“The Department,” like any hulking, beltway-bound federal agency, can seem like a cold, faceless leviathan—this imposing force, issuing impenetrable regulations from a utilitarian, vaguely Soviet, city block–sized building in the shadow of the Capitol.

But those who interact with it regularly, especially those of us fortunate enough to have worked there, know that it is made up of hundreds and hundreds of very fine people.

During my tenure there, I found both the career staff and the political appointees to be knowledgeable public servants and excellent colleagues. While working for a state department of education, I found the Department’s team to be thoughtful, accessible, and accommodating. And in my loyal-opposition think-tank stints, during which I sometimes find myself poking and prodding the Department, they’ve been patient, respectful, but understandably steely adversaries.

I’m appreciative that they took the time to answer these questions so thoroughly, and I’m flabbergasted that they did so at—in terms of agency timelines—Guinness-Book speed.

What would the U.S. Department of Education (ED) like people to know about the testing consortia?

The consortia are designing the next generation of assessment systems, which include diagnostic or formative assessments, not just end-of-the-year summative assessments. Their systems will assess student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready. These new systems will offer significant improvements directly responsive to the wishes of teachers and other practitioners: they will offer better assessment of critical thinking, through writing and real-world problem solving, and offer more accurate and rapid scoring. The Smarter Balanced consortium’s assessment will also be “computer-adaptive,” meaning that the difficulty of questions will adjust to students’ ability levels as they proceed through the test.

The two consortia are making significant progress developing their assessment systems and are making an effort to be as transparent as possible, going well beyond what is typical in an assessment-development process. They have released a wide variety of information on how they will create the assessments and have invited comment from educators, district practitioners, additional national experts and the public. In addition, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced have released sample items to offer educators and the public an early look and will release additional questions this summer.

When the two consortia roll out their new assessments in the 2014-15 school year, they will be works in progress. We fully expect some schedule adjustments and technical glitches. Assessment 2.0 will need lots of work to get to version 2.1 and 2.2. States and districts will improve implementation as they learn from pilots and field tests. And teachers will play an absolutely critical role in providing the consortia feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.

How important are PARCC and Smarter Balanced to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

This new generation of assessments—combined with the adoption of internationally benchmarked, college and career-ready standards—is an absolute game-changer for American education. PARCC and Smarter Balanced are tremendously important as a step forward to getting better, more accurate, and more actionable data about what students know and can do. As important as better assessments are, they must work in tandem with high-quality curriculum; meaningful, job-embedded professional development; and all the other pieces that will support educators preparing to teach to these new standards.

Most education observers know the consortia received federal funding several years ago. But the field probably knows less about ED’s interactions with the consortia since. That is, have they been on their own, or has ED been providing technical assistance and advice along the way?

As with all grantees, the Department works to ensure that the grants are on track, that funds are spent appropriately, and that we have actively supported grantee success. See the RTTA Program Review Process for some additional details. In addition, because we recognize the complexity of the consortia’s work, we have held a series of public meetings over the past two years to address particular components of their system—state and local technology needs, automated scoring of assessments, and how to improve the accessibility of assessments for all students, particularly students with disabilities and English learners. While each consortium has created its own technical advisory group, the Department recently created the RTTA Technical Review to help analyze each consortium’s progress and identify areas where additional attention may be necessary.

There have been recent signs of trouble. Alabama just abandoned the consortia (after Utah did so last year). Florida’s chief Tony Bennett said he’s looking for a “Plan B.” A March survey revealed that 65 percent and 70 percent of “education insiders” thought that PARCC and Smarter Balanced, respectively, were on the wrong track. What’s ED’s reaction to these events?

The states are the vital decision-makers here. States have demonstrated remarkable leadership, first through developing and adopting new, higher standards, and then through design and development of the next generation of high-quality assessments. But this is hard work. We are asking an enormous amount of principals and teachers in the next several years. We fully expect that there will be states that choose not to stay on board, and in those that do, we must provide teachers and principals with the resources and professional development they need to make the transition. Further, even if a state opts out of a consortium now, they can re-enter at any time in the future.

