do worse than to start tracking the type and complexity of texts being assigned in classrooms across the country as Common Core implementation ramps up.

The new standards are an improvement. Some content that was previously missing from the [existing] standards has been included, the standards remain clear and well organized, and the high school content remains strong.
Unfortunately, Texas has overcorrected its minimalist problem by adding too many standards—many of which descend inappropriately into pedagogy—and including a lot of unnecessary repetition. Worse, the new draft standards overemphasize process, and arithmetic is not given suitable priority.

By going it alone, Texas had hoped to do better than the Common Core. Unfortunately, it missed the mark. Check out to full report to learn more.

You might not expect us to champion this great new report from Brookings, but we are. Russ Whitehurst and his new colleague, former Harvard professor Matt Chingos, not only decry the nation's excessive focus on teacher quality—at the expense of curriculum—but also provide some neat evidence of the cost of that imbalance to student performance.

Source: "Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core," by Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. Whitehurst, (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2012).

One might quibble over the source of data for this little chart, given that the big impact from a better curriculum is derived from just a single study (though a very good one), but we think their point is still valid. Curriculum can and does move student performance. To quote the authors: "To focus education reform policy on selecting and retaining effective teacher while ignoring the role of instructional materials is to pay too much attention to the aspects of teacher quality that are set in stone and too little attention to ways that the effectiveness of all teachers might be improved and the variability among teachers reduced." To which we can only say: Amen.

Drawing from IES studies under Whitehurst which had the difficult job of tracking the complex curricular choices that schools make, they recommend that states need to develop the same level of data collection capabilities about curricular choices that they're using to track teacher performance. Currently, Florida is the only state in the union that is systematically tracking what curricula teachers are using in their classrooms. No one else seems to much care.

But wait, isn't the Common Core going to solve the nation's sloppy curricular choices? Not likely. Whitehurst's colleague at Brookings, Tom Loveless, attracted a lot of attention recently for suggesting that, based on our experience with state standards, the "new and improved" Common Core standards are unlikely to produce student gains. Chingos and Whitehurst add grist to the mill, predicting that without a renewed focus by states on curriculum, Loveless will unfortunately be proven right. Because states and districts have a long-standing tradition of choosing and implementing curricula that bear little real connection to their own standards, they are unlikely to behave any differently for having replaced their state standards with the Common Core.  

We might put it more bluntly. States along with the rest of us need to confront the fact that the Common Core is not a curriculum. Without attention to good curricular choices, not only will teachers be less effective than they would be otherwise, student progress will continue to stall.

Bruce Baker—Rutgers professor by day, anti-reform gadfly by night—thinks so, and took Fordham to task for either inconsistency between its goals or harboring a “weird, warped agenda.” He explains:

Collectively what we have here is a massive effort on the one hand, to require traditional public school districts to adopt a common curriculum and ultimately to adopt common assessments for evaluating student success on that curriculum and then force those districts to evaluate, retain and/or dismiss their teachers based on student assessment data, while on the other hand, expanding publicly financed subsidies for more children to attend schools that would not be required to do these things (in many cases, for example, relieving charter schools from teacher evaluation requirements).

This is a helpful way to frame it because I think Baker has gotten it precisely wrong.

Adopting common standards does not mean forcing a common curriculum on all schools.

For starters, adopting common standards does not mean forcing a common curriculum on all schools. And the difference between standards and curriculum is more than mere semantics. Standards define a baseline set of knowledge and skills that all students should learn. How students should learn that content—the curriculum—is up to the district/school/teacher to decide. And suggesting that holding all schools to the same standards somehow limits “any potential for real innovation,” as Bruce does, is misguided. Innovation stems not from different schools defining different ends, but instead from schools reaching those goals in different and innovative ways.

Second, adopting common standards doesn’t mean adopting a one-size-fits-all way to evaluate, retain, and/or dismiss teachers. It’s entirely possible—perhaps even desirable—to be in favor of common standards and assessments, while also giving school and district leaders the autonomy they need to hire and fire teachers.

Third, one of the advantages of common standards is the fact that all schools—traditional, magnet, technical, and charter—will be guided by the same expectations. And, in a choice environment, parents will have a common metric and a common language they can use to judge school effectiveness. That’s not to suggest that assessment results are the only way to judge them, but they are an independent yardstick that can be used in conjunction with other measures that parents use everyday.

Finally, reformers who believe that choice will lead to better educational options simply must acknowledge that choice between low-performing schools isn’t a real choice. In order to ensure that parents have high-quality options to choose from, we need to have rigorous standards to which all schools are held. Low performing schools should be closed. High performing schools should be encouraged to expand. Those in the middle should be improved. And parents should be empowered to choose between schools based on what’s best for their children.

In the end, if the goal is to improve educational outcomes for all students (and that is, in fact, Fordham’s goal), there needs to be some way to evaluate whether schools are adding value. Advocating for common standards and common assessments merely helps give parents the common language they need to understand that information. In short: it’s a way of helping make parents more informed consumers.

As we’ve said numerous times before, for the vast majority of states, adoption of the Common Core standards was an enormous improvement. (Click for Fordham’s review of each state’s standards and the Common Core.) It’s equally clear that we have an enormous challenge on our hands to ensure that the Common Core is implemented in a way that makes the most of these stronger and more rigorous standards. Change is hard but Common Core, correctly implemented, has the potential to amp up expectations and instruction across American classrooms. 

I’ve already posted about the danger of curriculum publishers co-opting the Common Core to promote their own (relatively unchanged) materials. But there’s a second, and potentially even more troubling challenge that lies ahead: a resistance among teachers to changing their instruction.

As the time comes to start implementing Common Core some teachers are starting to dig in their heels.

Of course, for teachers, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. There has been no shortage of curriculum fads and reforms that have demanded instructional changes and promised improvements, but yielded very little in the way of student achievement gains. It’s no wonder, then, that as the time comes to start implementing Common Core some teachers are starting to dig in their heels.

Valerie Strauss, a Washington Post blogger who has created a cottage industry out of assuming the worst about most education reforms, has a guest post up on The Answer Sheet blog that perfectly captures this emerging resistance.

“One (maddening) day working with the Common Core,” written by a 13-year veteran New York high school teacher named Jeremiah Chaffee, describes a daylong CCSS-related professional development. His day was spent, reading and analyzing a CCSS-aligned exemplar lesson on the Gettysburg Address created by the authors of the standards, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel. He writes:

As we looked through the exemplar, examined a lesson previously created by some of our colleagues, and then began working on our own Core-related lessons, I was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what I consider to be good teaching

By the end of the day, Chaffee concluded:

…when it came time to create our own lessons around the exemplar, three colleagues and I found ourselves using techniques that we know have worked to engage students — not what the exemplar puts forth.

As anyone who has ever organized a professional development session for teachers knows, it’s not uncommon when introducing new material or new techniques for teachers to fall back on previous ways of teaching. Another name for that is a failed session. 

Of course, teachers should carefully consider how they can best hit the targets laid out in the Common Core. Obviously the vision outlined by Coleman and Pimentel isn't the only path to implementation. Careful analysis is needed to determine how best to drive achievement in this new environment. However, in this case, it’s obvious from the outset that Chaffee and his colleagues were impervious to change. Unless the presenter was going to mirror back to them exactly the kinds of things that they’ve always done—perhaps with some tweaks, but certainly within the narrow constraints of their own vision of excellence—they were not open to the ideas. That is not the pathway to meaningful reform.

Worse, the particulars of Chaffee’s criticisms are often misguided (and apparently went uncorrected). Chaffee takes issue with three elements of the exemplar in particular:

1. It is overly scripted, and scripted lessons are limiting to teachers and students.

Chaffee believes that the Gettysburg Address exemplar is far too scripted, and says that scripting lessons is based on several false assumptions about teaching:

• That anyone who can read a lesson aloud to a class can teach just as well as experienced teachers;
• That teaching is simply the transference of information from one person to another;
• That students should not be trusted to direct any of their own learning;

Perhaps. But that has virtually nothing to do with the exemplar Chaffee and his colleagues examined. The exemplar was just that: a model. An example of how you might implement the Common Core ELA standards. These example lessons are not—nor are they meant to be, I assume—part of a fully fleshed out, scripted curriculum that teachers must implement. Instead, it is meant to show the level of planning required to align instruction to this vision of CCSS implementation. This is an important distinction. A scripted curriculum constrains teachers’ words. A detailed model is merely meant to show the rationale behind a plan so that teachers can better understand it.

With a well-thought out—even thoughtfully scripted—lesson plan, the teacher will be the guide.

More than that, I’ve seen lessons that range in detail from carefully scripted to broad outlines and, in just about every case, the more detailed the plan, the better the lesson. That doesn’t mean that a teacher should stare at a student like a deer caught in headlights when an off-topic question comes up. But with a well-thought out—even thoughtfully scripted—lesson plan, the teacher will be the guide. S/he will know when to veer off course, when something will be dealt with later, when it’s time to stop for an unrelated teachable moment, etc. Teachers with less scripted lesson and unit plans are far more easily taken off course in ways that distract from, rather than enhance, student learning.

2. The lesson relies on “cold reading” and discourages teachers from helping students make connections between the text and prior knowledge, previous reading, or personal experience.

Such pedagogy, Chaffee argues, “mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage,” but it “makes school wildly boring.”

To suggest that jumping right in to reading a great work of literature is boring seems patently absurd (particularly for an English teacher). But more importantly, no lesson exists—or should exist—in isolation. Each reading is part of a larger unit or long-term plan. I doubt that Coleman and Pimentel are suggesting that students dive into a reading of the Gettysburg Address with literally no introduction to the Civil War whatsoever. (And if that’s true, they should perhaps be clearer on this point.) If a teacher is developing a curriculum in isolation, the Address could come after other readings about the civil war—perhaps a series of newspaper articles that students read to understand what was happening at the time? Perhaps they lay the groundwork so that when the students read the Gettysburg Address, they have the knowledge they need to dive right in?

It seems to me that point is not that students should be able to understand quantum mechanics without having ever taken basic physics. It’s that, with the proper short- and long-term planning, individual literature lessons should not be marred by the kinds of pre-reading activities that do little more than bore students, distract attention away from the authors’ words, and spoon feed answers to questions students will get later.

3. The lesson encourages teachers to read rather than “deliver” the speech

“English teachers love Shakespeare,” Chaffee explains, “when we read to our classes from his plays, we do not do so in a dry monotone. I doubt Lincoln delivered his address in as boring a manner as the Common Core exemplar asks.”

The directions on the exemplar itself say:

Do not attempt to “deliver” Lincoln’s text as if giving the speech yourself but rather carefully speak Lincoln’s words clearly to the class, being sure to follow his punctuation and rhetorical clues

To my eye, following punctuation and rhetorical cues does not equate “reading in a dry monotone.” On the contrary, it encourages teachers to follow the cues in the text and use them to guide their oration. In other words, teachers are encouraged not to make assumptions about how the speech might have been delivered. After all, the way this speech might be delivered today—in an age of radio, television, and internet—is likely very different than the way it was actually delivered, on the grounds of a battle where many men lost their lives. The point, for teachers and students alike, is not to make assumptions about the text—what it says or how it should be read—based on our own biases, but instead to use the authors words, their punctuation, and their cues to guide our reading and comprehension.

That is the close reading that the Common Core challenges teachers to implement.

Of course, in order to get implementation right, teachers must look with a critical eye at any and all “models” of implementation—including the one being promoted by the standards authors themselves. Those models must be analyzed, evaluated, and critiqued. They must be tried and tweaked based on the realities of each classroom. But, if we’re ever to push our vision of what instructional excellence looks like beyond where it is today, we need to be open to change and not simply dismiss new ideas simply because they’re new or different. And that means challenging teachers like Jeremiah Chaffee to be willing to lose sight of the familiar shore of instruction and embrace the opportunity of crossing a new ocean with their students.

Do most states really understand what they signed up for?

To find out, we would do better to ignore the philosophic debates among policy wonks and dig into the teacher-driven conversations happening in classrooms, on blogs, and in professional development sessions around the country. These debates will likely have a far greater impact on the success or failure of the new standards than much of the political noise happening inside the Beltway and in state legislatures.

A Gates-funded survey of teachers released last week included some results cheered by supporters of Common Core, including the finding that most teachers (78 percent) had heard of the standards, that nearly two thirds (64 percent) felt that the expectations were going to have a “strong” or “very strong” impact on student achievement, and that 73 percent of teachers felt “somewhat” or “very” prepared to teach to the standards.

In isolation, this sounds like good news. But consider the results from a separate report, released by the Center on Education Policy, which found that barely half of school districts in states that adopted the Common Core standards “are taking essential steps to implement them.”

One might wonder how teachers can feel so prepared to teach to standards that are so different from what they are teaching to now when district- and school-level implementation has barely gotten off the ground? It makes more sense when you consider the messages being sent by several leading curriculum publishers and other organizations committed to bending Common Core to their interests.

Take Lucy Calkins. She is, by all accounts, a Common Core supporter. In a recent speech (and related article), she encouraged teachers to embrace the standards and to become “a co-constructor of the future of instruction and curriculum, and indeed, of public education across America.”

Yet, at least at face value, Calkins advice doesn’t sound like it’s changed much, despite the new standards. For instance, in an article entitled “Explore the Common Core,” Calkins’s first recommendation for “large scale reform” is to “implement a spiraled, cross-curricular, K-12 writing workshop curriculum.”

So, the first piece of Common Core implementation advice from the chief architect behind Teachers College Writers Workshop is to implement…a writers workshop?

Her second piece of advice is perhaps more alarming, though. She advises teachers to “move students up levels of text complexity by providing them with lots of just right, high-interest texts and time for them to read.” That certainly does square with the tenets of her own readers workshop, but seems to run directly counter to the Common Core guidance that all students should be reading grade appropriate texts.

Is Calkins rethinking her program in light of the new standards, or merely co-opting them to promote the same program?

One wonders whether Calkins is rethinking her program in light of the new standards, or merely co-opting them to promote the same program? And, upon hearing this advice, it’s easy to understand how a teacher implementing the readers and writers workshop could be lead to believe that they are ready for what lies ahead—after all, it’s pretty much the same as what they’re doing now.

Calkins certainly isn’t alone. I posted a few weeks ago about another group similarly peddling some “business as usual” tactics and passing them off as Common Core aligned.

The bottom line is this: The appropriate reaction of Common Core supporters to the news that nearly three-fourths of teachers claim to be at least somewhat prepared to teach the new standards should be fear. Because these results suggest that far too many teachers plan to make few, if any, changes to their instructional and curricular programs. Which only reinforces what we’ve said many times before: Adoption of the standards was the easy part. Proper implementation is going to be the real struggle. 

Particularly dismaying is how rarely state standards indicate that evolution has anything to do with us, Homo sapiens. Even states with thorough coverage of evolution, like Massachusetts, avoid linking that controversial term with ourselves. Only four states—Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Rhode Island—discuss human evolution in their current standards. This isn’t just a Bible Belt issue. Even the bluest of blue states don’t expect their students to know that humans and apes share ancestry.

But, as many people already know, a group of 26 states have teamed up with Achieve to do for science what the NGA and CCSSO did for ELA and math—to create a rigorous set of common standards that states would have the option to adopt as their own.

Whether those standards will be worth adoption remains an open question, but insiders tell us that we can expect the first public draft to be released for comment later this spring.

Our advice to the drafters of these “Next Generation Science Standards” (NGSS) was to look to the model state standards—to places like D.C., California, and Massachusetts—to inform their work. But what about the most commonly used national international benchmarks for science achievement—the NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, and ACT? The results from these assessments are often used to describe how well (or how poorly) states and nations are doing in science education. But are the standards that undergird these assessments strong? And can they provide a roadmap for the authors of the NGSS?

To help answer this question, using the same criteria that we used to evaluate each state’s standards, we asked distinguished biologist (and veteran Fordham science reviewer) Paul Gross to analyze the assessment frameworks for each of these science tests. (You can read Dr. Gross’s complete review of the NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, and ACT frameworks by clicking on each link.)

Overall, the results were mixed: Dr. Gross found the NAEP and TIMSS frameworks to be excellent; each earned an impressive 9 out of a possible 10 points and received an A minus.

The PISA and ACT frameworks were less impressive, each earning a mediocre C.

The best of the state standards—and the NAEP and TIMSS frameworks—have several things in common. For starters, they include most of the critical science content that students need to learn from K through grade 12, and that content is appropriately rigorous and progresses well from grade to grade. (While the frameworks delineate content for only select grades, that content is comprehensive, clear, and grade-appropriate.) In addition, they are clearly organized and presented. Finally, while they include critical science process skills, those skills are well integrated with the content that students need to learn.

It’s important to note, however, that these frameworks are not meant to be K-12 curriculum standards. They are meant to drive assessment development, not curriculum or instruction. Therefore, judging the frameworks against our criteria was imperfect. But, as the authors of the NGSS look to draw upon the best of what’s out there, we hope that they find these reviews useful, and we hope that they turn to TIMSS and NAEP to help inform their work.

To learn more about the state of science standards, watch Kathleen's recent FoxNews.com interview on the subject.

Take, for example, California teacher of the year and education blogger, Alan Lawrence Sitomer who wrote:

[Coleman] has zero K-12 teaching experience. Should we really be learning how to cook from a person who’s never been in the kitchen?

Sitomer isn’t alone in this view. Here are a few other samples from across the web:

Mr. Coleman is not an expert. He is simply someone who has been positioned and now is situated as an 'expert'. Itrequires significant arrogance to utter the bold statements Mr. Coleman makes.

I apologize for my brevity, but who IS David Coleman? What are his credentials, and how did a non-teacher gainauthorship of the hugest educational document ever written?

Practitioners are often quick to dismiss reform ideas that are promoted by people who have little direct classroom experience.

Of course, these instincts aren’t limited to reading instruction. Practitioners are often quick to dismiss reform ideas that are promoted by people who have little direct classroom experience.

These critics are not crazy, particularly when we’re talking about reading instruction. After all, it’s difficult to imagine someone who has never been in front of a classroom figuring out the delicate balance of classroom management, student engagement, and reading strategies it would take to ensure that all students could access sufficiently complex texts.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s exactly David Coleman’s distance from the classroom that gives him a comparative advantage worth listening to? After all, even after years—decades, even—during which dedicated educators have been pushing to move comprehension to the next level, reading achievement has languished. (Achievement on the fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP tests has virtually stagnated since 1992—and fourth grade NAEP reading achievement has not moved at all since 2007.)

In fact, research suggests that a fresh perspective is exactly what’s needed to solve seemingly impossible problems. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights growing evidence that “big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders,” not the conventional wisdom of the best and brightest in the field.

Such solutions are known as "mental restructurings," since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What's interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That's why it's important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.

In science, this idea is being put into practice through a website designed to solve difficult scientific problems. In short: organizations posted problems that they themselves were having trouble solving. “Nearly 30 percent of the problems were solved within six months. Many were solved within days.”

How were these problems—which had vexed organizations for months, even years—solved so quickly?

The secret was outsider thinking: The problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective at the margins of their own fields. Chemists didn't solve chemistry problems; they solved molecular biology problems. And vice versa. While these people were close enough to understand the challenge, they weren't so close that their knowledge held them back, causing them to run into the same stumbling blocks that held back their more expert peers.

And so, perhaps what we need right now in education is not fewer outsiders, but many, many more? Not to overrun the voices of those in the classroom, but to join the conversation and help spark new directions. And rather than dismiss those ideas out of hand, we should put down the pitchforks and pull out the welcome mat. There are big problems to solve and we need as much help as we can get.

Great teaching is neither art nor science. It's magic. Photo by jin.thai.

It turns out that his most basic secret—the “magic” of Penn & Teller’s work—doesn’t involve a clever slight of hand or carefully developed prop. Instead, it takes hard work, or grit. In simple terms, Teller explains:

You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

It underscores a simple but all-too-often overlooked life lesson: The only way to be truly great at anything is to set a goal and commit yourself to achieving it beyond what most normal people would think prudent. And then just refuse to give up.

Teller explains, for instance, that he and his partner Penn spent weeks preparing for a minutes-long stint on the David Letterman show. The trick? They produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat that was sitting on Letterman’s desk. To prepare for the stunt:

We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat.

“More trouble than the trick was worth?” Teller wonders. “To you, probably. But not to magicians.”

Any teacher will tell you that outstanding units or lessons don’t just happen.

The same could be said for teaching. Any teacher will tell you that outstanding units or lessons don’t just happen. They are the product of careful and deliberate planning and outstanding execution. And, frankly, they are the product of a dustbin full of the failed lessons that preceded them. In other words, magical teaching is the product of hard work and perseverance and experience and self-reflection.

This is a fact that Angela Duckworth has learned firsthand, first as a teacher and charter-school consultant, then as a researcher and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

As a teacher and consultant, Duckworth realized that one of the challenges of getting students to achieve at high levels was not just schools or life circumstances, but the character or “grit” of the students themselves. In her application essay to Penn, she explained:

The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves. Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.

Then, according to a 2011 New York Times article:

Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn’t as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”

Grit is exactly what makes Teller great. Like anyone who has achieved true greatness in his or her field, Teller has simply used failure as a lesson that informs his future work. He doesn’t give up. (Even when, at 11, he was pelted with hard candy by fellow Cub Scouts who exposed an early trick for what it was.)

This basic principle is something that organizations like KIPP integrate deep into their organizational culture and their approach to teaching, curriculum, and instruction. Perhaps it also needs to be used as a guiding principle for what we look for in all prospective teachers?

Teach for America may be the furthest ahead in this approach, using their considerable recruiting power to identify candidates with many of the indicators of grit so they will be up to the challenges of a gap-closing approach to teaching. That’s no doubt one of the secrets to how so many young, inexperienced TFA teachers can perform as well or better than their much more experienced peers.

But grit is most powerful when it paves the way for practice. How magical would Teller’s performances have been if he had stopped after two years of practice?

Grit is most powerful when it paves the way for practice.

Before we try to get a TFA teacher in every classroom in America, we should acknowledge that their model gets it only half right. The way they select teachers is something that principals and schools of education should learn from. But widespread magical teaching will only be a regular occurrence in America’s classrooms when that kind of raw grit and talent is honed through years and years of practice.

Imagine a teacher recruitment and preparation program that selected for these critical character traits and encouraged the longevity that teachers need to become great?

That would be true magic.

State policy leaders should commit these differences to memory.

Among the most useful elements of the report is Table 1, which outlines the “key instructional shifts” that ELA and math teachers will face as they begin to shift instruction to the Common Core. Drawn from advice produced by Student Achievement Partners, the guidance is simple, but more clearly outlines the essential differences between the Common Core and most existing state standards than most of the “crosswalk” comparisons that state Departments of Education have undertaken to date. On the ELA side, for instance, the authors explain that the CCSS will focus on:

• Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and informational texts 
• Reading and writing grounded in evidence from text 
• Regular practice with complex text and its academic vocabulary 

This very clearly and succinctly highlights some of the key differences between the Common Core and existing state standards. State policy leaders should commit it to memory.

And, even more helpfully, the authors frequently hearken back to these “instructional shifts” and push states to focus their curriculum and professional development efforts on helping teachers address those shifts in their classrooms. As states move to implement the Common Core, it’s critical that they focus on these big-picture shifts first, rather than getting bogged down in relatively minor content differences between the CCSS and a state’s previous standards, so this advice is spot on.

In the teacher evaluation section, the authors also make the important link between holding teachers accountable for CCSS-aligned outcomes and ensuring that districts and schools target professional development activities to identified gaps in teacher knowledge and skill. This link between teacher evaluation and professional development is a critical and often overlooked element of standards implementation and planning.

While the rubric is useful, there is still room for improvement.

Of course, while the rubric is useful, there is still room for improvement. For starters, while the authors claim that the rubric is focused on defining “what” states should do without delineating “how” they should go about achieving their outcomes, they occasionally miss the mark. For example, the rubric specifically demands that state with “exemplary” implementation plans, at a minimum, provide “an aligned model curriculum framework.”

Developing a curriculum framework is one way that states can help schools and teachers align instruction to the Common Core, but it’s certainly not the only way. And, given scarce resources, one wonders whether it’s prudent to encourage states to develop such frameworks themselves rather than, say, identifying a menu of high quality curricular options that allow some flexibility while also helping to align instruction around the new standards.

In addition, some indicators are unclear and may steer states in the wrong direction. For instance, the authors explain that “exemplary” states are those that plan “to connect the measures for teachers in [non-tested subjects and grades]—such as student learning objectives, adapted classroom assessments, or portfolios of student work—to the CCSS.” While it’s useful to prompt states to think about how to hold teachers in non-tested subjects and grades accountable for CCSS implementation, it might be an overreach to suggest that evaluations for all teachers in the building can be meaningfully linked to the CCSS.

On balance, however, the rubric is a useful frame that can help guide state-level implementation planning.

Before we go further down this path, now is probably as good a time as any for education reformers to pause and ask themselves if this kind of top down effort is really what will lead our schools to excellence?

The question is not whether student achievement data should be used as one of several measures of teacher effectiveness, but rather how those data should be used and who is ultimately in the driver’s seat.

Critics of using test data argue that it’s unfair; that standardized tests are imperfect and therefore cannot be used to determine whether students have learned what they should have, and certainly not whether teachers have taught what they were supposed to.

Such arguments are misguided for lots of reasons, chief among them that there is, in no profession, a perfect measure of effectiveness. And teachers ultimately should be held accountable for how well they are able to drive achievement in their classrooms.

No matter how well developed a tool is, it needs to be reality checked.

But these critics are correct on a larger point: no matter how well developed a tool is, it needs to be reality checked. Of course, the one thing critics—teacher unions chief among them—hate more than giving Departments of Education the power to determine who should be hired, fired, or promoted is letting principals make those decisions. As just one example, in a 2010 New York Times “Room for Debate” article, Richard Khalenberg of the Century Foundation explained Albert Shanker’s opposition to allowing principals to make firing decisions:

Who should make the decision about which teachers are fired? Not the principals, Shanker argued. They might play favorites and fire excellent teachers with whom they personally clashed. Besides, how would a principal trained in physical education or history know what makes an excellent French teacher?

But, in order to drive student achievement, we simply must create a system where teachers are free to teach and leaders are expected to lead. To that end, it’s time for education reformers to get out of the business of trying to improve the civil service rules of our broken education bureaucracies and get back into the business of empowering educators—including school leaders—to get results for kids. For principals, that means holding them accountable for school-level student achievement, and giving them the power to make evaluation and related staffing decisions.

It’s up to the principals to use those results—or not—to make school-level staffing decisions.

Test score results, while imperfect, are useful data points that help paint a comprehensive picture of teacher effectiveness. But it’s up to the principals to use those results—or not—to make school-level staffing decisions. Because, in the end, it’s the school leader who needs to determine who are the most and least effective teachers in their school, and it’s the leader who needs to work with teachers and the school community to drive student learning. By creating a system that, by labeling teachers for them, essentially tells principals which teachers should be kept and which should go, we are absolving principals of their responsibility for evaluating their own teachers. And we’re allowing them to escape responsibility for the role they play in driving school-level student achievement and growth.

The accountability formula should be pretty simple: hold principals accountable for the results of their schools. Give them the tools (including access to teacher-level achievement data), resources, and autonomy they need to make staffing decisions and to set the school culture. In other words: we need to stop trying to bypass principals in our effort to drive classroom-level achievement; we need to stop trying to principal-proof our schools.

Of course, there are different ways to structure discipline policies, and what works for one school won’t necessarily work for another. But what’s missing from this discussion is the context necessary to understand how the policy is used and its impact on the culture, students, and families.

Below is the response from Amanda Young, a learning specialist who works at a Noble Charter School in Chicago, and who is shocked and dismayed by the attention Noble’s discipline policy has received. She believes that, taken together, Noble’s policies are designed to support students and create a culture that helps them succeed. And it’s hard to argue with the success they’ve had so far. As Emerson noted in his post last week, “State achievement test data show that Noble beats the public school test score average. Families have lined up for entry and the school has a long waiting list, despite—or maybe because of—its strict disciplinary policies. It boasts a 90 percent graduation rate, compared to 54 percent for Chicago Public Schools, and 91 percent of its graduating seniors go on to college.”

***

Guest Post From Amanda Young, Learning Specialist in the Noble Charter School Network:

A lot of attention has been focused on a narrow slice of the discipline policy of the Noble Charter School Network.

A lot of attention has been focused on a narrow slice of the discipline policy of the Noble Charter School Network. What is most frustrating about this discussion, however, is that the media has failed to give any context that would help readers understand how the discipline policy works within a system that is far more focused on supporting each individual student than on nickel and diming minor infractions. In fact, I have never worked in a school that was so dedicated to supporting each and every student so thoroughly—academically, socially, emotionally, and so on. Every Noble student is matched with an Advisor who tracks his or her grades and demerits. Every Advisory meets at least once a day. Advisors have extra uniform items (socks, belts etc.) so that students don't receive demerits for minor issues like being ‘out of uniform’. What’s more, students get at least one warning before demerits are issued, unless the infraction is extreme. In the end, students have to put more effort into getting multiple demerits and detentions than they do into avoiding them. 

It is true that Noble charges students $5 if they earn four demerits in two weeks. The point is to help students understand that their behavior has consequences and that they need to take responsibility for their actions. That said, we understand that our students come from families who are struggling financially, and so the school works with students who cannot afford the fine. In fact, teachers and administrators have paid out of pocket for the students who truly don’t have the means to come up with the money themselves. (Nowhere in the news is this level of personal and individualized support ever mentioned.) And the money that’s collected is used to pay for student trips. (All juniors go to NY for an east coast college tour for a mere $80; all students go on a free camping trip.)

Prior to joining Noble, I worked in the NYC public schools for years. There were many times that I feared for my own safety inside the schools. Safety is not a concern at Muchin because of the rules and expectations. I would encourage anyone who criticizes the discipline policy to visit a Noble school for an hour and decide for him/herself whether the system of structure, expectations, and support is helping or hurting its students.

In the end, the reason Noble is so successful is because it holds everyone in the building to higher standards, and because everyone supports the policies and the culture it creates. Everyone is on the same page and supporting each other. It’s rare to see such support for schoolwide discipline policies and culture in traditional urban public schools. The reality for too many traditional urban public schools is that the balance of power has shifted so that teachers aren’t in control of the culture. At Noble, the adults have set the culture, and they have set it in service of the best interests of the students we serve. I feel privileged to be serving inner-city students in a school that I would actually send my own children to, and can't say enough in support of it.

Amanda Young is a learning specialist at Muchin College Prep, a Noble Charter School in Chicago. Prior to working at Muchin, she worked as a math teacher and learning specialist for the New York City Board of Education.

The astronomical estimate is not entirely surprising. If you want to scare cash-strapped states away from moving forward with their Common Core plans, it’s not hard to attach a frighteningly large price tag to implementation. After all, the purpose of standards is to create the foundation upon which the entire education system is built. So, obviously, changing standards must mean knocking down the house, re-pouring the foundation, and starting again.

Implementing Common Core doesn't necessarily mean knocking down the house and starting from scratch. Photo by Concrete Forms.

Right?

Well, not quite.

Yes, implementing the Common Core will be costly. No one disputes that. Aligning materials, instruction, and assessment around new standards cannot be done on the cheap if it’s going to be done well.

On the other hand, let’s pretend neither that implementation of the new standards needs to look exactly like implementation of a state’s previous standards, nor that every dollar spent on CCSS needs to be “new money.”

Unfortunately, the Pioneer authors seemed uninterested in reimagining standards implementation or in looking for—or even acknowledging—the potential for cost savings.

The Pioneer authors seemed uninterested in reimagining standards implementation or in looking for the potential for cost savings.

Take, as just one example, the section on professional development. Pioneer estimates that there will be a one-time professional development cost of $5.26 billion across all states—a third of Pioneer’s total CCSS implementation estimate.

Unfortunately, this overblown estimate rests on two fairly dubious assumptions. First, the authors explain that it

was determined by first identifying a typical cost for professional development based on previous state experiences implementing academic standards, weighed by the relative size of this states.

In other words: we assume that it is impossible to rethink professional development delivery or to imagine savings in this area.

Second, while the authors “considered whether to only assume professional development costs at the middle and upper grades for teachers responsible for English and mathematics (e.g., not for science or history teachers),” because of the Common Core’s “increased emphasis in English language arts on more challenging comprehension tasks,” they

…find it reasonable that the responsibility for preparing students to meet the standards would be shared among all teachers. As a result, we assume that all teachers will require training on the Common Core standards.

In other words: We assume that, no matter the cost, every teacher in the building needs exactly the same level of training at the same cost to the state.

Both of these assumptions are, of course, absurd.

For starters, professional development consultants are typically exorbitantly expensive. And their quality is varied, at best. As educators, given the amount of business professional development consultants are likely to get peddling similar materials and sessions to broad audiences, we ought to demand both cost savings and better quality. It’s high time we do that anyway.

More than that, though, what kind of one-time PD for every teacher in every state is Pioneer envisioning that would be worth $5.26 billion? Are they thinking that all teachers—regardless of their knowledge, experience, or effectiveness—need to sit through some kind of arbitrary “Welcome to the Common Core!” PD? (And if so, then I’m willing to save states $5 billion dollars right now by saying, don’t bother.)

That said, the authors do raise some very legitimate concerns about CCSS implementation to which supporters should pay attention. (In particular, they raise some important questions about CCSS-aligned assessment costs and the plans outlined by both consortia.) So let’s hope that Common Core states do not take this as an opportunity to walk away from the standards, but that they instead see it as a useful shot across the bow and that it spurs them to create implementation plans with innovation and cost savings in mind.

Standards—no matter how clear or how rigorous—are not a panacea.

To prove this, he draws on research from 2009 conducted by his colleague, Russ Whitehurst. Essentially, Whitehurst found that the quality of state standards (as judged by our own Fordham analyses as well as analyses conducted by the AFT) did not correlate with state NAEP scores. More specifically, he found that “states with weak content standards score about the same on NAEP as those with strong standards.”

Q.E.D.?

Hardly. What Loveless conveniently ignores is the second—and arguably more significant—element of Whitehurst’s research. In short, Whitehurst “concluded that the effects of curriculum on student achievement are larger, more certain, and less expensive than the effects of popular reforms such as common standards…” (Emphasis added.)

His point is that setting standards alone does very little, but that a thoughtfully and faithfully implemented rigorous curricula can move the achievement needle, sometimes dramatically.

While one could chose to pit those two policy advancements against it each other (standards versus curriculum), a much more logically way to view it is that while strong standards provide a solid foundation, you still need to build the schoolhouse. For education reformers trying to drive the needle on student achievement, the process should start by setting clear and rigorous standards, but it certainly can’t end there.

That’s the Fordham view. As we have long acknowledged, standards alone will do little but adorn classroom bookshelves if not aligned to summative, interim, and formative assessments in terms of both content and rigor, and if not tied to meaningful district-, school-, and classroom-level accountability.

This is a point that Whitehurst himself acknowledges. In 2009, he argued that “high quality common standards” can affect student achievement, but only

“in a system in which there are also aligned assessments, and aligned curriculum, and accountability for educators, and accountability for students, and aligned professional development, and managerial autonomy for school leaders, and teachers who drawn from the best and brightest, and so on.”

That’s hardly the damning critique of common standards that Loveless portrays.

What’s more, contrary to the picture Loveless paints, there is some evidence that the right combination of clear and rigorous standards, thoughtful implementation, and accountability can drive achievement. In Massachusetts—a state that has had among the nation’s most rigorous standards in place for more than a decade and that has aligned its entire education system around implementation of those standards—great standards seem to have jump started large gains in achievement for all students.

But, even more interesting than the fact that Massachusetts leads the nation in terms of overall student achievement is the fact that the lowest performing students from the Bay State outperform their peers around the nation. As do the highest performing students. As I wrote in March of 2010:

“…students scoring in Massachusetts's bottom 25% [on the 2009 Reading NAEP] score higher than students in the bottom 25% of any other state in the nation. And students scoring in the top 25% perform better than students in the top 25% of any other state.

In other words, thanks in large part to adopting rigorous standards and to using these standards to drive curriculum and instruction across the state, Massachusetts has lifted all of its students.

That said, Loveless is certainly right that standards—no matter how clear or how rigorous—are not a panacea that will transform our education system. But, setting clear and rigorous standards, as many states did by adopting the Common Core, is a critical first step towards driving achievement. Now it’s up to the states to commit themselves to properly implementing them.

When it comes to organizations peddling Common Core implementation resources and strategies, the buyer should beware.

Eye on Education, a publishing company that provides “busy educators with practical information” on a host of topics (professional development, school improvement, student assessment, data analysis, and on), released a report this week authored by Lauren Davis that highlights “5 Things Every Teacher Should be Doing to Meet the Common Core State Standards”:

• Lead High-Level, Text-Based Discussions
• Focus on Process, Not Just Content
• Create Assignments for Real Audiences and with Real Purpose
• Teach Argument, Not Persuasion
• Increase Text Complexity

At first glance, this appears to be pointed in the right direction. After all, nearly every point includes quotes from the standards themselves or from the publisher’s criteria released by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel.

Unfortunately, dressing up advice with strategically placed quotes does not a Common Core implementation strategy make. And, in all but one area, Eye on Education has gotten the spirit of the Common Core dead wrong.

First, teachers are told to “focus on process, not just content.” Here, the author gives lip service to the Common Core while at the same time prioritizing the teaching of classroom discussion skills over diving into substantive content and reading. Specifically, Davis argues:

“even if you craft strong questions, you cannot assume that students know how to be effective participants in a class discussion. In Teaching Critical Thinking, Terry Roberts and Laura Billings speak about the importance of explicitly teaching speaking and listening skills.”

To be sure, students need to be taught how to participate in class discussions. But we need not belabor such lessons. Nor should they trump the actual content—in this case, the literature—being taught.

Second, Davis tells teachers to focus on process not content, arguing that because the vocabulary standards encourage students to “make multiple connections between a new word and their own experiences” they should use “discovery-based word study” to expand their vocabulary. For instance,

“An example of a meaningful engagement would be for students to create a blog about a topic of interest and carry on an online conversation that is laced with target words. Even if the target words do sound forced, at least the student is combing through the new vocabulary in search of words that actually communicate their ideas.”

That’s one interpretation. A much more logical one is that the standards are calling for students to make connections to vocabulary when reading. That’s undoubtedly why, in the vocabulary section, the CCSS authors explain that, in order to make a “meaningful connection” to new vocabulary:

first, the reader’s internal representation of the word must be sufficiently complete and well articulated to allow the intended meaning to be known to him or her; second, the reader must understand the context well enough to select the intended meaning from the realm of the word’s possible meanings (which in turn depends on understanding the surrounding words of the text).

Note that neither of those two conditions depends on the reader doing decontextualized “discovery learning” activities.

Repackaging old strategies with Common Core wrapping paper does not constitute alignment to the new standards.

Third, Davis pretends that the Common Core writing standards ask teachers to “create assignments for a real audience with a real purpose.” Then she proceeds to propose using writing class as a way to promote classroom-level student activism. The example given is that a group of students was offended by the sound of the school bell, so “they developed a thesis, organized a petition, wrote letters, and prepared an oral statement to be read for the principal and vice principal.” In fact, the Common Core demands that persuasive and argumentative writing be grounded in evidence drawn from texts, not from empty personal experiences. (Interestingly, the fourth point made in the paper—that teachers should teach argument, not persuasion, seems to run directly counter to point three. Davis makes no attempt to relegate this.)

Finally, and perhaps most distressingly, Davis seemingly argues that text complexity matters, but then goes on to say “don’t rely solely on Lexiles or other formulas, even though they seem ‘official.’ The formulas are imperfect and do not take subject matter into account. Use your own judgment. Also be careful not to choose material that is too challenging.”

Wait: don’t rely on Lexiles? Really? Then, how, precisely, does Davis define text complexity? Because the entire thrust of the Common Core is to ensure all students are reading texts that are on grade level, not on their independent reading level. This is one of the most significant changes ushered in by the Common Core. (Of course, for students who are several grade levels behind, interventions are necessary and critical.)

Here is the bottom line: repackaging old strategies with Common Core wrapping paper does not constitute alignment to the new standards. In the end, only a careful investigation of what the standards actually say will make the difference between faithful implementation of the Common Core and more of the same. The details matter and so do the people teachers place their trust in to serve as a guide. To prevent this national effort from turning into window dressing for the status quo, we need to be much more vigilant separating experts from clowns.

I can understand why teachers would find formative and interim assessments appealing. After all, teachers generally either create those assessments themselves, or are at least intimately involved with their creation. And they are, therefore, more flexible tools that can be tweaked depending on, for instance, the pace of classroom instruction.

But, while formative and interim assessments are critically important and should be used to guide instruction and planning, they cannot and should not be used to replace summative assessments, which play an equally critical role in a standards-driven system.

Formative and interim assessments cannot and should not be used to replace summative assessments.

Summative assessments are designed to evaluate whether students have mastered knowledge and skills at a particular point in time. For instance, a teacher might give a summative assessment at the end of a unit to determine whether students have learned what they needed to in order to move forward. Similarly, and end-of-course or end-of-year summative assessment can help determine whether students mastered the content and skills outlined in a state’s standards for that grade.

If you believe that we need standards to ensure that all students—regardless of their zip code or socioeconomic status—need to learn the same essential content and be held to the same standards, than it’s essential to have an independent gauge that helps teachers, parents, administrators, and leaders understand where students are not reaching the goals we’ve set out for them.

Unfortunately, the NWEA survey does not make this clear, opting instead to narrowly define summative assessments only as “state or district-wide standardized tests that measure grade-level proficiency, and end-of-year subject or course exams.”

It’s hard to imagine many teachers who are going to be enthusiastic about the current “state or district-wide standardized tests” in use, which often include low-quality questions and the results of which typically don’t reach teachers until it’s too late to do anything with them. And so, by defining summative assessments in the particular rather than the general, the NWEA findings tell us less about how teachers feel about the value of summative assessments writ large, and more about how they feel about the current crop of state tests, which pretty much everyone agrees need significant improvement.

What’s more, everyone has a natural bias in favor of the things they create themselves. And so, it’s unsurprising that teachers find the assessments that they create and score (in real time) more useful than tests that are created and scored centrally.

Everyone has a natural bias in favor of the things they create themselves.

Yet, having a set of common standards—whether common to all schools within a state, or common across all states—requires some independent measure of student learning. There needs to be some gauge—for teachers, administrators, and parents—that helps show whether classroom instruction, materials, and even formative and interim assessments are aligned to the state standards in terms of both content and rigor. And to help teachers and parents understand whether, in the end, students learned the essential content and skills they needed each year.

Of course, shifting the focus from teacher-created assessments to centrally-developed state (or even district) assessments is difficult. And many teachers will resist being judged by something they had no hand in creating, and realigning instruction around standards that may look different from what they’ve taught in their classrooms for years.

In the end, if we want standards-driven reform to work, we need to get summative assessments right. Trading summative assessments for formative assessments isn’t an option. They are different tools with very different roles in the system. That means policymakers and education leaders need to do a far better job of soliciting teacher feedback on these assessment tools and they need to focus much more time and attention on delivering high-quality professional development that helps teachers use the data effectively to guide planning, instruction, and formative assessment development. But it also means that teachers in standards-driven schools need to accept that student learning will be measured by something other than the observations and assessments created within the four walls of their schools.

If only it were that easy.

Obama may end up ratcheting up the pressure to water down the standards to which all students are held.

The truth of the matter is, we have yet to develop an education system that keeps students in schools, that holds them accountable to rigorous standards, and that helps them meet those ambitious goals. Therefore, by putting the focus on staying in school longer, without dealing with the very real challenge of how you ensure that the time spent in school is meaningful, Obama may end up ratcheting up the pressure to water down the standards to which all students are held.

This is a truth that Al Shanker recognized two decades ago. In the 1990 National Governors Association meeting, Shanker explained:

…if we had outstanding teachers and if we were to require students to take a tough curriculum, and if we were to give them homework to do and make sure that they did the homework, and if we didn't promote any student unless the student learned what he or she was supposed to, or graduate them, we would have schools just like the ones that I went to in 1939, '40, '41, about that time in New York City.

And there were schools like that all across the country. We had wonderful teachers during the Great Depression, and after that. And we had a tough curriculum. We also had a 76 percent dropout rate in this country…Basically kids started staying in school when we promised them sort of an easy ticket, so we had a school system with a high dropout rate that was [had] quality standards, then we moved to one which had lower standards and kept everybody in.

And therein lies the rub. In this country, we have an education seesaw. Essentially, if you sit on one end, push standards higher, and require all students to master a shared set of sufficiently rigorous standards, the dropout rate goes up. If you sit on the other end and focus on ensuring that we keep as many kids in school for as long as possible, the standards to which those students are held go down.

This watering down of the standards can take many forms—states can loosen course requirements, weaken standards, set inappropriately low proficiency cut scores, or some combination of the three. (In fact, too many states did exactly that to comply with the mandates thrust upon them by NCLB.)

There is no easy answer. But if education leaders—Obama among them—are serious about tackling this challenge, we need to call out this tension far more directly. And, as states work to implement the Common Core, they need to develop a plan to tackle it head on. And asking students to stay in school longer isn’t a sustainable response. Because we’ve watered down the value of a high school diploma, we now tell kids they need some college, if not a four-year degree. Will our next plan be to mandate that students go to school until they’re 21? And, if so, what will our response be when the value of a college degree has been diluted and diminished to the point that it is worth only as much as a high school diploma?

In the end, raising the dropout age may get more kids to stay in school, but it won’t meaningfully increase the number of students ready to succeed after graduation. The only way to do that is to ensure that students graduate having learned the essential knowledge and skills they need to succeed.

The vision is compelling—I believe in the power of close reading and I also agree with Coleman’s point (made clearer in his comment on the post I wrote) that reading strategies are important only inasmuch as they are used to support comprehension of difficult texts. (They are not, in other words, an end in themselves.)

Its hard not to be biased in favor of one’s own interpretations of a text when it repeated back to you.

That said, there is one part of Coleman’s vision—specifically, his rejection of using “pre-reading” strategies to help prepare and provide context to students before they dive in to a complex text—that is likely to send shock waves into reading classrooms around the country, including those who are using the strategies suggested by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion. And, while the decision about whether or not to download background knowledge and information to students before reading may seem like small potatoes in the context of our larger Common Core implementation discussion, it actually gets to the heart of a key debate about the long-term impact of “gap-closing” schools.