Does ED have a message to states contemplating exiting the consortia?

States must make the right decisions for their students and communities. There’s overwhelming agreement that high standards and well-aligned assessments, emphasizing critical thinking and writing, are vital to serving students well. How states get there is entirely up to them.

It’s worth pointing out that when the states developed the Common Core State Standards, they provided some important distinctions from current standards and current state tests. For example, the Common Core emphasizes writing in the English language arts standards. Any assessment aligned to the Common Core needs to similarly emphasize writing, which is a skill children need to be ready for college and the workforce. These and other distinctions mean that assessments that truly measure the Common Core will likely look different from current state tests, necessary as we move from fill-in-the-bubble tests toward more engaging assessments that better mirror good instruction in the classroom.

It seems that ED has leverage because of promises states made when applying for NCLB waivers and accepting stimulus and Race to the Top funding. Would the Department exercise the authority it has in an effort to hold the consortia together, or would the Department stand down and allow each state to make the decision it deems best?

The Department is focused on states developing college- and career-ready standards and aligned high-quality assessments that provide a better, more accurate measure of what students know and can do and whether they graduate high school ready for college or the workforce. We don’t want to see any state go backward. We expect the consortia to develop assessment systems that are markedly better than current assessments and we expect them to be already considering how to continue innovating and improving the systems. We understand that states may choose a different way of measuring whether its students are ready for college and careers and we are working with states such as Minnesota, Virginia, and Utah on their approaches. Again, states need to individually make the best decision for them based on all the relevant facts.

Do you trust that states opting out of the consortia will pick assessments possessing the characteristics the Department wanted to be part of assessments in the Common Core era—e.g., tightly aligning with the new standards, moving beyond “bubble tests,” accurately measuring performance at the ends of the performance distribution, and producing final results quickly?

We expect that all states will continue to improve their assessment systems. This currently includes requirements that state tests are aligned to the standards chosen by the state, provide accurate, valid, and reliable data about student knowledge and skills, and measures higher-order thinking skills. In December 2012 the Department paused our peer review of state assessment systems in order to reconsider whether our criteria and process for evaluating assessments is sufficient to measure whether an assessment system is a high-quality measure of college and career readiness. We will be providing additional detail in the coming months about our process and our criteria. Once complete, all assessment systems, including PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and all other state assessment systems, will be required to demonstrate how they meet the requirements for technical quality, alignment, and other assessment best practices. It is vital students, parents and educators receive reliable and valid information on student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready regardless of what state they reside in.

If states splinter, going their own ways on test and, presumably, cut scores, haven’t we lost much of the rationale for states’ adopting Common Core? Won’t we be left unable to conduct cross-state comparisons, and won’t states still be able to lower the proficiency bar to improve their scores?

Having multiple state assessment systems aligned to common content standards with different cut scores and proficiency standards would make comparison harder (though not impossible), which would be unfortunate. In addition, the public reporting and transparency required under ESEA would continue to be an avenue to identify schools and districts that are doing a good job and identify where states are lagging in what they expect of students. States that have college- and career-ready standards will continue to work with their institutions of higher education to identify what it means to measure college- and career-readiness on state tests. This is important work that PARCC and Smarter Balanced are actively engaged in and something that has been lacking in state assessment systems previously. For states not in either consortium in the future, the connection to higher education will help ensure that states set a rigorous bar for college and career readiness. In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) will continue to give the nation a “report card” on how students are doing across states.

A reasonable person might ask, “If the private market seems to be producing assessments that meet states’ needs, why did ED spend well more than $300 million to develop tests?” Could you please explain ED’s thinking behind these investments?