Coleman argues that by telling students a little about the stories they are about to read, teachers replace complex texts with a simpler version—their own words—and subtly encourage students to parrot back them what they said, rather than to engage in and draw conclusions for themselves. That, in turn, creates a classroom environment that encourages mimics rather than strong, independent readers. After all, if we tell students what is most important, then ask them questions about what’s most important, aren’t we most likely to hear what we’ve told them to say? And try as we might, its hard not to be biased in favor of one’s own interpretations of a text when it repeated back to you.

It’s a compelling argument. But for those teachers who have built instruction around the strategies outlined in Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, following it would also be a significant departure from their current practice.

Both Lemov and Coleman agree on the importance of close reading to drive reading instruction and student comprehension. But Lemov’s vision differs from Coleman’s in at least two important ways.

1. Lemov suggests that “champion” teachers effectively pre-teach targeted background information, give students pre-reading summaries of the text, and “introduce key scenes before students read them.”

Lemov argues that “lack of prior knowledge is one of the key barriers to comprehension for at-risk students and it affects all aspects of reading, even fluency and decoding, as struggling with gaps soaks up the brain’s processing capacity.”

Lemov does emphasize, however, that these pre-reading mini-lessons should be short, and razor-focused on filling gaps, rather than on generating discussion. “Ten minutes of teacher-driven background and then getting right to reading is usually worth an hour of, ‘Who can tell me what Nazis were?’ Efficiency matters.”

Similarly, Lemov notes that the best teachers use summarizing effectively—they begin a class by summarizing what the students read the day before, and by “front loading” information and scenes that they will encounter today.

This is exactly the kind of practice that Coleman warns against, arguing that it’s precisely these kinds of summarizing and pre-reading activities that effectively give students “Cliff’s Notes” versions of complex texts and let them off the hook for engaging with the texts themselves.

2. Pointing out for students key “focal points” while reading

Lemov notes that students

“learn to determine what’s worthy of attention with time and practice. Without years of practice, readers often make questionable or nonstrategic decisions about what to attend to. They notice something of tangential relevance but miss the crucial moment. The trapeze artists are in full swing, and they can’t stop looking at the cotton candy seller. They see three details but fail to connect them to one another.”

To help students hone this critical skill, Lemov suggests that “champion” teachers

“steer them in advance toward key ideas, concepts, and themes to look for. Which characters will turn out to be most important? What idea will be most relevant to the story discussion? In addition, they advise students what’s secondary, not that important, or can be ignored for now.”

I am sure that Lemov and Coleman would agree on the problem—that students need to learn how to determine what’s worthy of time and attention. But Coleman values teachers who resist the temptation to point out key focal points and instead plan very strategic—often very humble—text-dependent questions that force students to go back into the texts themselves and recognize these focal points.

What Lemov saw in his best teachers could amount to “spoon feeding” answers to students.

The difference may be small, but its impact may be significant. What Lemov saw in his best teachers could amount to “spoon feeding” answers to students. It might let kids off the hook by putting most of the heavy lifting of reading on the teacher’s shoulders. And it could be one factor that contributes to the ongoing struggle that gap-closing schools have in helping their students learn the kinds of life-long independent reading and analysis skills they will need to be ready for the rigor and demands of college and beyond.

Of course, the challenge these schools have is real. As I mentioned in a previous post, gap-closing schools have to maximize every moment because every moment wasted simply adds to the already significant achievement gap between rich and poor. But, in reading class, have schools gone too far in their quest for efficiency and not left the space for students to learn the persistence they will need to do the kinds of analysis that will be required of them in the years ahead?

There is no easy answer—and there is no one right answer. But how schools approach these and other strategic questions in the months and years will go a long way towards determining the long-term impact of Common Core.

Enter the GE Foundation. In the hopes of providing a big boost to the Common Core implementation efforts, the foundation announced a 4-year, $18 million grant to Student Achievement Partners—the group co-founded by CCSS architects David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and Sue Pimentel. According to GE, the grant will support several implementation efforts, including:

• Direct collaboration with teachers to produce and share examples and best practices of excellent instruction aligned with the Standards;
• A website, www.achievethecore.org, to distribute free resources designed to support teacher understanding and implementation;
• Standards Immersion Institutes designed to cultivate teacher experts who can build knowledge in their districts and states;
• The development of tools to track implementation and evaluate the quality of student work; and
• Partnerships with a network of non-profits to provide ongoing technical support to district and state leaders guiding implementation.

Of course, the pressure is now on to deliver on these lofty goals. There will certainly be other investments in nonprofit groups looking to provide school- and district-level implementation support, but this will undoubtedly be the largest.

In a strong initial move, Student Achievement Partners will hold no intellectual property rights over the materials they create or share—they will be open source and they will be provided at no cost. In addition, the group will “have no financial interests with any publisher of education materials.” In a field quickly being overrun by textbook publishers looking to make a quick buck on “Common Core” support, this is a welcome approach to take.

In the end, there is no one right way to implement the standards. But hopefully giving the voices of the CCSS authors a big microphone will help guide and shape state, district, and classroom-level implementation discussions in the right direction.

It is exactly this “close reading” that Common Core supporters hope will usher in a new era of reading instruction—one where teachers select grade-appropriate texts for all students; where they have students read and reread those texts—perhaps more times than even makes sense or feels comfortable—to support deep comprehension and analysis; and where they push students to engage in the text itself—in the author’s words, not in how those words make us feel.

Common Core challenges us to help students (and teachers) understand that reading is not about them.

The reality is that the Common Core challenges us to help students (and teachers) understand that reading is not about them. Of course, what students read will often touch them, sometimes even change them. But that will happen only if, while they’re reading, they deeply understand and absorb the words and images in front of them first.

This is a lesson that David Coleman, one of the architects of the CCSS ELA standards, has traveled around the nation trying to help illustrate. His ideas are, of course, not without their critics. There are plenty of people who believe that Coleman, who has no classroom-level instructional experience, has no right to tell people how to run their classrooms.

Such criticism is not unsurprising. Coleman does, after all, outspokenly call out what are common—and beloved—practices in literature classrooms across the country. In one speech, for example, he challenges our overemphasis on personal narrative and personal opinion in writing classrooms by saying:

“…forgive me for saying this bluntly, the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world, you realize that people don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

His point, of course, is more nuanced than that: it’s that people are unlikely to listen to your opinions unless they’re grounded in something outside of yourself—evidence from reading, from research, etc.

And he’s right, by the way. That is, in fact, precisely why some of his staunchest critics dismiss his words out of hand—they don’t feel like those words are grounded in the kind of evidence they want to see (classroom experience).

But how does Coleman propose making this shift in the classroom? When it comes to reading, Coleman has several very specific suggestions:

1.  Eliminate pre-reading activities.

Coleman is refreshingly unapologetic in his assertion that pre-reading activities are a waste of instructional time. He believes, for instance, that giving students background information about the text does little more than encourage students to parrot back the teacher’s words when answering questions, rather than actually absorbing and critically analyzing what the author said. And he thinks spending time predicting what the text is going to be about or comparing it to other works is a needless distraction. Instead, he encourages teachers to allow students to dive immediately in to the text itself.

2. Guide lessons with text-dependent questions that require students to use the author’s words to support their responses.

This is perhaps the most significant difference between what the Common Core demands and the practice that is in place in classrooms across the country. Too many teachers shift students’ attention away from the text too quickly by asking them what they think of what they’re reading, or how it makes them feel. Or by asking them to make personal connections to the story. The Common Core asks that teachers develop questions—and demand answers—that use evidence from the text to support responses, to defend opinions, etc. Of course, by engaging in the text in this way, students will inevitably develop opinions and have reactions to the text. They should. But those feelings and reactions should not be the primary focus of instruction. In fact, it doesn’t need to be. A student who deeply understands King’s words in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, for instance, will not be able to help having an emotional response to it. We don’t need to focus instruction on spoon feeding those feelings to them.

3. Stop focusing instruction on reading strategies.

There are few people who argue that teaching students how to identify the main idea or to understand the difference between cause and effect has no place in an ELA classroom. That said, the importance of teaching such reading skills and strategies has somehow outstripped the importance of actually reading. As David Coleman says, “we lavish so much attention on these strategies in place of reading. I urge us instead to just read.”

4. Devote more time to each text by reading and re-reading for understanding.

Small children instinctively understand the importance of repetition. That’s why they play the same games ad infinitum. It’s why small children want to read their favorite books over and over. And yet, in school, we have a tendency to turn our noses up at it. Teachers loathe teaching lessons multiple times, or fear students will be bored if they’re exposed to the same content or reading again and again. We feel pressure to make things new and exciting, when what students might actually need to push their thinking and to do critical literary analysis is repetition. To that end, Coleman suggests spending three days on the Gettysburg Address—a three paragraph speech. And he thinks Letter from a Birmingham Jail should take six days.

Of course, there’s only value in lingering on texts for so long if they’re worthy of the time—and that is why the Common Core asks students to read texts that are sufficiently complex and grade-appropriate. Yes, such texts may often push students—perhaps even to their frustration level. That is why it’s essential for teachers to craft the kinds of text-dependent questions that will help them break down the text, that will draw their attention to some of the most critical elements, and that will push them to understand (and later analyze) the author’s words.

In the end, “close reading” means making lessons simplified, though not simplistic. Streamlined, though not rushed or short. Focused, but not narrow. And, more than anything, the Common Core challenge to spend class time engaging in “close reading” of texts asks teachers to focus reading on actually reading.

Textbooks won't go extinct anytime soon.
Photo by meedanphotos

Last week, Apple launched two programs for the iPad that it hopes will transform the textbook industry in the same way the iPod transformed the music industry. The first, iBooks 2, will make media-rich electronic textbooks available for purchase on the iPad at a fraction of the cost of a hard-copy text. (Currently, all titles are available for $14.99 or less.) The second, iBooks Author, allows anyone to create textbooks for free using an iMac, and to publish them to iBooks immediately.

There were many skeptics who, when the iPod was launched a decade ago, believed it would have only a negligible impact on the way people listened to music. Helping those folks eat their words has become something of a cottage industry on the web. Just yesterday, tech blogger and Apple enthusiast John Gruber gleefully documented all of the people who underestimated the appeal of the iPhone and iPad and contrasted them with Apple’s just-announced record-breaking sales for both products.

And so, I’m loathe to doubt the transformative power of the iPad in the world of education. After all, if anyone can transform the textbook industry, it’s Apple. As someone who spent many years writing instructional materials for schools and trying to find my way around the many deficiencies of the current crop of textbooks, I welcome the creative destruction it would bring.

But, even for a company as successful as Apple, the path forward is a challenging one, and it’s likely to be a while before students across all grades and schools come to class with iPads instead of textbooks in their backpacks.

For starters, iPads are—at least for now—prohibitively expensive for too many students ($499 to $829). Universal adoption would require a prohibitively large up-front expense. And, if schools were to somehow find room in their budgets to provide iPads to all students, it would be very tempting to do so in a tightly controlled way. It’s unlikely that they would let them take them home, both for security reasons and because it’s far too easy for children to damage iPads, no matter how careful they try to be.

Which brings us to our next challenge: iPads aren’t as nearly durable as textbooks. In fact, they don’t even come close. Perhaps anticipating this criticism, Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing, decided a good offense was a great defense and made the case that an iPad is better than a paper textbook because “It’s portable, durable, interactive, searchable, current and capable of containing even richer content.”

You lost me at “durable,” Phil. It’s one giant piece of glass. Some enthusiasts practically cradle them like babies when carrying them from room to room.

You lost me at “durable,” Phil. It’s one giant piece of glass.

Old-fashioned textbooks, by contrast, need little more than a paper bag cover to protect them—and can sustain the daily wear and tear they are sure to get. What will happen when, two months into the school year, a third of all elementary students need new iPads? Certainly parents aren’t going to absorb that cost. But how can schools? In such a scenario, what would a teacher do to ensure learning time wasn’t lost to technology glitches?

Even more importantly, though, in order for iPads to replace traditional textbooks and resources, teachers need to integrate them into their approach to lesson-planning. But low-tech options—blackboards, handouts, textbooks, etc.—are easy to integrate into daily lessons. Over time, would iBooks really become the go-to resource or will they be relegated to (expensive) niche lessons for particular classes and schools?

I’m sure that, when the personal computer was created, people envisioned a day when notebooks and paper would go the way of the dinosaur and would be replaced by a PC on every desk. It never panned out. It seems unlikely that we will have an Apple on every desk any time soon.

Unfortunately, Pondiscio’s post distracts from that point by deriding some practices that, when done well, can be used to powerfully drive student achievement.

Take, for example, data-driven instruction. Pondiscio is right that “using data in half-baked or simplistic ways” is going to do very little to drive student learning. But the answer is not to abandon data-driven instruction writ large, but rather to encourage teachers to use data thoughtfully and purposefully. There aren’t nearly enough examples (or quality PD purveyors) that demonstrate how this can be done and done well. We need more.

There is no question that test prep is virtually useless.

Similarly, Pondiscio derides both “dumb test prep” and “reciting lesson aim and standard.” There is no question that test prep is virtually useless. In fact, the fact that test prep is used so widely, but that reading scores have remained essentially flat for more than a decade, should help demonstrate just how ineffective it is. Why it is still the go-to method for preparing students for state tests is beyond me.

By contrast, the practice of organizing lessons around a clearly-defined aim is critical. And putting that aim in student-friendly language, while not absolutely necessary, can be useful. Unfortunately, the aim is too often added at the end, often as a compliance measure only because it is required by school and district leaders. And, as a result, there are countless examples of laughable “aims,” chief among them the one Pondiscio cites in his post. (“Through this lesson I will develop phonemic awareness and understanding of alphabetic principles.”)

But, as the Cheshire Cat explained to Alice: if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter much which way you go. And so it is in teaching: aimless lessons are too often guided by ill-chosen activities—including the kinds of “overused teaching strategies” that Pondiscio warns against in his post—exactly because the teacher hasn’t clearly defined the outcome s/he is driving towards. In fact, perhaps the best way to avoid the overuse of ineffective teaching strategies is to organize lessons around clearly defined aims. (And to use formative data to drive short and long term planning!)

That said, writing great aims—particularly in reading—is incredibly difficult. But getting it right is essential.

Writing great aims—particularly in reading—is incredibly difficult. But getting it right is essential.

In the end, Pondiscio is right about one thing: poorly conceived and implemented standards- and data-driven instruction will do little to drive achievement, particularly in reading. But, the best way to improve instruction—and to discourage the practices that Pondiscio rightly derides—is not to abandon it entirely, but rather to improve the foundation upon which that instruction is built. Specifically: we need to change the way we assess reading and the way we present data from those assessments to teachers.

In the end, the main reason that reading instruction is driven by skills is that reading assessments are designed to assess mastery of reading skills in isolation. This can’t be done well and should be abandoned. Instead, assessments should be organized around genres and mastery of critical, genre-specific content. And the data from the assessments should not be presented in terms of whether students have mastered particular skills—but rather how that comprehension differs depending on the genre or content covered.

• Developing a plan for teacher professional development,



• planning to align/revamp state-created curricular and instructional materials, and



• making changes to teacher evaluation systems.

Many CCSS supporters cheered at the report’s main finding, which indicated that all but one state—Wyoming—“reported having developed some type of formal implementation plan for transitioning to the new, common standards.” There is cause for excitement—this is a clear indication that states are taking CCSS implementation seriously and that they are working to reorient their education systems to the new standards.

That said, while developing implementation plans is an important first step, it’s far more critical to ensure that those plans are worth following—that they properly identify the gaps in teacher knowledge and skill so that they can target state-led PD efforts, for example, and that they prioritize the essential components of the CCSS in state-created curricular and instructional materials. This report doesn’t get into these questions of quality—though Education First and EPE will release two follow-up reports in the coming months that address the quality of the state plans. The first will include a rubric against which state plans will be judged, and the second will be a report of state progress against the benchmarks outlined in the rubric.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is reason to be nervous that states may be spending a tremendous amount of time and energy developing and implementing plans that might not address the essential curricular and instructional changes the CCSS demand.

Let’s hope that the follow-up reports—in particular the rubric that will be used to judge the quality of statewide CCSS implementation plans—look critically at where standards implementation has fallen short in the past and help identify what we need to do to correct those mistakes. This is our chance not just to raise the expectations for all students, but also to rethink the way to approach state standards implementation. Let’s seize the opportunity and make sure we’re getting it right.

Beverly Jobrack thinks so. In fact, she’s written a book— The Tyranny of theTextbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reform—that argues, essentially, that it’s curriculum, not structural reform, that has the greatest potential to drive student achievement.

Standards alone will do little to drive student achievement if they’re not meaningfully implemented.

Jobrack has a point—as we’ve long said here at Fordham, standards alone will do little to drive student achievement if they’re not meaningfully implemented (via, among other things, a thoughtfully designed curriculum). In fact, few state and national education reformers would disagree with Jobrack about the importance of curriculum and instruction in driving student achievement. So why do so few actually take up the fight for curriculum and instructional changes?

One big challenge is the belief of many reformers—including Jobrack herself—that curricular and instructional policy should not be set centrally. After all, if you have to drive change one school at a time, you lose all the leverage provided by state and federal policy. And this is where Jobrack’s argument and policy recommendations start to break down. While Jobrack does highlight the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of statewide textbook adoption policy, she doesn’t offer much in the way of practical policy advice beyond that. And much of the advice beyond the textbook issue seems misguided.

For instance, Jobrack outlines what seems like an overly complicated and lengthy selection process for schools looking to adopt curricula. And, once selected, she encourages schools to manage the faithful implementation of the selected curriculum—a policy prescription that seems sure to encourage a paint-by-numbers approach to instruction and implementation.

Of course, there’s no denying that a poorly implemented curriculum will have very little impact on student achievement. But it doesn’t follow that managing to implementation rather than to results will yield better results for students for two reasons. First, no selection process, no matter how well designed, will ever protect schools from making curricular mistakes. (Look at Joel Klein’s disastrous decision to mandate—and manage, too—the faithful implementation of “Everyday Math” and “Month-by-Month Phonics” in New York City schools nearly a decade ago.) Second, there is no such thing as a “teacher-proof” curriculum.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Jobrack doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to the importance of instruction. Effective curriculum implementation relies on effective instruction. And effective instruction relies on a teacher’s ability to adapt curriculum to the needs of his/her particular students. And so any discussion about classroom-level implementation of curriculum should include a discussion of using formal and informal assessment to track student mastery of essential content and skills, and of using the data from those assessments to really drive short- and long-term planning and instruction. This kind of data-driven instruction is essential in ensuring not only that teachers have covered essential content, but that students have actually learned it.

In the end, Jobrack helps reinforce the feeling that when it comes to state and federal policy a focus first and foremost on structural reforms does make sense. But Jobrack’s larger point still stands: a movement concerned only with these issues of structural reform can’t claim to actually be driving student achievement gains, instead only creating the opportunity for school leaders and educations to do so when they get curriculum and instruction right within school walls.

While this focus on setting clear and sufficiently rigorous standards is important, it is also insufficient. After all, if we’ve learned anything from 10 years of NCLB implementation, it’s that the act of setting standards doesn’t translate to increased student achievement unless those standards are meaningfully implemented in the classroom. And, one of the most important things for states to do to ensure strong implementation is to hold students accountable for actually learning the content laid out in the standards.

While the focus on setting clear and sufficiently rigorous standards is important, it is also insufficient.

Unfortunately, over the past 10 years, too many states—even those with reasonably rigorous standards—have asked very little of students on statewide assessments. In fact, Fordham’s 2007 “Proficiency Illusion” report found that “the central flaw in NCLB is that it allows each state to set its own definition of what constitutes ‘proficiency.’” And so, as we look towards NCLB reauthorization, we should seek to right this wrong.

In 2005, Andy Rotherham gave two pieces of advice to education reformers struggling with the issue of variability in state content standards and proficiency levels:

First, to those worried that the new NCLB accountability provisions could lead to the watering down of state standards, he argued that the path forward was to “build national consensus through governors working together and a bottom-up, consortia approach…[that would] save money, improve the quality of tests, and defuse the politics.”

Second, he argued against using “the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) as an actual yardstick with consequences,” noting that “it’s generally agreed that this would corrupt the NAEP’s validity as an independent gauge of trends over time, or as CGCS’s Mike Casserly once quipped, ‘why sully the almost only unsullied thing in education.’”

Seven years later, Rotherham’s first idea appears amazingly prescient. Governors did indeed come together to create a set of common standards for ELA and math, resulting in a dramatic and widespread improvement in the rigor of state standards.

But the issue of variability in state proficiency has yet to be addressed.

On the one hand, one of the requirements for states joining either the PARCC or SMARTER Balanced assessment Consortia is to agree to a common cut score. One option is to leave it to the consortia and hope that they set cut scores for proficiency sufficiently high.

Setting rigorous—and consistent—proficiency levels across states is too important to get wrong a second time.

But setting rigorous—and consistent—proficiency levels across states is too important to get wrong a second time. So, perhaps we need to establish an independent gauge that will help determine whether the proficiency levels set by either individual states or the assessment consortia are sufficiently rigorous? And, at the risk of challenging Andy’s forewarning, perhaps it’s time to revisit his caution against using the NAEP?

After all, the NAEP is a test that is widely agreed to be a reliable assessment of rigorous, K-12 content standards. Why not systematically compare the proficiency levels from statewide assessments to the proficiency levels of the NAEP 4th, 8th, and 12th grade tests and require that there is minimal variability between the two?

It’s time for ed reformers to confront an uncomfortable truth: ensuring that states set sufficiently rigorous standards isn’t enough. Common Core won’t move the needle on student achievement as long as states continue to set their proficiency levels so low. As legislators on both sides of the aisle work to revamp the federal ESEA, it’s time to revisit the purpose of the NAEP and leverage its power to set the bar for students consistently high across all states.

Details continue to trickle in about the PARCC and SMARTER Balanced assessment consortia plans for their summative ELA and math assessments. Catherine Gewertz has dug into the RFPs for both consortia and shared some of her findings in an article published in Education Week yesterday. There’s a lot of interesting information, including the fact that both consortia appear to be moving away from multiple choice questions in their test designs. Gewertz explains:

Documents issued by the two groups of states that are designing the tests show that they seek to harness the power of computers in new ways and assess skills that multiple-choice tests cannot…

While the plans offer few details about how the new items will differ, or why it’s necessary to abandon multiple choice questions entirely, people across the education world will no doubt celebrate the demise of the multiple choice question.

Multiple choice items are, after all, the assessment items everyone loves to hate. Critics on all sides of the education debate deride “bubble tests” as the enemy of genuine learning and believe that our reliance on assessments that use multiple choice questions has forced teachers to “teach to the test” rather than focusing on helping students achieve deep conceptual understanding of critical content and 21st century skills.

But, perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to relegate multiple choice questions to the dustbin of assessment history? After all, when carefully crafted, these questions can be useful, reliable, and cost-effective ways to gather information about student learning. And because they can be scored quickly, information from multiple choice questions can be used almost immediately to drive whole class and small group instruction and individual tutoring.

Unfortunately, “bubble tests” have become the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with assessments today. In particular, people tend to criticize two things.

First, some multiple choice questions are just poorly written. Too many questions assess only low-level content that requires little more than rote memorization of basic skills, rather than higher-level application or conceptual understanding.

Second, analysis of the data from multiple choice questions too often begins and ends with whether the student got the question right or wrong. But, such superficial analysis ignores the most useful information that can be gleaned from multiple choice questions. Specifically, careful analysis of the “distractors”—the purposefully chosen wrong answers—can help the teacher understand where student understanding is breaking down.

Take, for example, the following 10th grade math question:

What is the median of the data set below?

30,  37,  19,  42,  33,  37

A. 31             C. 35

B. 33             D. 37

This is a basic question that assesses student mastery of core math skills. But, analysis of the distracters can help teachers identify where student understanding is breaking down. For example, a student selecting answer B has most likely confused mean with median—information that a teacher can use to target individual tutoring or instruction right away. But, more than that, would an open-ended question give teachers more or better information about student mastery of this basic skill? Not necessarily.

Of course, it’s also possible to write questions that assess far more than basic skills. Carefully crafted multiple choice questions can demand application of essential content and skills and can push student thinking. And the data can be equally useful in driving instruction and tutoring.

What’s more, multiple choice questions are generally more efficient than open-ended questions. Scoring them is quick, easy, and cost-effective. And there is very little scoring bias: when properly constructed there are clear right and wrong answers to each question. (Open-ended questions, by contrast, can be scored differently by different people, which often leads to either variations in student scores, or an overreliance on simplistic rubrics that do not give the full picture of student understanding of essential content and skills.)

Of course, with multiple choice items, like all assessment items, their effectiveness depends on how well they are developed and how effectively they are put to use as part of an overall assessment and instructional strategy. And, while assessments should never rely exclusively on multiple choice questions, to avoid them entirely because they may have been abused in the past seems misguided.

So, as PARCC and SMARTER Balanced look to develop the assessments of the future, perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to abandon something that, when paired with innovative new question types, might be the most effective and efficient way to gauge student learning of essential content and skills.

Specifically, the law (which was passed over the governor’s veto) requires all districts to adopt a policy that:

“…include[s] a provision requiring the parent or legal guardian to notify the school principal or designee in writing of the specific material to which they object and a provision requiring an alternative agreed upon by the school district and the parent, at the parent’s expense, sufficient to enable the child to meet state requirements for education in the particular subject area.”

Do parents not have a right to ask that assignments not insult their beliefs and teachings?

In a post on Curriculum Matters last week, Erik Robelen explained that New Hampshire Governor John Lynch “said the measure was too vague about what might be deemed objectionable and would prove burdensome to school districts. He also said it risked stifling teachers, who might shy away from exposing students to ‘new ideas and critical thinking’ for fear of sparking complaints.”

Governor Lynch went on to say that the legislation “encourages teachers to go to the lowest common denominator in selecting material, in order to avoid 'objections' and the disruptions it may cause their classrooms.”

Of course, it’s reasonable to wonder whether such policies will lead to abuse. Teachers cannot, after all, craft individualized lessons on every topic to cater to the whims of parents.

And it’s impossible to read about this kind of curricular debate without wondering whether this is just a back-door way for creationists to oppose teaching about evolution or to force lessons on intelligent design. But the questions raised by this law are actually both larger and more nuanced than that.

For example, shouldn’t parents exercise some control over what their children learn? In fact, public schools—as we know them today—actually started out as publicly funded Protestant schools that used the King James Version of the Bible in class and included overt anti-Catholic (not to mention anti-Jewish) teaching. At the time, Catholic and Jewish parents had no recourse, and so created their own system of privately funded schools.

Of course, starting an alternative system of education is an extreme—and one unlikely to be replicated. But we have seen a big increase in homeschooling fueled, in part, by a feeling among many parents that their values are being undermined by their public schools.

For instance, the parents of one New Hampshire high school student were outraged when their child was assigned Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America in the school’s finance class. They complained about the book’s pro-Marxist, anti-Christian references and asked that it be removed from the curriculum. (The boy’s parents complained that “Jesus is referred to as a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist,” and the education bill’s main sponsor, Rep. J. R. Hoell, cited this incident in its defense, arguing that the “admittedly Marxist” book “insulted Christians and promoted illegal drug use as well as being critical of American family life.”)

The school district defended the book, arguing that its “instructional value outweighs its shortcomings.” But at what cost?

This is a dicey issue, to be sure. Taken to its extreme, such objections could lead to the banning of classic works of literature or the indoctrination of particular points of view in fairly homogeneous communities. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss these developments as one big creationist conspiracy. Do parents not have a right to ask that assignments not insult their beliefs and teachings? Perhaps a little more flexibility and sensitivity to the values of the kids we serve is in order?

Two months ago, Apple celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of the iPod. Sunday, we will “celebrate” the 10th birthday of NCLB.

The iPod is universally seen as a game changer—something that not only transformed the way we listen to music, but that changed the music industry itself.

Few would say the same about the transformative power of NCLB.

Yet, what if the iPod hadn’t evolved in the ten years since its initial release? What if, after Steve Jobs released the 2001 version—the first-generation iPod—the different divisions at Apple couldn’t come to agreement about how it should evolve?

As one tech-expert explained:

[The iPod] debuted in the fall of 2001 as a Mac-only, FireWire-only $399 digital audio player with a tiny black-and-white display and 5 GB hard disk. The iTunes Store didn’t exist until April 2003. The Windows version of iTunes didn’t appear until October 2003—two years after the iPod debuted! Two years before it truly supported Windows! Think about that. If Apple released an iPod today that sold only as many units as the iPod sold in 2002, that product would be considered an enormous flop.

The transformative power of the iPod was unleashed not by its first iteration, but by the way Apple constantly evaluates, reevaluates, improves, and changes its products. And that’s why, ten years later, the iPod is seen as a game changer.

By contrast, ten years after the release of NCLB, the law is seen as a disappointment, if not an outright flop. Not because it didn’t have the potential to change classroom-level instruction the same way the iPod changed music, but because it’s a law frozen in time.

NCLB was signed into law and never modified. As Mike pointed out yesterday, Version 1.0 of NCLB sparked some initial changes. Student achievement improved, particularly for our most struggling students and particularly in math. But then we saw a plateau. Version 2.0 was debated for a decade and never released. And we wonder why the impact was so small?

The truth is that any policy innovation is only as good as its implementation is strong.

The truth is that any policy innovation is only as good as its implementation is strong. And strong implementation requires constantly evaluating and reevaluating what’s happening, what’s going wrong, and how it can be improved.

There are schools and districts, however, who did take Steve Jobs's approach to implementation. They embraced standards- and accountability-driven reform the same way Apple embraced the iPod. They focused on evaluation and continuous improvement, and as a result, they have made enormous gains for their students. These schools took the state standards—which were often woefully inadequate, written in obscure and unteachable language, and riddled with content gaps and errors—and worked with teachers before the school year began to ensure everyone was clear about what, precisely, students should know and be able to do. They worked to ensure that those outcomes drove short- and long-term lesson plans. And they worked to align formative, interim, and summative assessments to the state assessments in terms of content and rigor.

But more than that, the most successful among this group constantly evaluated and reevaluated their practice and made changes to curriculum, to instruction, and to assessment to help their students master that content and those skills. That is standards- and accountability-driven reform at its core.

In order for standards to gain traction on the ground—in classrooms—they have to be the starting point for all short- and long-term planning; they have to be the anchors to which all formal and informal assessments (both formative and summative) are aligned. Unfortunately, in too many classrooms, standards were largely ignored. Sure, they were occasionally linked to lessons—generally as a compliance measure when administrators required it—but, in too many classrooms, teachers continued on, using the same kinds of curricular and instructional resources they had for many years, sometimes with minor tweaks, day in and day out.

We should look not at the failure of the law itself, but rather at our failure to evolve NCLB in response to lessons learned.

Of course, the state assessments did have some impact. In many classrooms, a panic wave would sweep through the building several weeks before the state test when “regular” instruction would be replaced by test prep; when “electives” (like art, history, and science) were dropped in favor of extra “tutoring” (read: more test prep) for “cusp” students who, it was thought, could be brought from failure to passing with some key test-taking strategies and some last-minute cramming. And, in too many schools, this version of implementation has remained mostly unchanged since NCLB was passed 10 years ago, largely because the law itself hasn’t evolved with the changing landscape.

And so, as we take stock of NCLB 10 years later, we should look not at the failure of the law itself, but rather at our failure to evolve NCLB in response to lessons learned. In the end, if we want standards- and accountability-driven reform to be a game changer for schools, we need to learn from the past—from our successes and mistakes—and commit to improving and evolving our first-generation iPod.

“I challenge anyone who supports the current testing regime to take the 12th grade test for graduation and release the results to the media.”

The tweet was a response to a post published by Valerie Strauss in early December that told the story of a prominent and, by all accounts, very successful Florida school board member who took a state ELA and math test and publicized his results. (He earned 17 percent in math, 62 percent in reading.) His experience caused him to question to validity of using tests as part of a statewide accountability system. He said:

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning…I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

Strauss agreed and concluded:

“There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

The post and Ravitch’s challenge set off a firestorm of anti-testing vitriol. This was proof, people argued, that “corporate-driven” standards- and accountability-driven reforms should be abandoned.

Intrigued, I went and took the modified test that Strauss posted on her blog. My results: 86% on math (6/7) 100% on reading (7/7). Perhaps I’m an outlier? (Click on these links to take the reading or math test yourself.) But either way, the crux of this conversation should not be about how I did—or how a Florida school board member did. Indeed, such conversations distract us from the debate we should be having about standards- and accountability-driven reform for three reasons.

First, as the board member himself acknowledges, “if [he’d] actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh.” In all likelihood, that’s the case, particularly for math. I suspect that this board member took a job that doesn’t require much day-to-day math knowledge. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s unsurprising that someone who isn’t using high-level math every day would forget some of that important content. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop asking high school graduates to demonstrate mastery of that content. After all, we need to ensure that we give students the option to take college-level math if they so choose.

Second, the rhetoric that inspired Strauss’s post and its follow ups suggests that a single test can dictate the future of young children in our country. That is simply not true. There are places where it is: in France, for instance, the only students who are eligible to attend state universities must pass the nation’s baccalaureate. Other nations have similarly black-and-white approaches to deciding who is and is not “college material.” Here, only a little over half (28) of states require students to take a standardized test as a condition of earning a high school diploma. Most of those assessments are pegged at 10th grade—not 12th grade—standards. All students have multiple chances to pass the test before graduation. And even students who don’t pass have other opportunities to pursue postsecondary education if they so choose.

But, more than that, shouldn’t earning a high school diploma depend on demonstrating mastery of some predetermined set of knowledge and skills? If not those that the FCAT (or other tests) assess, then let’s talk about what we think all students should learn and about how we can best measure that. It shouldn’t focus on abandoning all efforts to measure student learning of any standards.

Before we abandon all state testing and accountability systems, shouldn’t we work to build a better evaluation of student learning?

Finally, and most importantly, few people argue that existing state tests are perfectly crafted. On the contrary, while it is possible to glean instructionally useful information about student learning from the assessments, they provide a narrow and imperfect picture of student mastery of essential content and skills. That’s unsurprising given how few states make getting assessments right a top priority. (As I’ve argued before, states have invested a comparatively small portion of their budgets on getting assessment right.)

Before we abandon all state testing and accountability systems, shouldn’t we work to build a better evaluation of student learning? After all, don’t we need to better understand how prepared our students are for the rigors of college-level work? And shouldn’t we rely on something other than individual GPAs, which are frequently inflated, overestimate the performance of top students in low-performing schools, and give little information on what students have or have not learned?

In the end, the real challenge is to ensure that a high school diploma is a meaningful indication that students who’ve earned it are ready for the rigors of college-level work and beyond. The system we have now is imperfect, but proponents of standards-driven reform are working to make it better. I challenge those who oppose standards- and accountability-driven reform writ large to propose a viable alternative that does the job better.

But we have a long road ahead to reach that goal. The quality of state standards has been all over the map and implementation of those standards has been mixed at best. Now that nearly every state has adopted the Common Core, states have a chance to reboot and to get standards- and assessment-driven reform right.

To get there we will have to find the right answers to some key questions. How do we ensure the assessment consortia develop the rigorous assessments we need? Will state-driven professional development be focused where it needs to be? Will states focus too much on mandating curricular and instructional materials? Not enough? And, most importantly, will district leaders and teachers embrace the new standards and drive the classroom-level changes we need? Here, I hope to explore these questions and more.

But first a few answers about how I ended up as editor of Common Core Watch: I’m a Connecticut-based education policy analyst who’s been committed to and working in education for 15 years. I began as a classroom teacher, taught both middle and high school and served as a high school department chair. I currently work as a senior director here at Fordham, leading all of our projects related to standards. This is my second stint at Fordham—I worked here from 2003-2005, but left to spend more time on the ground and in schools. From 2005 until 2010 I worked as the senior director of curriculum and professional development at Achievement First, a charter management organization that operates K-12 schools in both New York and Connecticut. My time at Achievement First—and the mistakes I made and learned from over the course of my tenure there—helped shape my vision for standards implementation.

I hope that this blog will be a conversation that, like my past, straddles policy and practice: a place where we can talk about what great instruction looks like and how policymakers can work to ensure that policies support teachers and leaders in their work to drive outstanding student achievement.

Stay tuned!

On the other hand, if you’re to read individual states’ own descriptions of the differences between the Common Core and existing ELA and math standards, the changes seem far less dramatic.

Since they have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), nearly every state has undertaken some kind of review that compared existing ELA and math standards to the CCSS. And, almost without exception, these comparisons found near-perfect alignment between the CCSS and state ELA and math standards.

A Tennessee’s curriculum and assessment “crosswalk,” for example, found that “97 percent of the CCSS ELA standards have a match in Tennessee’s ELA standards, with 90 percent being rated an excellent or good match.” On the math side, Tennessee found that there are “no grade-level difference[s] in Kindergarten and only a 1 percent difference in 1st grade…” Similar comparisons by state departments of education around the country have found similar levels of alignment. (This despite the fact that our own analysis of state ELA and math standards found significant differences between a majority of state standards and the CCSS.)

There are several problems with these crosswalks and their findings.

For starters, these crosswalk comparisons too often lose the forest for the trees, focusing on narrow and sometimes insignificant differences between state and Common Core standards, rather than working to identify major differences in prioritization and focus. As one example, a Crosswalk done by the Oregon State Department of Education compared the following second grade standards:

The summary analysis found that

• Oregon's call for predictions and cause/effect only.
• CCSS calls for students to focus on key details.

Nowhere in this overly simplistic analysis does the state even mention the focus in the CCSS on engaging in close reading of grade appropriate texts. And yet, the importance of ensuring that all students engage in reading sufficiently rigorous texts is at the heart of the Common Core standards—and represents a significant shift for classrooms across the country.

What’s more, the Beaver State analysis glosses over the most significant difference between the CCSS and the Oregon standards. Namely, that the Common Core rather deliberately focuses on using details drawn from the text itself to support student understanding, rather than on using reading skills and strategies as a way to improve reading comprehension. Yes, they mention using details in passing, but there is no discussion of what this means or how it differs from the current standards.

And therein lies the second problem. States are using these crosswalk exercises as way of identifying the areas where they should focus teacher professional development. And yet, these crosswalk exercises seem focused on finding similarities between the standards, rather than on understanding the most significant big picture differences. And so, if the crosswalks fail to focus attention on the most fundamental differences between the state standards and the Common Core, it is unlikely that teachers will receive the training they need to make the instructional changes the Common Core State Standards demand.

It’s a great line. Such statements are the seductive battle cries of the anti-standards and anti-assessment crowd. But is there any reason behind this kind of rhetoric?

Parents rarely complain that their young babies are being weighed and measured too much—even though it can create an extra burden in an often stressful time in their lives. That’s not because parents naively believe these basic tests will make their babies grow faster or taller, but rather because they trust that their doctor will use the data from these and other tests to flag early problems and develop individualized plans to help their children thrive.

Of course, education assessments—particularly end-of-year summative assessments—are far more complicated than scales. But the purpose of tests in school is no different: to flag problems early and often so that they can be addressed before they become lifelong issues.

In education, like in medicine, there are unintended consequences to relying on a limited number of tests in a narrow range of subjects. According to a report released by Common Core last week, 76 percent of teachers feel that critical subjects like science, history, and art are being “crowded out by extra attention being paid to math and language arts,” and 93 percent of those teachers believe that this crowding is a direct result of the state testing regimes that focus almost exclusively on reading and math.

But, too frequently, people see these unintended consequences and seek to throw the baby out with the bathwater—they argue that we should abandon standards- and assessment-driven reform because our current experiment has so far fallen short.  That is a mistake. In the end, our biggest problem isn’t that we test students too often, but rather that the quality and scope of tests we administer year in and year out are poor.

A quick scan of the battery of released reading tests on state websites reveals a distressing array of inane reading passages and low-quality questions that promote exactly the kind of instruction we want to avoid. In reading, for instance, rather than selecting passages for their word length and asking them to make rather empty “text to self” connections, why not select passages based on their literary merit and ask them to analyze the author’s actual words? Or to defend a text-dependent thesis statement? And why not focus informational passages on important and grade-appropriate history and science content—content that our education standards already ask students to master and that, if we held students accountable for knowing, teachers might spend more time teaching?

The reason is simple: too many states have low-quality assessments because too few states (if any) make getting assessment right a top priority. States spend a comparatively miniscule amount of their budgets on assessment. In Ohio, for instance, a back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that assessment accounts for a mere 0.7 percent of the state’s total education spending. (In other states, I’m sure the figure is similar.) We pay for a household scale, but we want the diagnostic functionality of an MRI.

And yet we all know that, in order for standards to gain traction in the classroom and drive the kind of educational change that reformers on all sides of the debate want to see, teachers must have access to useful and reliable achievement data gathered through sophisticated assessments. They must be able to diagnose where individual students are struggling so that they can target extra help, and they need to be able to identify where the class is struggling so they know when to move on and what to focus on if the group isn’t yet ready.

And so our challenge is not to abandon testing and hope for the best. Encouraging teachers to stop “teaching to the test” makes about as much sense as encouraging doctors to stop “treating to the diagnostic.” The two are—and should be—linked. Instead, our challenge is to develop a test on which only students with deep content mastery can succeed. In short, we simply must develop a test worth teaching to.

Focusing on math and reading at the expense of subjects like science and social studies requires serious scrutiny, and Common Core should be applauded for bringing more attention to the issue. Critics of test-based accountability will be quick to cite the survey as evidence of the deleterious effects of testing, but the numbers tell a more complicated story. 90 percent of teachers said that inclusion in state testing results in a subject being taken more seriously. Of those who reported crowding out, 60 percent said that the increased focus on math and language arts boosted test scores and 46 percent agreed that it resulted in improved skills and knowledge. Is the problem testing itself, or that test-based accountability is so narrowly focused in most states?

Below are three ways states can ensure that these newly adopted standards translate to clear student achievement outcomes:

1. Clearly define the student learning outcomes to which all students will be held accountable once the CCSS-aligned assessments come down the pike.

Perhaps the most important thing that a state department of education can do for classroom teachers is to clearly define the student learning outcomes to which students will be held. The Common Core Standards for ELA and math get us partway there, but they, like all standards, don’t go far enough. For instance, the following are three standards from sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, respectively.

RL.6.1. Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
RL.7.1. Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
RL.8.1. Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

How will students demonstrate mastery of these standards? What kind of analysis will students be expected to do in sixth grade and how will that differ from the analysis they are asked to do in eighth? These are important questions that will help teachers shape instruction and that states can and should help teachers answer as they work to align their curricular and instructional resources to the Common Core. Of course, the assessment consortia are doing some of this work, but their assessments won’t come online for several years. And states, schools and districts are already starting to rewrite curriculum and formative assessments. If they wait too long, they will have already invested heavily on the curriculum side without ensuring that those curriculum efforts are aligned to learning outcomes and assessments.

Unfortunately, of the 11 recently submitted ESEA waivers, it appears that only two states—New Jersey and Kentucky—have plans to deliberately link curriculum and professional development efforts with efforts to define student learning outcomes. New Jersey plans to create model units that are linked to clearly defined learning outcomes, end-of-unit assessments, and formative assessment tools. While states don’t need to go as far as creating a complete model curriculum for each core content area at each grade level, the Garden State’s focus on directly linking their curriculum development efforts with a clear plan for defining student learning outcomes makes it a real leader in this area that other states should be looking to for inspiration.

Kentucky is taking a slightly different, though similarly assessment-focused path. The Bluegrass State plans to use the ACT’s assessment program and its related PLAN, EXPLORE, and ACT assessments to assess student mastery of college- and career-readiness standards. (This is interesting because Kentucky is still a participating state of both assessment consortia, but seems to be developing plans to go it alone on the assessment side, at least in the interim.)

Of course, other states have indicated that they will make adjustments to their assessment programs. Some are planning to shift assessment blueprints beginning as early as this year to better reflect CCSS priorities. Others are planning to pilot “PARCC-like” assessment items. While these are all worthy activities, they feel more like afterthoughts than deliberate attempts to align curriculum and instruction to clear student learning outcomes.

2. Align professional development priorities with gaps in teacher knowledge and skills

Professional development is not a blunt instrument, but rather a precision tool that should be used to meet teachers where they are and to address specific gaps in knowledge and skills. State departments of education should develop plans to work with school and district leaders to figure out the kinds of targeted professional development that teachers need to drive rigorous, standards-aligned instruction.

Unfortunately, state implementation plans seem more focused on information dissemination—particularly on helping teachers understand the specific differences between the CCSS and their state standards—than on diagnosing where standards implementation has gone wrong in the past, what changes need to be made to right those wrongs, and how they can best support teachers moving forward. For example, Tennessee is working with Achieve to compare the CCSS to its existing state standards and will focus professional development activities on educating teachers on the differences between existing state standards and the CCSS. The state plans to “focus PD on the areas that will lead to the greatest shifts in instruction, particularly the 3-6 ‘biggest shifts’ identified through the Crosswalk process.” Several states have similar professional development plans.

While educating teachers on the differences between previous state standards and the CCSS is important, it seems based on the assumption that we only need to tweak around the margins—that implementation of the previous standards was strong, and so professional development should focus on differences. In reality, however, many states had rigorous standards in place prior to the CCSS and those standards did not lead to dramatic increases in student achievement. States should, therefore, focus not only on identifying differences between the standards, but also on identifying teacher knowledge and skills gaps more broadly and to targeting district- and school-level professional development on addressing those gaps. (Noting, of course, that the gaps will likely differ from district to district and school to school.)

3. Set a clear bar for the level of rigor required to align planning, instruction, and assessment to the CCSS

State Departments of Education are well positioned to give teachers the clear guidance they need to make CCSS work for their students. They should seize CCSS implementation as an opportunity to develop exemplars and models of the kind of rigorous, well-planned units, lessons, and formative and summative assessments that teachers should be creating to drive instruction. Some states have engaged in activities like this in the past. In the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks, for instance, the state provided sample “integrated learning scenarios,” which were essentially exceptionally well-planned, standards-aligned lessons that clearly demonstrated the level of planning and rigor that was required by the standards. Rather than focusing on developing fully-developed model curricula, states should work to created targeted exemplar units, lessons, and formative and summative assessments. Then, they should work to ensure that teacher and school leader professional development is focused on helping teachers meet these targets.

In its ESEA waiver, New Jersey has articulated plans to do just that. In addition to creating model units, the state plans to focus professional development on helping teachers design and use formative instruction, on helping principals support effective data-driven instruction, and specifically on helping teachers really understand the level of instructional and assessment rigor that is required to assess the student learning requirements. Other states should take note and follow New Jersey’s lead in this area.

In the end, if the Common Core is going to student achievement, states need to change the way they think about standards implementation. It’s not a question of whether states are focused on CCSS implementation. Rather, it’s a question of whether they are going to seize this opportunity to focus Departmental efforts on the few key levers they can pull to drive meaningful change.

And yet, 18 months after the standards were released, the assessment consortia have released minimal guidance about how precisely they will assess the CCSS. In fact, PARCC has yet to release a single sample assessment item. And, while SMARTER Balanced has released a small handful of sample items, teachers need far more guidance to understand the outcomes to which their students will be held accountable in just a few years.

It’s these critical assessment decisions —which will more clearly illustrate the outcomes to which students will be held accountable—that should lay the groundwork for the curricular, professional development, and instructional decisions that are being made across states as we speak. Yet, delays in the development of assessments threaten to derail the 150 mile per hour bullet train that was standards creation and adoption and to replace it with a broken down commuter train that is limping towards an uncertain destination.

To be sure, getting CCSS-aligned assessments right will take time. And both assessment consortia have spent tremendous time and resources writing and revising content specifications that are meant to guide states, districts, and schools in their curriculum development efforts. (See here and here.) Unfortunately, these content specifications often do little more than reiterate the information that can be found in the standards themselves. Or speak in vague generalities about what the assessments might look like several years down the road.

What’s more, we’re told that the CCSS-aligned assessments will be dramatically different from existing state assessments, which are often derided as low-level bubble tests that don’t paint an accurate picture of student learning. Assuming that’s true, how can states and districts move forward to build or revise their own curriculum and assessments without being given a much clearer indication of how these standards will be assessed—of what will be different and of what that will mean for instruction?

Unfortunately, states do not appear to be waiting for an answer. Instead, if the latest round of ESEA waivers are any indication, states seem to be pushing full steam ahead on a separate implementation track; one that appears to have little to do with the CCSS-aligned assessments that will eventually be the foundation for their statewide accountability.

These developments leave some big questions unanswered: What will happen down the road if the then-revised state curricula don’t align well with the new assessments? Will the states be forced to re-revise their curricular and instructional resources? Will the consortia change their plans to fit those of the states? Will that even be possible if states head in different directions? It’s not hard to imagine a situation where day-to-day teaching is, on some level, detached from the outcomes we hold students to, which will negate much of the process made in adopting the common core.

The bottom line is that the public has put a lot of pressure on the states to develop clear plans for CCSS implementation. In order to get implementation right, though, state leaders need to find a way to get the consortia to speed up their own assessment development timelines. After all, the promise of the CCSS to transform student learning and achievement can only be realized if those standards are aligned, in terms of both content and rigor, to classroom-level curriculum, instruction, and assessment. And that simply cannot happen if assessment development and curriculum development are moving forward on two very different and nonintersecting tracks.

Below is an overview of the feedback I provided to SBAC. A previous post summarized the feedback I provided to PARCC on their ELA content frameworks. We would love to get your thoughts after reading the post, so please take time to add your comments below.

Overall, while SBAC has produced a clear and detailed document that will help teachers begin to align their curriculum, instruction, and assessment around CCSS, these content specifications raise some concerns about how faithful the SMARTER Balanced assessments will be to the spirit and purpose of the standards themselves. PARCC has not yet released detailed assessment specifications, so we can't yet say whether their plans will align more closely with the spirit of the CCSS. Hopefully they will more clearly outline an alternative assessment plan.

Purpose of the Framework

The SBAC content specifications ?are intended to ensure that the assessment system [being developed] accurately assesses the full range of the standards.? To that end, the framework specifies five ?critically important claims about student learning? that will ?serve as the basis for the Consortium's system of summative and interim assessments and its formative assessment support for teachers.? Those five claims are:

1. Students can read closely and critically comprehend a range of increasingly complex literary and informational texts.
2. Students can produce effective writing for a range of purposes and audiences.
3. Students can employ effective speaking and listening skills for a range of purposes and audiences.
4. Students can engage appropriately in collaborative and independent inquiry to investigate/research topics, pose questions and gather and present information.
5. Students can use oral and written language skillfully across a range of literacy tasks.

The framework then details the consortium's plans for assessing each of these claims at the 4^th, 8^th, and 11^th grade.

SBAC Strengths: Keeping it Clear

Whereas the presentation of the PARCC frameworks (reviewed here) is often confusing and repetitive, the SBAC framework is clearly written and easy to understand. They unapologetically and clearly lay out their plans for assessing the CCSS at grades 4, 8, and 12, including providing details about how the consortium is planning accommodations for students with special needs, English Language Learners, etc.

In addition, for reading in particular, the SBAC provides reasonably clear information about the amount of literary and informational text reading students should be doing at each grade level. ?For instance, the document says that ?equal emphasis will be placed on reading both literary and informational texts? in grades 3-5, but that the among of time devoted to informational texts will increase in grades 6-8 (55 percent) and that, by high school, 70 percent of student reading should be devoted to informational texts, including literary nonfiction. This increasing emphasis on informational reading and literary nonfiction reflects the priorities outlined in the standards.

SBAC Weaknesses: Missing the Mark on Reading and Writing?

The biggest problem with the SBAC content specifications is the consortium's plan for assessing Claim 1 (close reading). In short, the specifications put the focus on student mastery of particular reading skills, rather than on comprehension of carefully selected texts. For instance, the 14 ?summative assessment targets? that will be used to determine whether students ?can read closely and critically comprehend a range of increasingly complex literary and informational texts? are all narrowly-defined skills, including: using explicit details to support ideas, identifying or summarizing central ideas and key events, determining word meanings (including shades of meaning), and using supporting evidence to justify/explain inferences.

The challenge is that one of the things the Common Core standards are focused very specifically on using skills as a means to an end?on ensuring that students understand and can critically analyze appropriately complex texts. By focusing on skills as the ?assessment targets,? the consortium will inevitably perpetuate the myth that mastery of skills absent mastery of rich content or comprehension of complex texts can help improve students' reading comprehension writ large. That you can somehow assess students' ability to summarize or use details to support inferences and use it as a proxy for deeper comprehension of carefully selected texts.

On the writing side (?claim 2?), there are two additional problems. For starters, students will only be asked to write one extended piece per year and the content specifications make it clear that, in fourth and eighth grade, the extended writing piece can either be a narrative or opinion/persuasive piece. Given the importance the Common Core places on analytical writing, the assessment should more directly and specifically assess analytical writing. The content specifications do indicate that analytical writing may also be assessed under claim 4, however the assessment specifications under claim 4 indicate students may collaborate for the planning/information gathering phase and the summative assessment ?would be a presentation of learning?with some flexibility of medium used: oral, visual/graphic, written or combination.?

That means that students may escape ever having written research (or extended response) as part of the summative assessment at any grade level.

SMARTER Balanced plans to release an updated version of its ELA content specifications on September 19. Feedback on the updated version is due back to the consortium by September 26.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

These frameworks are the first real glimpse we've had into how each consortium will be assessing the CCSS. As part of my role at the Fordham I've submitted feedback directly to both assessment consortia. We decided it would be good to bring the public into this insider conversation. This post is a little longer than usual but Gadfly readers are a smart bunch and we figured you wanted the full monty.

Below is an overview of the feedback I provided to PARCC framework. A second post will cover the feedback I provided to SBAC. We would love to get your thoughts after reading the post, so please take time to add your comments below.

Purpose of the Frameworks (Hint: It's Not to Take Over the World)

The PARCC and SBAC frameworks are written for different purposes. SBAC has released a document that is clearly designed to communicate assessment priorities and to give specific information about how they will test key standards. By contrast, PARCC has created a document that is meant to inform curriculum planning. It lists content priorities, but does not provide information about how those priorities will be assessed.

Of course, it's no secret that there are plenty of CCSS critics who fear that the adoption of the Common Core standards was the first step towards mandating a de facto nationalized curriculum. The fact that this initial PARCC document is focused on curriculum planning, rather than assessment development, has no doubt worried critics and supporters alike. After all, by focusing on curriculum, PARCC surely must be overstepping its bounds and inching dangerously close to de facto curriculum mandates.

Hardly. Anyone who's read PARCC's content frameworks must realize how far they are from an actual curriculum. [pullquote]Anyone who's read PARCC's content frameworks must realize how far they are from an actual curriculum.[/pullquote]Yes, they are designed ?to help teachers understand how to implement the standards. And yes, even PARCC admits that, because they are designed to help demystify the standards, they will have relevance for curriculum planning. But publishing documents that are ?relevant? to curriculum planning and publishing a curriculum are two wildly different animals. And for an assessment provider to provide any less information than PARCC has provided would make it nearly impossible for teachers in PARCC states to begin to figure out how to align their instruction with the PARCC assessment priorities. I would argue that PARCC should go at least a step further in providing even more specific and instructionally useful information to teachers, particularly in ELA.

PARCC Strengths: Thinking Big

Perhaps the biggest strength of the PARCC frameworks is their fidelity to the "big ideas" of the standards themselves. To that end, the frameworks identify five priority areas: 1) close reading, 2) writing about texts, 3) research, 4) narrative writing, and 5) reading and writing. While there is some overlap between these areas for instance, there is too much repetition between the "close reading" and "writing about texts"and the last reading and writing priority these priorities clearly put the emphasis on using grade-appropriate reading and writing to drive classroom instruction.

In addition, the grade-specific frameworks provide a summary of the standards and help paint a picture of what students should know and be able to do by the end of the year. The third grade summary is particularly useful and it would be helpful if the summaries for the later grades more specifically flagged for teachers the kinds of extra practice struggling students might need to access grade-level texts.

At each grade level, the frameworks also provide a helpful writing progressions chart that specifically delineates the writing standards students should have mastered the year before, and that highlights the new content and skills that students will be expected to learn this year.

The standards also include some specific information about how teachers should prioritize their time throughout the school year. To that end, the model content framework and the ?glossary? for each grade level list the number of short texts and full-length books that students should read at each grade level, specifically noting that teachers should spend equal time on literature and informational texts/literary nonfiction. They also specify how much time teachers should spend on each full-length book and group of short texts within a module. This guidance is helpful because it makes it clear that the focus of the standards is not on the quantity of texts read, but rather the quality of analysis and writing.

Similarly, the frameworks give clear guidance about the percentage of writing time that should be spent on analytic versus narrative writing. Fourth graders are, for example, encouraged to spend 65 percent of their time writing analytical pieces (30 percent opinions and 35 percent to explain/inform) and 35 percent of their writing time on narrative writing. By contrast, the ninth grade frameworks specify that 80 percent of student writing should be analytical (40 percent argument and 40 percent to explain/inform) and 20 percent of student writing should be narrative ?with a mix of on-demand and review-and-revision writing assignments (building student competence and confidence with technology should be part of instruction). Such guidance helpfully indicates that analytic writing becomes increasingly important in middle and high school, and helps teachers at each grade level build the skills and stamina they'll need to do advanced analysis and research in high school and beyond.

PARCC Weaknesses: Leaving Teachers Wanting More

One of the biggest drawbacks of these content frameworks is that the authors seem to have been so afraid of prescribing content that they have failed to give much in the way of instructionally useful guidance for teachers. For instance, while the frameworks do give specific information about amount of reading and writing students should do in particular genres, they don't draw upon the suggested list of texts provided by the Common Core standards to show an example of how a teacher might group texts within and across modules. Nor do they provide exemplar lessons that might demonstrate how a teacher might plan a lesson or unit focused on one of the five priority areas. PARCC could have, for example, provided a full exemplar module that could help guide teachers in their own planning and instruction.

What's more, while the frameworks do identify the five priority areas of the standards, they only describe each of these priorities in exceedingly broad and general terms. Under close reading of texts in third grade, for example, teachers are encouraged only to allow students to draw evidence from the text and present their analyses in writing as well as through speaking. That does not clarify what, specifically, teachers should be asking of their students or how a unit or class discussion might be organized. It would be far more useful for the frameworks to give teachers examples of the kinds of text-dependent questions that they should use to drive class discussion. Without these kinds of examples, the frameworks give teachers very little instructionally useful guidance.

Furthermore, given how few specifics the frameworks include, the document is also excessively long, and often confusing and repetitive. It begins, for example, with a dense, 11-page introduction that tries to help the reader understand the information that is presented in the 90 pages that follow. Unfortunately, this introduction is as confusing as it is repetitive. With careful editing, it could easily be cut in half without losing the most salient points, and the result would undoubtedly be a clearer, more succinct and far more helpful introduction to the frameworks.

Adding confusion to the document, the authors have included a Module Content Framework Chart, which is meant to offer a visual model of how the standards for a particular grade level could be organized into an easy-to-understand structure to aid states and districts in developing instructional tools. Regrettably, the chart is far from easy to understand. It is visually confusing and repeated almost verbatim at every grade level.

The glossary and writing sections are also unnecessarily repetitive. For instance, in the glossary section a paragraph describing an in-depth study of one extended text such as a novel, a play, longer literary nonfiction, or informational text? is repeated verbatim at every grade level. It would be far more helpful for the authors to select an exemplar text from the standards and include some specific guidance about what close reading of the text? might look like, highlighting examples of the kinds of rigorous, text-dependent questions that teachers might use to drive a high-quality book discussion.

Finally, some of the weaknesses of the standards themselves are repeated in the frameworks. (See The State of State Standards and the Common Core in 2010.) For instance, a third grade standard indicates that with guidance and support from adults, [students should] produce writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose. The frameworks could have seized on this opportunity to expand upon the expectation and help teachers understand more specifically what students should be expected to master independently, and what is an emerging skill for which they may need additional support.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Now it seems like Wyoming lawmakers are beginning to question the Board's decision and have actually told districts to ?slow down implementing standards not yet adopted.? (See here.)

In short, it seems that last year's adoption decision by the State Board did little more than include the Common Core ELA and math standards ?in the next revision of the Wyoming Content and Performance Standards,? which is currently underway. And those standards are still being vetted and changes can still be made through the end of this year. (See here for more.) And now lawmakers are starting to get cold feet and they're trying to decide whether the challenge the adoption decision writ large.

What's more, even if Wyoming does move forward the Common Core ELA and math standards, there is still some question about whether the state will opt to administer the assessments developed by one of the national assessment consortia, or whether it will opt to go it alone. (Wyoming joined the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) as a participating state, but has not yet fully committed to implement the assessment system.) Superintendent of Public Instruction, Cindy Hill, assures that "the Common Core standards will be assessed," but it seems that the state may choose to continue to work with and make changes to its existing assessment, rather than to implement an entirely new assessment system. Should Wyoming opt to go it alone, it would be the first state to decide to develop its own CCSS-aligned assessment, which could have an enormous impact on the national debate over Common Core implementation.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

I hoped that new national curriculum standards would be better than the state standards they replaced, and that new student assessments would be better, too.

I wish I could say that our progress toward common-core standards has fulfilled my hopes. Instead, it seems to me that the common-core movement is turning into a lost opportunity.

His critique of the Common Core is grounded in a study that he and a team of U Penn researchers conducted that compared the both the topics covered and the ?cognitive demand? of the Common Core standards with the state standards they are going to replace. (According to Porter and his team, there are five categories of cognitive demand: memorize; perform procedures; demonstrate understanding; conjecture, generalize, prove; and solve non-routine problems. All objectives from the state and Common Core English Language Arts and math standards are grouped under one of these headings.)

Before even diving into a discussion of the substance of their analysis, the metric that Porter et al use is problematic. The researchers dive immediately into the weeds by dividing content into different topics and categorizing each objective under different headings. And, by doing so, Porter and his team lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Take, for example, a common math standard: ?demonstrate fluency with addition and subtraction facts.?

For starters, this standard could be categorized under more than one header. Some might mistake it as a memorization standard and tag it to the first category of cognitive demand. Others might code it under the second or third category??perform procedures? or ?demonstrate understanding.? But either way, by somewhat arbitrarily coding the standard, we've lost a more nuanced and important analysis of whether the standard is asking students to master essential content at the appropriate time and with the appropriate level of rigor. (In this case, for Fordham's review of state standards and the Common Core, our math experts felt that the standard didn't ask enough of students because it was focused on fluency, rather than memorization. And, at the elementary level, when students are mastering essential foundational math skills, they felt it was essential to memorize this content.)

Sadly, though, Porter and his team don't look at the standards holistically to see how thoroughly and rigorously critical topics are covered, opting instead to arbitrarily and superficially quantify the differences between different sets of standards.

[pullquote]Porter has criticized the standards for both putting too little and too great an emphasis on higher order thinking skills.[/pullquote]But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the research is that Porter himself doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what, precisely, he's hoping to glean from this questionable exercise in categorization. It seems, rather, that he was just looking to, one way or another, find fault with the Common Core.

For instance, in his op-ed, Porter criticizes the standards because they ?do not represent a meaningful improvement over existing state standards.? He explains:

To be sure, when we consider state standards in the aggregate, the common-core standards present a somewhat greater emphasis on higher-order thinking. But the keyword here is somewhat; the difference is small, and some state standards exceed the common core in this respect.

Oddly, though, Porter goes on almost immediately to explain that a comparison between the Common Core and international standards (including everyone's beloved Finland) found that the standards in some of the highest performing nations had less of a focus on higher order thinking skills than the Common Core. Specifically, he warns:

But curricula in top-performing countries we studied?like Finland, Japan, and New Zealand?put far less emphasis on higher-order thinking, and far more on basic skills, than does the common core. We need to ask ourselves: Could our enthusiasm for teaching higher-order skills possibly have gone too far? Clearly, both basic skills and higher-order thinking are important, but what is the right balance?

It was about this time that Porter might have asked himself if all this energy had actually shed any light on the Common Core whatsoever. After all, he has criticized the standards for both putting too little and too great an emphasis on higher order thinking skills. It's impossible to know how any set of standards would fare well in this analysis when it seems clear that Porter doesn't even know what an ideal set of standards should look like.

Finally, Porter tosses in an unfounded critique of the yet-to-be-developed tests that the PARCC and SMARTER Balanced consortia are working on. He warns that

?what I know so far about the work of the two multistate consortia developing the assessments isn't promising. It sounds as if the new assessments may ignore state-of-the-art research and technological advances, settling for tests that are much like the ones we already have.

What he knows can't be much since both consortia have grand plans to use innovative items and computer-based and/or computer-adaptive assessments, but neither has released as much as a single sample test question. But damn the facts when you have a point to make!

Despite the circuitous and questionable route he takes, in the end Porter is right that the Common Core standards are imperfect. Fordham's analysis of the Common Core standards found that both the ELA and math standards had shortcomings. (See here for more.)

Those shortcomings notwithstanding, the Common Core standards are far and away superior to the ELA and math standards that were in place in a majority of standards just a year ago. (Our 2010 comparison of state standards to the Common Core found that the Common Core ELA standards were ?clearly superior? than all but about a dozen existing state standards. And, only two states?Indiana and California?had ELA standards that were ?clearly superior? than the Common Core. No state's math standards were ?clearly superior.?)

While there may be no way to assuage the concern of critics who fear that moving to common standards will somehow undermine innovation or local control, adoption of the Common Core standards was a clear step forward for the vast majority of states because it replaced poor standards with clearer and more rigorous expectations of student learning. No amount of verbal sophistry can change that simple fact.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

The latest argument to that effect comes from a book (Now You See It) written by Cathy N. Davidson and related blog post from Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times. In her piece, Heffernan argues:

??fully 65 percent of today's grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn't been invented yet?For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it's high time we redesigned American education.?

And so, because today's students will be doing things that we can't imagine, we need to rethink the kinds of work we're assigning today. Including research papers, which Heffernan argues have outlived their usefulness:

Teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers. Semester after semester, year after year, ?papers? are styled as the highest form of writing. And semester after semester, teachers and professors are freshly appalled when they turn up terrible.

Ms. Davidson herself was appalled not long ago when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers. But instead of simply carping about students with colleagues in the great faculty-lounge tradition, Ms. Davidson questioned the whole form of the research paper. ?What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school ? the term paper ? and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process?? She adds: ?What if ?research paper' is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook??

Unfortunately, Heffernan seems to have missed her own point. As she implies, we are no better at predicting what today's elementary students will be doing in twenty years than Hanna-Barbera were at painting what 21^st century life would look like in the Jetsons. And so, our job as educators is not hitch our wagons to the latest education fad in response to changing?and often fleeting?technology, but rather to identify the timeless knowledge and skills that all students must master to succeed in any environment.

To that end, abandoning research papers in favor of blog posts or other multimedia presentations would be a grave mistake. After all, that students can produce ?witty and incisive? blog posts for their peers on topics of their choosing says nothing about their ability to write and speak to multiple audiences or about a variety of topics. (Most multimedia products are necessarily limited and we need to ask more of our students.) And the ability to synthesize complicated information in a persuasive way?grounded in facts, research and reading?is critical and timeless.

Of course, there's nothing to stop students from producing a blog post or multimedia presentation, but those shouldn't be the starting point. In fact, the most interesting and influential bloggers and thinkers?across disciplines and times?have a body of work that goes well beyond their own observations and conclusions and is grounded in real work, research, and thoughtful writing and analysis.

Regardless of what is the hip new medium, we do our students a grave disservice by pretending that pithy diatribes or observational blog posts are on the same level as more thoughtful, well-developed arguments, grounded in evidence derived from texts, with clear theses that come from something other than their personal feelings.

And, I'm willing to bet that that even Davidson's students' blog posts would be far wittier and more insightful if they were better able to develop a thoughtful argument in a paper first.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

The article focused on the CCSS ?publishers' criteria? that was recently released by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel. (See here and here for more.) For those who want to see the Common Core faithfully implemented, it raised two chief concerns.

First, Barbara Cambridge, the state director of NCTE's Washington chapter, criticized the publishers' criteria because she feels that they ?signal a usurpation of teacher judgment in ways that are alarming? and because she believes the document shortchanges ?the value of children's own experiences in responding to what they read.?

?The way we learn something new is to attach it to something we already know,? she said. ?So of course what kids bring to school isn't sufficient, but it's important. And to imply we shouldn't spend time on it, with 1st and 2nd graders, is just bad advice.?

Second, Barbara A. Kapinus of the NEA felt that the criteria veered too far into the world of pedagogy. Kapinus argued that, by saying that ?fluency should be a particular focus? of second grade reading programs,

?teachers [may] put a premium on it, despite the developmental variations in when children reach fluency.

She also criticized the criteria for advising teachers to teach reading strategies only ?in service of reading comprehension, not as a separate body of material.? Good reading instruction, she said, requires pulling out and practicing specific skills.

?This isn't just a description of what curriculum should look like, it's a teaching guide,? Ms. Kapinus said. ?I'm afraid people will take this and say, ?This is what instruction has to look like.' ?

Both Cambridge's and Kapinus's positions are problematic for a number of reasons.

For starters, Coleman and Pimentel are right to warn against an overreliance on making personal connections to reading. Of course, they aren't saying that there is no place for students to relate what they've read to their own lives or to the world. Instead, their point is that reading lessons should be focused on the texts that students are reading first and foremost?not the feelings that those texts evoke.

Of course, no one would pretend that focusing on texts is antithetical to connecting in a very intense and personal way to what you're reading. But it does our students a very grave disservice to pretend that forcing text-to-self connections in only the most superficial way is the only?or best?way to interact with great literature.

More importantly, though, Kapinus wrongly slams the criteria for veering into pedagogy by asking teachers to focus on fluency in early and by advocating against teaching abstract reading ?skills? in isolation.

For starters, the standards themselves specifically require students to read and understand texts that are sufficiently complex?according to a students' grade level, not independent or instructional reading level. The standards very intentionally do not require mastery of abstract skills in the same way, primarily because there is no evidence to suggest that mastering abstract skills leads to improved reading comprehension.

Of course, nowhere in the criteria (or the standards) do the authors suggest that it's never appropriate to learn particular skills. They merely say that such strategies should only be taught in service of reading and understanding sufficiently complex texts, not as an end in themselves.

Unfortunately, across too many classrooms, those skills have become the ends rather than the means. And it would be easy?to look at the standards and see what we want to see?and to shun the changes that they are meant to bring. But, if these?standards are going to impact instruction the way they have the potential to, we need to see them for what they are. And advocates of these standards need to get serious about defending effective implementation.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

?There is no purpose in ?reading'?The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald's novel is not about a story. It is about?how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby's lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald's style--in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look."

Ebert illustrates this point brilliantly by comparing, side-by-side, several parts of the book, including the conclusion, which in the ?retold? version, is boiled down to this:

Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?

As Ebert succinctly notes, ?this is an obscenity?No possible reading of the book, however stupid, could possibly conclude that.?

Unfortunately, using such bastardized translations rather than the original version of books is common practice in far too many classrooms. (Particularly in places where standards and curricula are focused more on teaching abstract reading ?skills? than on ensuring that all students read and understand rich literature.)

We now have the opportunity to change that.

There has been a lot of talk about how the Common Core standards are going to change ?everything.? Some people believe that they the CCSS promote constructivism. Some believe that they will usher in an era where performance assessments all but replace more traditional forms of assessment. Or that we'll finally have a set of standards that will help teach students "how to think."

I disagree. ?The CCSS aren't about constructivism. They aren't about abandoning traditional measures of assessment wholesale. Nor are they about abandoning teacher-directed learning.

In the end, the CCSS will only change "everything" if we allow them to refocus our time and attention on the importance of reading sufficiently complex texts and using evidence from those texts to guide discussion, writing, activities, etc.

To my eye, that is among the most significant take-aways from David Coleman's and Sue Pimentel's publishers' criteria.? That we need to stop feeding our struggling readers dumbed-down versions of complex texts. That we need to stop focusing on empty skills like making ?text to self? or ?text to world? connections. And we need to stop organizing our curricula around broad and empty themes that may only be tangentially related to the texts students are reading.

That is to say: we need to refocus literature class on actually reading literature.

If we get that right, we won't have to teach kids ?how to think? or tell them what to think. They'll figure that part out on their own. And if we want our students to become great readers and to be prepared to do the thinking that will be required of them in college and life, that's what they must do.

Yes, student understanding of these texts will evolve over time, and yes it may take a long time for students to struggle through the most complex texts. But the CCSS have challenged us to allow for that evolution and for that struggle. Now, let's step up to that challenge and stop pretending that ??Pretty Good' Gatsby? is good enough.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Enter David Coleman and Sue Pimentel. Last week, the two lead ELA writers for the CCSS ELA standards released ?Publishers' Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy? for grades K-2 and 3-12 in an attempt to guide the curriculum writers who are genuinely trying to align their materials to the CCSS. It will also be an invaluable resource for teachers, schools, and districts who are trying to navigate the already crowded space of CCSS-aligned materials.

Coleman and Pimentel are careful to note that these criteria ?are not meant to dictate classroom practice,? but instead are ?intended to direct curriculum developers and publishers to be purposeful and strategic in both what to include and what to exclude in instructional materials.? In short, Coleman and Pimentel attempt to clarify what materials would be worthy of the ?CCSS-aligned? label.

While the guidelines do include criteria for everything ranging from writing and grammar to research, the bulk of the guidance is focused on reading. The authors note that, in order to be truly CCSS-aligned, reading materials must:

• Include texts that are appropriately complex. The guidelines note that ?far too often, students who have fallen behind are given only less complex texts rather than the support they need to read texts at the appropriate level of complexity.? By contrast, the CCSS ?hinge on students encountering appropriately complex texts at each grade level to develop the mature language skills and the conceptual knowledge they need for success in school and life.?
• Ensure that units, guiding questions, and activities that accompany reading selections are text-dependent. ?Close and careful reading must be at the heart of classroom activities and not be consigned to the margins when completing assignments,? Coleman and Pimentel explain. ?Practices such as organizing instructional units around broad, abstract themes like ?traditions' or ?our changing world' can be hard to develop and even harder for students to grasp. Such broad themes can invite teachers and readers to have general conversations rather than focusing reading on the specifics, drawing evidence from the text, and gleaning meaning from it.?
• Ensure that at least 50 percent of reading material is focused on informational reading (in grades 3-5) or literary nonfiction (in grades 6-12).

Finally, the guidelines specify that the goal of any reading program should be student comprehension of sufficiently complex texts, rather than the volume of texts read.

Coleman and Pimentel are undoubtedly serving a critical role to bring some order to the Wild West of CCSS materials. One important limitation of their work is that the criteria they produced doesn't offer the kinds of specific examples that could help not only set the bar for curriculum developers, but also provide teachers and curriculum directors a touchpoint to better understand what CCSS-aligned materials should actually look like. That said, these criteria should help limit the number of publishers who can claim the CCSS label and that is an important first step.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

• ?Poverty matters,? @cyndyw2, tweets to @DianeRavitch and her followers, ?when kids don't have ?homes', instead they have ?the place where I stay'.? (Jun 16, 2011 12:04:52 AM)
• Or, according to @JSamuelCook,? ?#PovertyMatters when students can't do their homework because their electricity has been disconnected.? (Jun 16, 2011 12:04:03 AM)

The crux of the argument is that, because we have so many children living in poverty, we can't possibly expect schools to close the achievement gap. Instead, we need to eliminate poverty?or treat the symptoms of poverty?first.

The implication, in short: stop asking so much of schools and teachers, these problems run deeper than they can be expected to solve.

Of course, the link between student achievement and socioeconomic status is unmistakable. Students who come from middle class or affluent families tend to start school ahead of their more disadvantaged peers. And, without serious, direct, and deliberate intervention, that gap only grows wider over time.

But saying we need to fix poverty before we can fix schools is like a doctor saying that he's going to wait until you get better before he treats you.? Education is the path out of poverty, not the consolation prize offered to children whose families have managed to dig their way out on their own.

As anyone who has worked in gap-closing schools can tell you, that path is twisted and rocky, with almost innumerable setbacks and roadblocks. What powers teachers in these schools forward is the unshakable belief that they can have a life-changing impact on their students. That, while poverty matters, it doesn't need to constrain what's possible.

It's this belief in the power of schools that makes places like KIPP Infinity possible?a school that wins over nearly every visitor who walks through its doors with its energy, it's passion for learning, and its deep commitment to its students.

Can you create the same kind of energy and commitment in a school on a foundation of ?poverty matters??

In the end, the ?fix poverty first? rhetoric is not only misguided, but saps the energy from those who oppose today's education reforms. Why try to compete with new models of schools reform if the culture of poverty is insurmountable?

It's a rhetorical trap that binds these advocates to a culture antithetical to the ?roll up your selves and do whatever it takes? attitude that powers not only high-performing charter schools but every major burst of social entrepreneurship over the past century.

And, it makes you wonder: If these critics don't believe that schools matter more than poverty, why would anyone trust them with our schools?

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

The through-course assessments have been replaced by two optional tests:

1. An early assessment, that would be given early in the year and would be designed "to provide teachers with information that can serve as an early indicator of student status relative to the CCSS. It may be possible to design this component to also include information about whether students who did not achieve proficiency in their previous grade have made progress towards or have attained proficiency on those standards in their current year."
2. A mid-year assessment that would include performance-based assessments that are designed to give "instructionally useful feedback to? teachers and students and help prepare them for the innovative assessment tasks" they will see on the required end of year assessment.

While both of these components are optional and the scores will not initially count towards a student's summative score, the consortium notes that "over time, states may consider including results of the mid-year assessments in summative scores."

The consortium will continue to require end-of-year assessments that include computer-based and innovative performance assessments in grades 3-8 and end-of-course assessments in high school ELA and math, but the 3-8 tests will now include an assessment of speaking/listening skills.

You can read more about the changes here.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Photo by Sarah Kennon"][/caption]

Allyn's argument?which is becoming a widely-held belief among literature teachers?is seductive in an age where ?individualized learning plan? is the watch phrase and blended-learning models aim to let students move at their own pace.

To underscore her point, Allyn shares an example of one of her struggling readers, Sam.

Sam, a 12-year-old student in one of my LitWorld programs for struggling readers, had a breakthrough moment recently. It happened at 3:30 p.m., after school hours, when he picked up Horton Hears a Who! and the volunteer smiled at him, and said, ?That's the perfect book for you, Sam. Dr. Seuss is one of the world's greatest, most brilliant writers of all.? The book was the perfect level for him as an emerging reader, the perfect pitch of humor and art; in short, the perfect book for Sam.

Back in his classroom, Sam was required to read To Kill a Mockingbird. He struggled against this book every day. He could not decode or comprehend it. He faked his way through it.? It did not help him learn to read, nor did it help him to become a lifelong lover of text. And he was alienated and isolated from his peers.

Allyn goes on to argue:

To read in school what one is driven to read, every day. To read at one's own pace. To read driven by one's own passions. To read on whatever device makes the most sense for that particular reader, whether it's a mobile phone or an iPad. To invite all students to become, in essence, the curators of their own reading lives. This should be our reading program.

If a student has found 16 blogs about boats, let him read those in school. And maybe that student will follow one of those blogs to a newspaper series about a regatta, or to Dove, Robin Lee Graham's personal account of sailing around the world as a teenager. In these ways, our students will be exposed to a wider variety of genres than the whole-class novel ever allowed, and they will be more compelled to think critically across genres, as the common-core standards will require of them.

As I've written before something has obviously gone terribly wrong with the adoption and dissemination of the Common Core State Standards if it is being so readily trotted out to defend the retreat from holding all students to consistently high standards.

And, while I certainly hope that students acquire a love of reading, that is actually not the primary goal of a school's literature program. Instead, its purpose is to help students read (and understand) a variety of texts?both fiction and nonfiction?that are sufficiently challenging and that expose students to the content they will need to know to be college and career ready. Blogs about boats may be entertaining but they don't put you on the track to tackle college-level reading. Its not fair to students to pretend they do.

Allyn's argument seems to rest on the assumption that it doesn't matter what you read, as long as you read. That's just simply not true. While students should absolutely be encouraged to pick up books that interest them and read whenever they've got a spare moment, what students read in class is one of the most important decisions a teacher can make. By limiting the challenge and complexity of what students read while in school, you limit what they will be able to read?and not read?for the rest of their lives.

Most troublingly, the reading programs that Allyn describes will, if applied in classrooms across our country, only serve to perpetuate America's enormous achievement gap.

Think about it: if Horton Hears a Who is a ?just right? book for Sam, but To Kill a Mockingbird is more appropriate for Sam's peers, how will Sam ever get to the point where he can read books that are equally as challenging as his peers? And given that poor readers in America are disproportionately African American and Latino means imposing separate and unequal reading lists on America's youth that fall with disconcerting consistency across the fault lines of class, race, and ethnicity.

That doesn't mean that we should slap Dr. Seuss out of Sam's hands. Reading ?just right? books in afterschool programs or at home while teachers work to close the reading gap in school is entirely appropriate. But, we simply cannot pretend that reading programs driven entirely by choice and reading level are going to serve the best interests of students like Sam. Students that deserve to stretch to their fullest potential no matter the cards they were dealt at birth. Nor can we pretend that the Sams of the world can magically access these complicated texts. But the conversation needs to center around how to scaffold grade-appropriate books for struggling readers, not about whether they should even be reading them at all.

Every student deserves high standards and every student deserves to have the opportunity to participate with his peers in discussions about complex books that cover varied and interesting topics. Those are the discussions and that is the content that is going to put them on the path to college.

Or as Dr. Seuss himself might have said, ?The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.?

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Common Core supporters heralded the speedy adoption as a testament to how hard the NGA and CCSSO worked to get input and garner support for the standards. (They did.) But I now wonder whether the lack of debate is more a reflection of the fact that some interested parties may not have known exactly what they signed themselves up for.

Take, for example, the National Education Association. After reading an article published in NEA Today last week, I am certain that Senior Policy Analyst Barbara Kapinus and I are seeing two very different versions of the Common Core standards. In her version, Kapinus explains that implementation of the standards would encourage ?real world? over ?knowledge based? learning.

?Rather than reading drills, we'll ask students to apply reading skills in a broader, ?real world' context.?

So gone are the days of summary book reports ? students will have to analyze the story rather than rehash the plot???

To my eyes, that looks like a gross mischaracterization of how these standards should be implemented. Not least of which because the second College and Career Readiness standard explicitly requires students to ?summarize the key and supporting details and ideas? in texts. To be sure, the standards also ask students to analyze texts, but the standards recognize that, before you can do any kind of deep analysis, you first need to demonstrate a basic understanding of the plot. So I certainly hope that students will continue to be asked to summarize.

A more specific example of a ?common core standard in action? cited in the article is an activity that involves attaching bungee cords (i.e.: rubber bands) to Barbie dolls and dropping them from a ceiling. (For real.)

It is genuinely hard for me to imagine that such an activity is the most effective or efficient way to teach any math skill, but the teacher insists that students will be doing deep data analysis and learning about slope and linear relationships as they toss Barbie around the classroom.

The mastermind of the bungee-jumping-Barbie activity goes on to explain that the ?best part? of the activity is that students will learn to persevere with a problem. ?They don't give up,? he explains, ?because they really want to see if and how it will work.?

Leaving aside the fact that I don't really understand what mathematical problem Barbie is helping them solve, wouldn't teaching kids to persevere even when they don't necessarily want to be an even better lesson? Shouldn't students learn that struggling through problems that are hard?and often tedious?can give you a real sense of satisfaction when you figure it out?

More to the point, however, students learn perseverance by struggling through?and ultimately succeeding on?very difficult problems. And you just simply cannot do that unless you have mastered the content you need to succeed. Empty problem solving skills simply cannot make up for missing content. And so to describe CCSS implementation as requiring a focus on skills over knowledge is to lead students very far astray. And to distinguish between ?real world? and ?knowledge based? learning, as if they were?mutually exclusive, is ludicrous.

We are at a critical juncture with Common Core implementation. While adoption may have been reasonably smooth, the intersection of instruction and assessment is where the rubber will really meet the road. And so all eyes should be on the two assessment consortia and Common Core supporters should work to ensure that CCSS-aligned assessments require students to demonstrate deep mastery of both the essential knowledge and the skills students need to succeed.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Had Shakespeare had the opportunity to witness the infighting and special interest politics of state textbook adoption processes, he might have found a better target for his ire.

According to the Tampa Tribune, Florida lawmakers have introduced a bill that includes, among other things, a provision that would change the state's textbook adoption process.

The [provision] would replace the state's formal review committees?which include lay citizens, teachers, teacher supervisors and a school board member?with a trio of subject-matter experts appointed by the state education commissioner.

School districts would appoint teachers and content supervisors to rate the practical usability of the texts recommended by the state's experts.

Opponents of the bill??Tea Party? conservatives chief among them?are outraged.

"'We the People' should have a say on what textbooks OUR CHILDREN read," Tea Party activist Shari Krass wrote recently in a letter to Scott.

Krass and activists like her believe some texts used by Florida schools are slanted to favor Islam over Judaism and Christianity?

?"This legislation 'ties our hands'?where we will be restricted in our ability to influence our children's education," she wrote.

Of course, battles over textbook adoption seem, on some level, beside the point. If a state has set clear expectations for what students should know and be able to do, why does it need to prescribe the text from which students should learn that content?

If the state wants to ensure that all students are learning the same, rigorous content, wouldn't it be better to assess student knowledge and leave textbook and take state-level politics out of the curriculum game?

In the end, no textbook is perfect. Most are, in fact, bland, boring, and pitched at too-low reading levels. Hardly a recipe for inspiring a deep love of learning. Worse, evidence abounds that statewide textbook adoption processes themselves actually contribute to the dumbing down of textbooks. In 2004, Fordham released a report on textbook adoption where we found that adoption:

consistently produces second-rate textbooks that replicate the same flaws and failings over and over again. Adoption states perform poorly on national tests, and the market incentives caused by the adoption process are so skewed that lively writing and top-flight scholarship are discouraged. Every individual analyst and expert panel that has studied American K-12 textbooks has concluded that they are sorely lacking and that the adoption process cries out for reform.

Those criticisms are likely as valid today as they were in '04. So, if Florida parents, educators and lawmakers want to ensure that students learn the same rigorous content, they should focus on setting clear and rigorous standards, assessing student mastery of the content and skills outlined therein, and then pass a law that gets state bureaucrats out of the textbook game altogether.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

(H/T to Erik Robelen at Curriculum Matters for the link.)

In spite of the string of policy victories we have seen this year (see here and here), he might be disheartened to see what has happened to the education reform debate of late.

Changing complicated systems?and there are few more complicated than our patchwork quilt of overlapping federal, state and local education policies?is necessarily iterative and incremental. Politically, you can't change everything at once, and everything you do change impacts other areas of education in ways that are often hard to predict.

Yet, in the era of 140-character debates and multi-million dollar ad buys, people on all sides often boil complex ideas down into pithy soundbytes and oversimplifications. But it's the ed reformers?the people trying to build something new?who will suffer the most from this trend because we're trending towards trading a comprehensive vision for a new kind of education system for a series of bold but isolated changes that will sell in state legislatures.

This year's ?message discipline? seems to have translated into a nearly myopic focus on teacher quality as the antidote for our student achievement woes. (In a blog post last week, Robert Pondiscio pooled together a drumbeat of soundbytes from notable reformers who touted the importance of teacher quality in the effort to close the achievement gap.)

Reformers are, of course, using this rhetoric to push important (and necessary) reforms such as overturning LIFO, encouraging alternative certification, and improving teacher evaluation. And, of course, as anyone who has worked in a school can affirm, great teachers can and do have a transformative impact on students' lives.

Unfortunately, in these like all political fights, winning often means overselling the impact of an isolated reform, rather than putting that change in the larger context of the systemic changes we need to truly drive student achievement.

Take Last In, First Out (LIFO) as the latest hot-button issue.

Will ending LIFO solve 100%--or even 10%--of our teacher quality problems? Certainly not. All it will do is help create the conditions where effective school leaders can make important hiring and firing decisions based on quality (rather than seniority) in tight budgetary times.

Of course it's essential for leaders to have the authority to make such critical personnel decisions. But as we push LIFO reforms, let's not forget that, while union rules do make it difficult, the vast majority of principals do actually have the power to document poor performing teachers out of a job. Yes, too few exercise this power. ?But why? And will ending LIFO make it easier for principals to let teachers go because they aren't moving the achievement needle? Hardly. It will merely makes it possible.

Yet, too much of our reform rhetoric suggests that changing the metrics we use to judge teachers or allowing principals to use those metrics in their layoff decisions will suddenly spur mediocre leaders to action.

That is to say that, if we want these bold teacher quality reforms to have their intended impact, they must be paired with policies that promote stronger accountability for school leaders.

Of course, this problem isn't unique to the teacher quality debate. For rigorous standards to drive student achievement, they need to be paired with improved assessments and tied to clearer accountability for results. And on.

In the end, if we reformers want to drive the kinds of thoughtful and systemic changes that are needed to improve education outcomes for all students, we need to do more than muscle through a series of bold but fragmented, isolated, and incremental policy changes.

You don't have to be an Einstein to realize that celebrating policy victories that were won by oversimplifying what it takes to run great schools and drive systemic change will catch up with us when it comes time to implement our policy solutions at scale.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

The governor has until midnight tomorrow to veto the bill. If he doesn't, the Minnesota Commissioner will not be able to adopt common standards in any other content area, no matter how good those standards may be. That means, for example, that when the state's math standards are up for revision in 2015, the Commissioner will not even be able to consider adopting the Common Core math standards even though, according to our math reviewers, those standards are stronger than what the state has in place today. It also means that future Commissioners would be prohibited from even considering adopting common standards in any other subject, no matter how good they may be.

The governor is expected to veto the bill. If he does, it would go into special session. What happens from there is anyone's guess.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Kathleen,

I am speaking for myself here?I just wanted to respond to your points.

The problem with the ?maximize every moment? approach is that in the name of maximizing every moment, the moments themselves are often limited?and needlessly.

Many children in urban schools are not on the brink of failure; they desperately need more challenge. They are placed in classes with students who lag them by several years. I'm not saying tracking is the solution?but these students should at least be acknowledged.

Because of the belief that urban students in general must be yanked into success, some reformers assert that every moment of the lesson should be directly tied to its objective and that the lesson should be swift, purposeful, and productive. This precludes the sort of discussion that allows for tangents and open questions and that does not lead to a physical product or concrete result.

Not every lesson can be like that, even in wealthy schools. You need to teach children concrete things and to ensure that they are learning them. But children are capable of that tiny bit of uncertainty and openness, the time to consider something interesting, the pause to listen to a poem without deriving something specific from it. And they should be given that opportunity?and should be given the things worth pausing over, in many subjects.

A lesson needs not only structure and purpose, but a touch of something else, and that students in urban schools are capable of appreciating this as much as students in private schools. Some may need to learn how to handle uncertainty and open questions, but they can learn.

Some might ask: why does it matter? If the kids in the ?maximize every moment? schools are achieving, isn't that what counts? Well, up to a point. There is still a gap between students who can handle doubts and open questions, and students who cannot. This will show in high school and college (and even earlier). What's more, the ?concrete results? trend is spilling over even into affluent private schools. We are losing the idea of education as something that is not completely sure, something other than a pursuit of a known goal by a known means.

Many children in urban schools are not on the brink of failure; they desperately need more challenge. They are placed in classes with students who lag them by several years. I'm not saying tracking is the solution?but these students should at least be acknowledged.

Because of the belief that urban students in general must be yanked into success, some reformers assert that every moment of the lesson should be directly tied to its objective and that the lesson should be swift, purposeful, and productive. This precludes the sort of discussion that allows for tangents and open questions and that does not lead to a physical product or concrete result.

First, I agree that there are many urban students who do not come in behind?or at least not as far behind as many of their peers.

That said, I think we do need to deal with the reality that we face in far too many urban classrooms. Here are a few fast facts (gathered together by the Education Equality Project) that we should remember when we're debating the tough choices and tradeoffs that urban schools face every day:

• 89% of Latino and 86% of African-American middle and high school students read below grade level.
• On average, students eligible for free/reduced lunch are approximately two years of learning behind the average ineligible student.
• By 4^th grade,?African-American and Latino students are, on average, nearly three academic years behind their white peers.
• Barely half of African-American and Latino students graduate from high school, with Latinos graduating at 56%, African-Americans at 54%, and their white counterparts at 77%.

These are facts that need to always be front and center in our minds when we are debating urban school models. Yes, there are students who come into our urban schools who are beating these odds out of the gate. And, from my experience, urban charter schools do try to push them to the next level. To their credit, they admit they could do even more.

But the harsh reality is that, for the vast majority of students who enter the doors of many urban schools, every moment that is not spent trying to close the practice gap is a minute that contributes to the achievement gap.

It is certainly true that creating a culture of urgency and maximizing every moment to try to fill these enormous gaps in basic skills and knowledge risks pushing back the kind of discussion and investigation you think is so critical. But the best urban schools concentrate this gap-filling effort into the early years exactly so that when they turn to these discussions, all students can be equal participants.

One school that I think, from a culture standpoint, does this expertly is KIPP: Infinity in Harlem. When you walk into that school, the feel is the exact opposite of the kind of militaristic regimentation that critics associate with KIPP. Instead, you walk into a school and hear the hum of students working hard and engaging in their work. You move through common areas and see students walking between classes--on their own, not always in lines--quietly, books in hand, often having conversations about what they just learned. On the walls you see student work that genuinely wows you with its creativity and uniqueness. And you see students in free spaces between classes reading real literature--for pleasure.

And in classes--particularly in the upper grades (the school is 5-8) you can often hear the kind of discussions that I think so many of us want to see even more of in all schools. Yes, these discussion are purposeful. But they are anything but stifling.

This is just one example. There are others, though none of them is perfect. No school is. And many of these school leaders struggle to figure out how to help their students struggle with the uncertainty Diana mentions. They are seeking solutions. And these are public schools that are serving majority poor, majority urban, majority African American and Latino students using a model that is ready to be scaled up to meet the overwhelming demand. Why would we look past them to a boutique private school like Sidwell Friends for inspiration?

Perhaps it is the overiding intensity and focus, which can be a turnoff to some. It is certainly true that behind KIPP's success is a teacher culture that is absolutely focused on maximizing every moment. The teachers share a vision--a vision that I think most of us want for all schools--of what education should be. They just realize that it's not going to happen automatically and that the path to creating it may be different than the path to creating it at a Sidwell Friends and Dalton. When you sit in on teacher meetings--after school, at the end of very long days?they regularly discuss each and every student. Where they are, what their individual goals are, whether they're meeting them, and when they aren't, how they as a team are going to target interventions to help.

My point is that this kind of culture?one that maximizes every moment in service of the creation of the vision of a truly great and rich education?is ?achieved differently in schools where students come through the door with different challenges. It has to be to meet students needs. We can't wish away achievement gaps; they can only be closed with hours and hours of hard work.

Just as teachers understand the need for differentiated instruction for students with different needs, we need to acknowledge that the path to our vision for excellent schools might look different in schools that serve students who go home to an environment that makes engaging in the most challenging homework or projects difficult or impossible, or who come in never having read a book on their own.

In the end, if we agree on the what?what a great education looks like?then the conversation has to shift to the how: How can we create the education we want for all students in urban schools? Urban charter schools like KIPP: Infinity or Amistad Academy have one answer. It's not the only one, but it's a proven one that year after year urban parents actively seek out for their students. How would the same children do if they descended en masses to Sidwell Friends or Dalton? I suspect much worse, but the truth is we may never know because those elite private schools have not opened their doors to the thousands of children in the impoverished neighborhoods nearby.

If approved, the measure would require the state legislature, called the "general court" in New Hampshire, to approve any changes the state board of education makes in academic standards. It specifies that the common standards, approved by the state board last July 8, "shall not be adopted" without the general court's consent. Both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature are controlled by Republicans, but the state's governor is a Democrat.

It seems strange to require legislative approval for something that doesn't seem to have needed it before, but one presumes they know what they're doing.

Either way, this is a terrible sign for Common Core implementation in New Hampshire. And it comes on the heels of eerily similar bills in Minnesota and Texas. (Of course, the MN and Texas bills explicitly forbid adoption of ?common? and ?national? standards.) And it also makes me wonder how many other states have groups working to unravel Common Core adoption before implementation has even begun?

The question of whether affluent and disadvantaged kids need a different kind of education?different instructional strategies, different curriculum, maybe even different kinds of teachers?is a serious one. This discussion is easily demagogued (particularly on Twitter). But it's not racist to say that poor kids?who generally come to school with much less vocabulary, exposure to print, and much else?might need something different?more intense, more structured?than their well-off, better-prepared peers.

On some level, we're overcomplicating this. In the end, the ?achievement gap,? as we now call it, is really little more than a practice gap. And schools that are succeeding in closing it are simply better at creating a culture that makes time for that practice.

In his bestselling book, The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that, across divergent fields (athletics, music, business, academia), the people who rose to the top had two things in common:

1. They had been exposed to and given the opportunity to learn, and
2. They had logged at least 10,000 hours of practice.

That's because extraordinary achievement is a function of extraordinary practice. Unfortunately, the sad truth for too many of America's poor children is that they are never given the opportunity to learn. ?And they are even more rarely given the space to practice.

When preparing for a professional development session, I once came across an alarming statistic: By the time s/he starts Kindergarten, the average middle class student has been exposed to 1,700 hours of one-on-one reading. Do you know how many hours of reading the average disadvantaged student has been exposed to by Kindergarten? 25. That's 1.4 percent of their middle class peers.

Worse, without serious and deliberate intervention, that gap is only going to increase over time as middle class parents work overtime to provide structured learning opportunities for their kids outside of school, putting disadvantaged students even further behind.

A lot of education activists?like Alfie Kohn and Diane Ravitch?like to argue that urban schools should copy the instructional practices of elite private schools. They look inside these small, often unstructured classrooms and wonder if this isn't the path to success.

What they are missing is what happens outside the classroom: the heavy reliance on parent involvement to help teach their students the key skills, knowledge and abilities they need to succeed. Teachers in these schools can, after all, assign hefty reading and writing assignments as homework because the typical middle class or affluent student goes home to a place where homework is valued and where parents can serve as a teacher-in-residence. That allows for much more flexibility in the school day?and takes the pressure off getting every transition perfect or focusing every discussion toward an instructional end.

Our most disadvantaged students typically don't have that luxury. If they're lucky, they have a quiet place to work at home. Too frequently, though, they have neither the space nor the support they need to complete complex assignments. That means that, in urban schools, shifting the critical practice time to the home by assigning overly hefty homework assignments is tantamount to telling students to figure things out on their own. It leaves them with few options and is no doubt why so many students throw up their hands in frustration.

In the end, the best hope urban teachers and schools have to close the practice gap is to?quite literally?maximize every moment. Every minute wasted on an unnecessary transition or on a correction that could have been avoided is a minute that could have been used to close that gap.

That's a fact that organizations like KIPP, TFA, and Achievement First get. Sure, the execution may not always be perfect. I forgive that, because at the end of the day, every adult in those buildings is working to ensure that not a moment is lost. Because every minute that's lost in an urban school is a minute that adds to the achievement gap.

This isn't a pedagogy of poverty. It's a pedagogy of practice. And there is a reason that, given the choice, poor parents will make extraordinary effort to seek it out for their children. They know that the road out of poverty is paved with thousands of hours of hard work acquiring the skills, knowledge and abilities that middle class kids take for granted.

Making sure students?no matter their home environment?get that practice inside the protective walls of a high-performing school isn't something to be dismissed or denigrated; it's something that should be understood and respected.

Policy makers and the general public have paid much less attention to what happens inside classrooms -- the particulars of teaching and learning -- especially in low-income neighborhoods?In an article published in Phi Delta Kappan back in 1991, Martin Haberman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, coined the phrase ?pedagogy of poverty.? Based on his observations in thousands of urban classrooms, Haberman described a tightly controlled routine in which teachers dispense, and then test students on, factual information; assign seatwork; and punish noncompliance.? It is a regimen, he said, ?in which learners can ?succeed' without becoming either involved or thoughtful? -- and it is noticeably different from the questioning, discovering, arguing, and collaborating that is more common (though by no means universal) among students in suburban and private schools.

This description is misleading on so many levels. First of all, it seems to suggest that having tight classroom management and routines is antithetical to creating classrooms where students can think deeply about issues. Nonsense.

In fact, having tight classroom management and efficient and effective classroom routines is exactly what you need to create the conditions where students can learn?where they can question and debate and where teachers can effectively use more student-centered techniques if they so choose.

Of course, there are classrooms where you can get away with looser routines and not have it devolve into chaos. But just because a classroom isn't completely chaotic doesn't mean it wouldn't benefit from having tighter management and stronger routines. And just because you have strong management and routines doesn't mean that your students aren't actively engaging in advanced work and critical thinking.

Kohn goes on to say:

Among the research that has confirmed the disparity are two studies based on data from the periodic National Assessment of Educational Progress. One found that black children are much more likely than white children to be taught with workbooks or worksheets on a daily basis.? The other revealed a racial disparity in how computers are used for instruction, with African Americans mostly getting drill and practice exercises (which, the study also found, are associated with poorer results).

Again, this is incredibly misleading. I have no doubt that there are far too many poor and minority students who are exposed to ineffective or lazy pedagogy. (And giving nothing but seatwork without thoughtful planning or instruction is lazy.) But let's not forget that there is a known teacher quality gap that accompanies the achievement gap. It's no secret?and no surprise?that schools that serve predominantly urban, low-SES students are more likely to have ineffective teachers. That is precisely why adopting reforms that help attract and retain higher quality teachers in urban schools is so critical.

What is perhaps most frustrating about Kohn's piece, however, is that he tries to suggest that the pedagogical techniques used in many high quality charter schools around the nation are the actual problem--and that they are grounded not in the desire to do what's best for students, but rather to deliberately stifle thinking and learning. He argues:

Rather than viewing the pedagogy of poverty as a disgrace, however, many of the charter schools championed by the new reformers have concentrated on perfecting and intensifying techniques to keep children ?on task? and compel them to follow directions.

Wrong.

The pedagogy that is used and encouraged at the most successful urban charter schools around the country?including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, and a host of others?are actually designed to create the conditions where student thinking and learning can actually happen. (It's difficult for students to learn if they are, in fact, not on task.)? And, done right, they help push students thinking very deliberately beyond lower level questions. Watch any of the host of clips that Doug Lemov has amassed for his Teach Like a Champion book and you'll see teachers using these techniques expertly. Visit schools like KIPP: Infinity, Achievement First Hartford Academy, or North Star Academy and you'll see teachers pushing their students thinking every day, in almost every classroom.

What's more, plenty of these techniques are effectively used in suburban and private schools around the country as well. (Catholic schools are, for example, known for their tight culture and strict rules.)

There are plenty of thoughtful critiques you can level against reform efforts?critiques that the reformers themselves struggle with every day. Sadly, Kohn fails to make any of them convincingly.

Washington, DC

Overview

I think that I may have started by reading the gold standard CCSS implementation plan because the District's RTT application outlines a plan that is as thoughtful as it is comprehensive. States and districts that are looking for smart CCSS implementation advice would do well to read and adapt DC's plan.

Strengths

There are essentially three areas of the RTT application that deal directly with CCSS implementation: standards and assessment, data, and great teachers and leaders. What impressed me most about DC's plan was how well integrated these areas were. It seems clear that the ?state? officials had a unified and clear theory of action and aligned all elements of their reform plan around particular goals. Even better, they are clearly using assessment and data as the driving force behind CCSS implementation. To that end, DC plans:

• To adopt a statewide summative assessment in 2011-2012, even though the PARRC assessment isn't coming out with the consortium assessment until 2014.
• To require all schools to implement interim assessments 6-8 times a year to track student mastery of standards.
• To use data from the summative and interim assessments to identify teacher-specific and school- and district-wide professional development priorities.
• To centrally track and use data to evaluate the impact of specific professional development and to make decisions about which programs to continue and which to cut.
• To use data about student growth as 50 percent of the teacher evaluation system.
• To use data to track the effectiveness of certification and licensure programs.

This focus on assessment and data is especially noteworthy. I fear that too many states start first with reimagining inputs, such as curriculum and professional development, before clearly defining the outcomes students and teachers will ultimately need to achieve. While that might sound sensible, from the state (or, in this case, district) level, assessment is the most powerful lever that officials have to impact curriculum, instruction, and student achievement. (Yes, it does put additional pressure on getting the assessment piece right, but that's important regardless. States simply must get assessment right.)

What's more, while DC requires all schools to use interim assessments to track student mastery approximately six times each year, they do not require all schools to use the same interim assessments. That means that schools are free to follow different scope and sequences, which means that teachers and school leaders can really tailor curriculum and pedagogy to meet the needs of particular students.

On the professional development side, there were three things that stood out about the District's plan:

1. Professional development was going to be targeted at creating strong, data-driven instruction at each school.
2. The quality of ALL professional development (school-site and district-wide) was going to be tracked and professional development decisions were going to be data-driven. (i.e.: poor quality PD providers were not going to be invited back.)
3. District officials seemed to understand that the single most important professional development that teachers can receive is targeted, ongoing observation and feedback in the classroom. (To that end, the plan directs money to hiring instructional coaches for each school. Coaches whose effectiveness will be tracked using qualitative and quantitative data.)

All of that is to say that DC's CCSS implementation plans are impressive.

Weaknesses

There were of course a few things that stood out as concerns, but they were few and fairly minor. The biggest was the amount of money that was being spent on professional development platforms and data evaluation systems. High-tech solutions are only as good as the habits they support. And, while DC's plan suggests that district officials are trying to establish those habits, it can be dangerous to lead with costly technology because, once such platforms are built, they can be hard to customize. It might be better to establish the habits first, and then tailor the technology solutions to meet the needs of the teachers who will use them.

Conclusion

Obviously, DC is unique because, while technically a state for the purposes of Race to the Top, they are no bigger than a typical urban district. Most states will have to grapple more directly with what parts of CCSS implementation should be housed in state departments of ed and which should be devolved to the district or the school level. (Though it's worth reiterating that, even though DC is the size of a district, officials did devolve questions about scope, sequence, formative assessment, and curriculum to the school level.) That said, for states and districts looking to learn more about what CCSS implementation should look like, DC's application might be a good place to start.

In education, interaction effects are everywhere. As I've argued before, a strong curriculum implemented by skilled instructor often yields amazing results. The same curriculum implemented by a weak teacher may yield no (or negative) student achievement gains. That's because, as anyone who's ever worked in a school knows, outstanding student achievement results are the product of many different interacting elements within schools, not just of standards or curriculum alone.

For policy makers, it's challenging because no policy can control all of the (school-based) factors that will determine whether their programs succeed or fail in boosting student achievement.

So it is with Common Core. While the standards themselves are far more rigorous than what existed in most states previously, the one thing we've definitively learned from the past two decades is that strong standards alone will not ensure that all students learn essential content.

As we look to implement this next generation of standards, states, districts, and schools need to adopt a series of policies that will interact with the standards to drive student achievement.

To that end, I would argue that there are, at a minimum, two things that need to be in place for rigorous standards to drive student achievement: First, individual teachers must feel ownership over and be accountability to their students' achievement results. Second, teachers need to employ effective, data-driven instructional practices.

The challenge, of course, is that sometimes, policies are enacting to improve one area but that hurt another. For example, effective instruction is driven by good planning and curriculum. So it seems logical that handing teachers pre-planned and pre-packaged curricula would improve student achievement.

Unfortunately, mandating the rigid implementation of such resources from on-high impacts the ownership that teachers feel over their students' achievement results.

Similarly, holding teachers accountable only to student performance on standardized tests will inevitably hurt effective instruction by encouraging shortcuts, curricular narrowing, etc.

It's complicated?more complicated than some debates over education reform suggest.

So as states consider what state- and district-level implementation of the Common Core should look like, they should consider what combination of policies will create the conditions that will yield the most significant student achievement gains in the greatest number of classrooms. Otherwise, we will be like a guy who's trying to lower his cholesterol by running just far enough to make it to the next McDonalds.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

a key goal for this year's social studies committee, which is made up of citizens and teachers, is to shrink the standards to more manageable lengths, which means far fewer examples than are contained in the current standards.

Note first that the committee is made up of ?citizens and teachers.? Does that mean to imply that the state isn't deliberately soliciting the input of historians? Let's hope not. While there would certainly be tension between what the historians wanted to include and what the teachers felt was manageable, such tension is a healthy way to ensure the pendulum doesn't swing too far in one direction or another.

Further, it's disheartening to hear that the state is moving to remove content from the standards, given that the Sterns felt the inclusion of so much substantive content was the best part about the standards.

On the other hand, they felt the standards were ?poorly organized, chronologically confused, and divorced from context,? and that ?political bias also makes unwelcome intrusions at all levels, at the expense of balanced historical perspectives.? Addressing those problems doesn't appear to have been the committee's top priority. Perhaps it should be?

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

An education bill introduced last week specifically prohibits the Commissioner ?from adopting common core standards in the subject and school year listed in the revision cycle in paragraphs (a) to (f).?? (See here and here.) Translated, that means that, when the state's math standards are up for revision in 2015, the state will not be permitted to adopt the Common Core.

Even more troubling, though, the sweeping statement has implications that go well beyond math, because the revision cycles outlined in ?paragraphs (a) to (f)? include science, social studies, technology and information literacy, the arts, and language arts. That means that, if passed, this bill would prevent the state from adopting common standards in any content area?no matter how much better than the state's existing standards they may be.

It also calls into question what's going to happen the next time the state's ELA standards are up for revision in 2018. Will the state be forced to replace the CCSS with different standards because this short-sighted provision prohibits the Commissioner from adopting any common core standards? I assume--perhaps naively--that wasn't the lawmakers' intent. Let's hope it doesn't become the reality.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

This year many states will make dramatic cuts to their education budgets?I would urge that those budget cuts not come at the expense of improving teaching. Furloughing teachers on professional development days, or ridding school systems of professional development departments, instructional coaches, and other forms of support altogether, will erode the knowledge, skills, and abilities teachers need to meet students' learning needs, and, as a result, will have a dramatic negative impact on student achievement for years to come.

The post is grounded in the dubious (but all too common) assumption that less is inevitably worse. ?As if it's impossible to streamline spending in education?or, in this case, in professional development?without negatively impacting quality.

Nonsense.

For starters, regardless of their quality, most professional development consultants are astronomically expensive. I can remember being *shocked* that a one-day training with unheard of (and untested) trainers who knew nothing of our schools and teachers, but who worked for a well known and well respected organization charged $20,000 for a one day training. That's more than $3,000 an hour to deliver a presentation that had been pre-packaged and delivered many times before. And the quality of the trainers was so poor that we fired them by lunch.

Of course, in PD, since there is no money-back-guarantee, we never saw that $20K again. Nor were the teachers able to buy back that precious time that could have been better spent on planning, collaborating, school visits, or a host of other more effective (and less costly) professional learning opportunities.

How was it that such lackluster trainers could command such exorbitant fees? One problem is that, more often than not, you hire organizations, not trainers. So that means that PD fees are often only very loosely tied to the quality of the trainers themselves. And well known organizations can command big bucks for all of their trainers, no matter how good or bad they are.

To make matters worse, too many training sessions are essentially canned presentations that are not customized to meet the particular needs of the teachers (or the students they serve). In fact, I've worked with a host of trainers in the past trying to get them to understand what our teachers already know, where they are and what they needed, only to have the trainers arrive and deliver the same, pat presentations and PowerPoints they always give. Which meant that we had to effectively pay twice: once for the external trainers and once to actually customize the information ourselves for use in our schools.

Such practices are as wasteful as they are commonplace. So, in the end, as we look to do more with less, perhaps PD budgets are the right place to start after all? After all, while ?good teaching cannot fall victim to budget cuts,? poor professional development certainly can.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Napoleon had his Waterloo. Harding had his Teapot Dome. And now the Gates Foundation has its ?conflict of interest? clause. Let's back up. For more than a year, education groups, states, and local districts have been busily updating curricula, altering assessment blueprints, and writing new state tests as they ready themselves for implementation of the new Common Core state standards. Yet in March, the Gates Foundation completely sidelined all efforts by introducing a ?conflict of interest? policy that prevents any grantee from discussing the work of a fellow grantee publicly or privately. As soon as Gates made the decision public, all work on Common Core standards implementation promptly ground to a halt. When asked about the consequences of the new policy, Stefanie Sanford said, ?Huh. Interesting.? She later when on to reassure grantees by explaining that Gates has created a National Commission that will look into the policy and its ramifications. A report on their findings and recommendations is due out this summer.

In related news, the Liberty Institute released a report today praising the conflict of interest policy. ?At last,? the release said, ?a Gates policy recommendation we can get behind!?

?Kathleen Porter-Magee

According to an LA Times article, because the program was both unpopular with teachers and didn't yield the student achievement results district officials had hoped for?there were gains, but they plateaued ?in upper classes? and weren't uniform across district schools?the LAUSD school board voted this week to replace it with another program called ?California Treasures.?

While I don't know much about the new program, I worry that, by simply replacing one program with another, the board hasn't learned two critical lessons.

The first is that, when you mandate a district-wide curriculum in a district the size of LA, school and leaders will inevitably begin to focus their management on compliance rather than student achievement. That is precisely what happened in Los Angeles, according to an article in the Los Angeles Daily Breeze.

[District officials] treated it like the Bible and if you deviated in any way ... you were subjected to an inquisition," said Janet Davis, an LAUSD teacher adviser and former elementary school teacher.

Davis recalled that she was once reprimanded for using the wrong Open Court puppet for a reading lesson.

In education, such compliance-focused management is absurd. It's no wonder that student achievement gains didn't persist over time.

Second, there is no teacher-proof curriculum. Open Court is a strong program?so strong that even in a district the size of LA, there were significant student achievement gains after teachers began implementing it.

But, as I've argued before, while a mediocre curriculum in the hands of an outstanding teacher will yield outstanding results, an outstanding curriculum in the hands of a mediocre teacher will yield mediocre results. So when student achievement lagged under the Open Court regime, I wonder how deeply district officials dove to find out whether student achievement woes were due to specific problems with the curriculum, or whether they stemmed from instructional and teacher quality challenges that will persist regardless of the program shift?

In the end, a curriculum is only as good as the teacher who implements it. Let's hope that district officials realize that and couple this program shift with a shift in management from teacher compliance to teacher quality and student achievement.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Take, California for example. In response to the 2009 budget crisis, the state passed a law that suspended all work related to the updating or adoption of instructional materials, including textbooks, for five years. (According to ?California Watch,? a bill currently awaiting Gov. Brown's signature would delay the adoption of new textbooks even longer.)

Unfortunately, while the intention of these bills?to save money during a fiscal crisis?is good, the execution is a disaster.

Now the state had adopted new standards for its schools?standards that will begin to inform statewide assessment in 2014. But, thanks to the state's convoluted textbook adoption laws, teachers won't have access to CCSS-aligned instructional materials until after their students begin taking CCSS-aligned assessments. (That is, unless districts are able to buy such materials with something other than state money.)

This is, of course, absurd. And, while this may be an extreme case of state incompetence, it's a good warning for anyone looking to mandate a ?shared curriculum? at the state or national level.

Decisions made in the statehouse are inevitably protracted. If states really want to help districts and schools implement the Common Core effectively, they should learn from California's mistakes and look for ways to simplify, not complicate, school- and district-level Common Core implementation.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.

Schools arrived at these arrangements through a gradual process of market competition and adaptation?.Of course, not everything is synced, but the items that are most important to consumers often are.

That's how standardization in market settings works and we have a lot of positive experience with this in industry. ?VHS became the standard medium for home entertainment because the market gravitated to it, not because some government authority mandated it. ?If we followed the logic of Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE we would want some government-backed committee to decide on the best format and provide government subsidies only to those companies that complied.

Instead of ending up with VHS, they may well have imposed Betamax on the country?

Of course, many people agree that Betamax had the superior technology (the picture was sharper, the cassettes were smaller, it was better at high-speed duplication, etc.). So, in effect, market forces standardized the inferior technology.

But rather than belabor the VHS-Betamax analogy, let's talk about the actual case of state standards. Is Greene correct in his contention that the market was on its way to standardizing high-quality state standards? Not even close.

In fact, for more than a decade we have been conducting a natural experiment where we let market forces drive standards setting at the state level. The result? A swift and sure race to the bottom. A majority of states had failed to set rigorous standards for their students?and had failed to create effective assessments that could be used to track student mastery of that content. In fact, the whole impetus behind the Common Core State Standards Initiative was to address what was essentially a market failure in education.

That said, I do agree with Greene that too much government intervention will stifle innovation. That's precisely why I think government ?standardization? should begin and end with standards. Let the government define what students should know and be able to do.? Then let market forces determine which curricula and pedagogy will best help students master that essential content.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Yes, you can get better by imitating those who are better than you?this is how most learning takes place?but this is very different from "implementing" decontextualized practices and expecting it to "work."

 

Great teachers are great teachers, whether or not they use "best practices." When we study great teachers, we can start to identify common elements in their instruction. However, turning these practices into policy by making poor teachers implement them is not the road to success for our students.

Here, Baeder has it mostly right. Trying to improve student achievement by having all teachers copy the effective practices of the most effective teachers is destined to fail for at least three reasons.

First, it takes our eye off the ball. Teachers should be held accountable for student learning, not for implementing particular pedagogical strategies. And too often, well-intentioned instructional leaders try to get at student achievement indirectly by managing inputs like the implementation of a particular curriculum or fidelity to a particular pedagogical model. The most effective teachers are effective because they are razor-focused on student learning?measured multiple ways?and they tailor their instructional strategies and adopt practices that yield better student achievement results. Sure, they do often learn by imitating the work of master, but they are constantly evaluating their own practice to ensure it meets their students' needs and to ensure that it is actually driving student achievement.

Second, these policies take ownership over student achievement results out of teachers' hands. If we tell teachers that imitating particular practices will yield greater student achievement gains and then manage towards how faithfully teachers implement those practices, then whose fault is it when student achievement lags? In order to hold teachers accountable for their students' learning, they must have the flexibility to meet their goals in multiple--and perhaps even sometimes messy--ways.

Finally, such policies pretend that you can miraculously transform poor teachers into great ones through mimicry. To be sure, all teachers need support and all struggling teachers need to be afforded the chance to improve. But in teaching, just as in all professions, it's impossible to coach everyone to greatness. (Or even to effectiveness.) So we should focus our management and policies on coaching those who can improve and counseling out those whose strengths are better matched to other professions.

In teaching, like in art, you can't turn amateurs into artists with paint-by-numbers. Let's acknowledge that and focus our policymaking and management on the kinds of results-oriented, flexible support that good teachers will thrive on.

(*H/T to Joanne Jacobs.)

?a group of school districts in California isn't waiting around for the state to build curriculum frameworks...[instead] CORE, a group of seven districts that pushed forward California's Race to the Top application, is rallying teachers to build instructional materials and formative assessments for the standards, which California and most other states have adopted.

At last! Districts taking the lead on curriculum and instructional decisions rather than waiting for the state to tell them what to do. Hopefully other districts across the country will follow suit.

Of course, let's also hope that the assessment consortia start releasing some more specific details (sample assessment items, perhaps?) about their summative assessments so that teachers can be sure that standards, curriculum, instruction, and formative and summative assessments are all properly aligned in terms of both content and rigor.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

To date, it doesn't seem like too many states have taken seriously the charge of fleshing out this additional ?15 percent.? It's no wonder, then, that folks are looking to curriculum to provide teachers with more specific details about what content students should learn.

I've already argued against making curriculum decisions at the state or national level. I remain convinced that it would be a mistake to do so for lots of reasons. Among them, in this debate over curriculum, one thing that we shouldn't lose sight of is the important distinction between standards and curriculum. Done right, standards define the outcomes?the knowledge and skills that students must master. Curriculum, on the other hand, helps shape the process through which students will learn that content. In other words, curriculum helps shape (among other things) how the content should be organized, how it should be taught, etc. (Pedagogy gets at this as well, of course.)

We all know how long it takes for states to change statewide education policy decisions like textbook adoption, standards, etc.? Once states begin to dictate curriculum decisions from the statehouse, curriculum becomes static. This is a problem because, in order to encourage innovation and to ensure that teachers, schools, and districts can nimbly respond to the needs of their students, curriculum needs to be a living, breathing being that schools and districts frequently tailor and improve to ensure that all students have mastered the content outlined in the standards. In other words, while the ends (i.e. the standards) should be fixed, the means by which we help students master those standards (i.e.: the curriculum and pedagogy) need to be flexible.

That said, I now wonder if the debate over a shared curriculum is a bit of a red herring. If the problem is that the standards don't clearly outline the content that students must learn, then the solution is not to create yet another layer of expectations atop the standards. Instead, states should focus more deliberately on finishing the job that started with CCSS adoption by filling the perceived content gaps in the standards themselves. How to do so is a much bigger conversation, but that is where we should be focusing our attention.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Most people agree that current measures of text complexity are imperfect. They are frequently quantatitve measures that rely on rudimentary scores of word length, sentence length, or paragraph length and structure to assign appropriate age and grade levels. As part of the Common Core standards initiative, the CCSS authors are seeking to improve these measures of text complexity so that they include both quantitative and qualitative measures (such as themes) to give a more accurate picture of when particular texts should be taught. This is part of a larger effort to help ensure that students across grade levels are exposed to appropriately rigorous literary and informational reading that will help better prepare them for the reading that will be required of them in college.

According to the article, there is a pilot program in New York City where teachers are coming together to analyze texts using quantitative and their own qualitative metrics of text complexity.

This work is welcome if it leads more students to read more rigorous texts across all levels, but particularly in high school.

But before we get too excited about the transformative power of these metrics, we need to investigate whether these fancy new analytic tools are actually going to change teacher practice.

You see, the focus in far too many reading classrooms today is on using reading strategies and on teaching reading skills. And, while there is some role for skill-building and comprehension strategies, in too many classrooms, teaching these skills and strategies has become an end in itself, and students are neither being forced to apply these strategies to appropriately rigorous texts nor to learn the essential genre-specific content they need to know to read texts of all genres.

Unfortunately, some details from the article make me wonder whether we're primed to see a shift from teaching strategies to teaching essential, genre-specific content. For instance, while one teacher explained that:

?expecting 14-year-olds to grasp high-level material without discipline-specific strategies is tantamount to dropping them off unaccompanied in three different countries and expecting them to thrive. ?That's what we do every day in their schools,? he told the teachers. ?We move them from the land of math to science to history with no guides.?

The examples cited in this article of how teachers are going to help students access important science and history content seem rudimentary. In one ELA class, for instance, the teacher explains that she:

??helps 11th and 12th graders build work-attack skills and access key themes in a story about slavery. Together, they break down words such as ?demoralize? and ?dehumanize.?

To be sure, teaching students some comprehension strategies such as ?word attack skills? can be helpful. But these are more appropriate very short mini-lessons in early grades, and we should be careful not to let them become the primary focus of instruction. Particularly not with juniors and seniors in high school.

In the end, instructional time is a zero sum game and we should remember two things: First, that the best way to help students improve their comprehension is to have them read a ton of rigorous texts across all genres?but particularly informational texts that will help expand the depth and? breadth of their knowledge. And second, every minute spent focusing on strategies to the exclusion of content takes some of that precious instructional time away from reading itself.

She confuses the core curriculum manifesto's?call for guidance on what students should learn with?a call to?pick winners and losers among published curricula, or?prescribe the methods by which?children should be taught.? The Call for Common Content is merely a sensible proposal to?describe the?common, knowledge-building content that all children must have in order to be fully literate.

While I will admit to being confused about what, precisely, the Shanker Institute's ?call? is actually advocating (particularly after the latest round of blog posts about it), that may have more to do with the way the manifesto is written than with my larger point. So let me be clear: Prescribing scope and sequence from the state or national level is a mistake. If that is what the manifesto is trying to achieve, then it's a step in the wrong direction.

The details matter in this debate, since they have the potential to impact classroom practice very directly and deliberately. I do think it's entirely appropriate for states to define the scope of content that students should learn. States have for many years defined what students should know and be able to do in core content areas. We call those standards. Getting those right was what the push for ?Common Core? standards was all about.

But I don't think states?or, even worse, the federal government?should be in the business of prescribing sequence. (If it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, you probably haven't had to sweat the details of sequence while building a scope and sequence for a school system.) Sequence matters exactly because it has pedagogical implications. To use my math example from the other day: Saxon math is a spiraled curriculum. The sequence of that material is wildly different from most curricula. And getting overly specific about sequence would either necessitate or prevent using a program like Saxon. Is that the kind of battle the signatories of the manifesto intended to create?

But, it doesn't even have to be that overt. Even deciding whether, for example, to teach fractions, decimals, and percents together or to teach fractions first is a decision of sequence that impacts pedagogy. And many teachers have very strong opinions about the ?best? way to introduce that essential content. Similarly, in ELA, deciding in what order you want to teach particular books or whether you want to scaffold research skills across several units or in one intensive unit is something teachers are likely to want to have some flexibility to decide. And, as I argued the other day, if we want teachers to feel real ownership over their students' achievement results, then we have to give some flexibility over these decisions. (While holding them accountable for student learning, of course?something the state is well positioned to do.)

Pondiscio also argues that a national or state focus on curriculum is rather uncontroversial.

Something is going to get taught, and there are no discounts for bad or ineffective curricula; the implementation costs are essentially fixed.? Thus a?coherent, content-rich approach to curriculum costs the same as?an inferior?content-neutral approach.? Why?bet on?incoherence?

Yes, something is going to be taught. And I wholeheartedly agree that a content-rich curriculum is essential. But I sincerely believe that if states get the standards and accountability pieces right, then schools will have no choice but to follow a content rich curriculum. (The reason this has yet to happen across states is either that the existing state standards are poor, the accountability system is weak, or both.)

What's more: there are already a host of fantastic content-rich curricula on the market. (Core Knowledge chief among them.) A state or nationally driven common curriculum is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't seem to exist.

Sure, there are a lot of ineffective curricula out there. But, the best way to drive out such curricula is by creating state accountability systems that keep the focus on student mastery of essential content. To be sure, very few states right now have the kinds of accountability systems we need to really drive achievement, but there are at least a few that have made a strong start. (Massachusetts and Florida come to mind.)

In the end, most people agree that schools need strong, content-rich curriculum. But I believe one of the least effectives way to get such curricula with the teacher and principal buy-in needed for it to transform student achievement is to mandate it?whether directly or indirectly?from the state or national level.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

Unfortunately, I still think that these debates are missing the point, and potentially distracting states from allocating their now very scarce resources towards policies that have the potential to much more dramatically impact student achievement.

It's worth noting that, as a former curriculum director, I am a strong believer in the transformative power of curriculum. It is essential.

But, I sincerely believe that making curricular decisions at the state or?even worse?national level is a mistake. States would do better to create or adopt rigorous assessments and a strong state accountability system, and then to devolve ownership over student achievement results?and that includes curricular decisions?as closely as possible to the classroom.

Heading up the curriculum and professional development team at Achievement First, one of our early missteps was to focus on mandating?or at least very strongly recommending?curriculum decisions. Our elementary math program, for example, was Saxon math. We feared deviating from it. It was a proven model, after all, and we'd seen it succeed in action.

We learned pretty quickly, however, that mandating Saxon was a mistake. Not because it wasn't a good program, but rather because, by focusing our energies on convincing teachers and principals to use a particular curriculum, we were, on some level, taking ownership over student achievement results from teachers and principals and shouldering it ourselves. After all, if teachers were merely implementing required programs?programs they didn't feel they had the authority to deviate from?then how could they be held accountable if student achievement results didn't naturally follow?

In my second year at AF, a group of elementary principals came together and essentially asked to take that power back. They didn't want to use Saxon; they wanted to use Everyday Math, a program they were convinced was going to lead to better results for our students. (For anyone who knows anything about the math wars, you know that choosing between Saxon and Everyday Math isn't the same thing as choosing between having steak and a hamburger for dinner. It's more like choosing between having steak and gouging your eyes out with toothpicks. From an instructional and philosophical standpoint, they're as different as they come.)

We agonized over this decision. We set up pilots rather than let everyone switch programs. We were cautious.

While I'm sure that sounds like the right approach?it certainly did to us at the time?we quickly realized that we were wrong. For lots of reasons, but one in particular.

In short, it soon became clear that if you bring together a group of smart, dedicated teachers and principals who are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure kids can learn, they are going to succeed. These educators wanted to make Everyday Math work. And, since they knew that they were being held accountable for making it work?and they clearly understood the measures we were going to use to judge student learning?they did. (Incidentally, they made it work by very deliberately filling gaps in the program?a story for a different day.) So the success of the program had more to do with the teachers implementing the program than the curriculum itself.

The lesson now seems simple: a gold star curriculum in the hands of a mediocre teacher will inevitably yield mediocre results. By contrast, a mediocre curriculum in the hands of a gold star teacher will yield outstanding results.

In the end, the teacher makes more of a difference than the program. (We saw this time and time again across the network. Whenever we had curricular shifts, the teachers who demonstrated the greatest student achievement gains were always the same, regardless of the program.)

I think the lesson for states is equally simple. We cannot prescribe curricular solutions to instructional problems. And, the most effective way states can help diagnose instructional problems is to ensure that there are rigorous statewide assessments that are tied to accountability at all levels. Focusing prematurely on curriculum before laying this critical assessment and accountability groundwork will do no more to ensure all students learn ?common,? rigorous content than the adoption of the Common Core State Standards on its own would do.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

That's not to say that teachers aren't going to need rigorous and thorough curricula to help them effectively teach to the standards. They are.

Rather, it's a question of what is the proper role of the state in CCSS implementation. And unless the state wants to get in the business of policing schools' proper implementation of a curriculum?whether that ?curriculum? is as detailed as a script or as general as a pacing guide?they would do better to focus the lion's share of their time and attention elsewhere. Namely, on ensuring that there are rigorous, CCSS-aligned summative state assessments in all core content areas.

The easy answer is of course to say that's already being taken care of. Most states have joined one of two consortia and the work on those CCSS-aligned assessments is already well underway.

But there is still much assessment work that needs to be done. For starters, between now and when the consortia-created assessments are ready for prime-time, states be tweaking their existing assessment blueprints to ensure that essential content is being properly prioritized across the grades.

What's more, states should be working within the consortia to understand?and to communicate to districts?how each of the standards is going to be assessed. That is?or, rather, that should be?what drives standards-aligned curricula and instruction in the end.

Beyond that, let's not forget that the ELA standards are actually called the ?Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects.? To date, no consortia are, to my knowledge, designing history or science assessments that are aligned to the CCSS. States, therefore, need to take the lead. And if the ELA standards are ever to live up to their promise, this work is essential.

Of course, the signatories are right that developing standards- and assessment-aligned curricula is essential. After all, it is typically the curriculum that provides teachers with needed guidance about how to teach the assessed standards. But if states do their job on the assessment side, they would do better to get out of the way and let districts (or even schools and teachers) decide for themselves which curriculum resources will best help them prepare their students to succeed.

I use the word mundane not because the techniques are insignificant. On the contrary, they are essential, practical, and--done right--transformative in their power to drive student achievement, teacher training and professional development, and related policy decisions. But, some--for instance, the advice on how to train students to pass out papers efficiently--upon first glance seem so trivial that it hardly seems worthy of the pages devoted to it. That is until you realize that investing an hour up-front to getting this right can literally save as many as eight full instructional days. Eight days. In an age when school districts are being forced to cut valuable instructional days, such dramatic time-saving techniques should be the rule, not the exception.

Throughout the book, Lemov calls out 49 specific techniques that are equally simple, though not simplistic. Pragmatic, though at their core truly inspirational.

In fact, Lemov has included video clips that show the techniques in action, as well as scores of helpful examples of how to adapt the techniques to meet different needs. A teacher reading this book on Friday can put the techniques into practice Monday.

That's the point, of course. Lemov wants to put into the hands of teachers practical techniques that will ultimately help them drive student achievement. He explains:

I would like this [goal] to distinguish this book from so many others: it starts with and is justified by the results it helps teachers achieve, not by its fealty to some ideological principle. The result to aim for is not the loyal adoption of these techniques for their own sake but their application in service of increased student achievement. Too many ideas, even good ones, go bad when they become an end and not a means.

I've no doubt that many--some teachers chief among them--will read this book and argue that it oversimplifies the artistry and craft of teaching. Teaching is difficult if not impossible to boil down into something that can be taught (as this is) using some targeted PD, practical video clips, and reading absent a deep theoretical analysis of pedagogy or other educational theory. To such critics, Lemov eloquently says:

Great teaching is an art. In other arts--painting, sculture, the writing of novels--great masters leverage a proficiency with basic tools to transform the rawest of material (stone, paper, ink) into the most valued assets in society. This alchemy is all the more astounding because the tools often appear unremarkable to others. Who would look at a chisel, a mallet, and a file and imagine them producing Michelangelo's David? Great art relies on the mastery and application of foundational skills, learned individually through diligent study.

And, Lemov adds, real-world application and practice. Lots of practice:

...the more you practice it, the better you get. Mulling your decision to run from the front a hundred times doesn't make it any better, but practicing a hundred sprints with just the right body position does. This is why, in the end, focusing on honing and improving specific techniques is the fastest route to success, sometimes even if that practice comes at the expense of philosophy or strategy.

Would that all teacher training and professional development were so targeted, practical, and specific.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee

*****

In the spirit of full disclosure, as senior director of curriculum and professional development at Achievement First, Lemov's ???Taxonomy of Effective Teaching??? helped transform our PD model. And one of the teachers cited in the book--both in the descriptions of the techniques and in the acknowledgments--is my former boss and AF co-CEO, Doug McCurry.

I bought this rhetoric for a long time. As a teacher, I always felt like I was taking a shortcut if I chose multiple choice tests over short answer questions or essays.

That was, until I started actually writing network-wide interim assessments and helping teachers use the data from these tests to drive daily instruction, one-on-one tutoring, and small group instruction. It was only then that I really began to realize the power of these frequently-maligned assessment tools.

To be clear, I wholeheartedly agree that multiple choice tests cannot and should not be the only means of assessing student knowledge and skills. But, they rarely are. For example, I can't think of a single instance where open-ended response questions aren't part of the state assessment system. Or when the best teachers don't pair these assessments with projects, essay tests, and other measure of student learning.

But in reality, there is much teachers can learn about student progress toward mastery of essential content and skills from multiple choice questions. In fact, I sometimes believe that you can learn more about where student understanding is breaking down by analyzing data from a well-designed multiple choice question than from many open-ended questions.

Unfortunately, most analyses of multiple choice tests begin and end with the student test score?how many questions did they get right and wrong. This type of superficial analysis ignores the most useful data that a multiple choice question can provide. Careful analysis of the distracters?the incorrect answers students select?can give teachers valuable insight into where student understanding is breaking down, and therefore can help teachers maximize their instructional time by better targeting whole-class and small group instruction and individual tutoring. What's more, these assessments can be scored quickly and their data used to drive instruction almost immediately.

Sadly, though, many people see multiple choice tests only for their limitations and not for their power.

Yes, these assessments?like all tests?are limited. Yes, teachers must ensure that they are using multiple measures to paint a complete picture of student learning. And yes, some (poor) teachers will look for shortcuts and use valuable instructional time to teach students tricks to try to ?game? the tests themselves. (Though, given the formulaic way most open-ended responses are scored by states, I would argue that short answer and essay questions encourage more such short cuts than multiple choice questions do.)

But, aren't we kidding ourselves by saying that teachers who take such instructional shortcuts would magically stop if it weren't for standardized assessments? And, are we sure that the trade-offs of opting for tests with fewer (if any) multiple choice questions?cost, timeliness of data reporting, subjectivity of scoring, etc.?would paint a clearer picture of student learning?

?Kathleen Porter-Magee

At face value, this argument just doesn't sit well with me. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of school choice. In fact, in the nine years I've spent working directly in and with schools, I've only worked in schools of choice???both public charter and private schools that were part of the DC opportunity scholarship program.

But, to say that advocating for more rigorous standards is a distraction from reforms that will drive student achievement seems so far removed from everything I've ever experienced in education.

First, the DC Catholic Schools Consortium (now the Center City Consortium), which has served hundreds of at-risk students thanks to the Opportunity Scholarship Program, was able to realize the dramatic student achievement gains they've achieved in part because they made the bold choice to adopt Indiana's standards, which were far superior to their hometown DC and Maryland standards. And they very intentionally used these standards to drive curriculum, assessment, professional development, and consequently, student achievement across their classrooms.

Second, the success of high-performing charter schools???including Achievement First, where I served as Senior Curriculum and Professional Development director for more than four years???is thanks in very large part to the adoption of rigorous standards. When the standards in the states in which these schools operate are too low, they are augmented. At Achievement First, for example, when we were looking to develop a truly rigorous high school curricular and instructional program, we evaluated standards from AP courses, IB programs, and top state standards to determine which set of expectations would help us set the bar where it needed to be. (And, of course, AF and all successful public and private schools do this all the time across all grade levels.)

But, even outside my own narrow experience, there is evidence that standards matter.

Take today's release of the 2009 NAEP reading results. Unsurprisingly, Massachusetts???the state that has the strongest ELA standards in the country???is leading the nation in reading achievement.

But, if you scratch beneath the surface, there is even more to Massachusetts's remarkable story. Not only do they have the greatest percentage of students scoring at or above proficiency, but they also lead the nation in every single category.

In other words, students scoring in Massachusetts's bottom 25% score higher than students in the bottom 25% of any other state in the nation.?? And students scoring in the top 25% perform better than students in the top 25% of any other state.

In other words, thanks in large part to adopting rigorous standards and to using these standards to drive curriculum and instruction across the state, Massachusetts has lifted all of its students. Sure, there's more to do, and school choice could undoubtedly help. But it's just hard for me to believe that Massachusetts's results have nothing to do with having the most rigorous standards in the country.

And this is why, for states whose math and ELA standards are currently so abysmally low, the Common Core standards initiative holds so much promise. Done right, adopting more rigorous ELA and math standards has the potential to push every student in the state to do better. This is surely something worth doing if we can do it right.

--Kathleen Porter-Magee