In 2010, in direct response to requests from governors and chief state school officers, the Department elected to use a portion of the Race to the Top funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to support the next generation of assessment because the market was not meeting their needs. Current state tests were missing several important opportunities—they often did not measure the full range of what students should know, focusing on easier skills and ignoring hard-to-measure standards, and most states did not include writing in their assessment systems (to name just a few of the issues with the current market of tests).

We have already seen the Race to the Top Assessment program move the field of assessment. Forty-four states and DC, working in two consortia to develop assessments aligned to the Common Core, have pushed the field to react in ways they likely would not have reacted if each state were separately pursuing a new set of assessments. A 2012 study by the RAND Corporation, for example, indicated that most state tests do not assess “deeper learning skills” of cognitively complex tasks. By contrast, an initial study of the consortia by CRESST in 2013 shows promising results for the consortia’s ability to measure students’ ability “mastering and being able to apply core academic content and cognitive strategies related to complex thinking, communication, and problem solving.”

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed as a number of cities and states have been forced to address serious allegations. Is ED concerned about test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Yes, the Department is concerned about test security. We don’t think the concerns are any greater with PARCC and Smarter Balanced than with current state tests; though the challenges may change slightly due to the tests being primarily computer-based and the fact that a breach in security could have repercussions beyond a single state. The consortia need to establish security controls and procedures to address these issues, and we expect them to do so as they ramp up toward the field test in spring 2014 and the first operational assessment in the 2014-2015 school year.

It’s worth pointing out that in recent months, critics have claimed that high-stakes tests drive teachers and school administrators to cheat. But that argument confuses correlation with causation. And it also ignores history. There is no excuse for school administrators and teachers tampering with student tests to boost test scores. It is morally indefensible—and it is most damaging to the very students who most desperately need the help of their teachers and school leaders.

We reject the idea that the system makes people cheat. Millions of educators administer tests but very few chose to cheat. In all but a tiny minority of cases, teachers want their children to genuinely learn and grow—not achieve phony gains to make themselves or their schools look good. In places where a district’s culture is rotten, people must speak out. But the vast, vast majority of educators are committed to assessing their students’ progress with complete integrity.

For more, check out Andy Smarick's interviews with PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

After my ominous prediction about the consortia’s fates, Smarter Balanced quickly responded in private. Their counter was both courteous and forceful. I was impressed by the initial case they made, and I’m very glad that they swiftly agreed to participate in this public Q&A.

Could you please briefly describe the process (including the challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

The process Smarter Balanced is using is very similar to the processes that states have been using for over a decade to create assessments for NCLB accountability. Using a widely regarded conceptual approach called Evidence-Centered Design, and working in partnership with an array of private sector companies, work groups comprising assessment leadership from Smarter Balanced states have developed the various components necessary for a next-generation assessment system. Among the major elements are:

• IT architecture and open-source software to deliver, score and report on assessments
• Content and item specifications and a test blueprint to govern the content and format of the assessment
• Accommodations and accessibility features and policies
• Achievement-level descriptors, college content-readiness policy and plans for standard-setting
• Reporting system design
• Validity testing and psychometric research

This work has benefited immensely from the pooled expertise of state assessment professionals; K12 teachers, higher education faculty and other academic content experts; and staff from a diverse array of private sector firms. While the process that is being used to develop the Smarter Balanced assessment system would be familiar to anyone who has ever built a test, what is unique about Smarter Balanced is the bringing together of a large and diverse array of talent committed to making each element of the system “best in breed.”

What is Smarter Balanced most proud of?

We are proud that we have simultaneously been able to meet three ambitious goals:

1.   We have hit all the major project milestones for delivering all three aspects of the assessment system—summative, interim and formative—on-time and on-budget for the 2014-15 academic year.

2.   We have done this through a state-led process featuring consensus-based decision-making and the hard work of dedicated K-12 and higher education educators and administrators.

3.   We have met our milestones without sacrificing our very high quality standards, and we continue to push the envelope of innovation in test design, including ground-breaking open-source software, innovative items and performance tasks, and new approaches to key processes such as developing achievement level descriptors and standard-setting.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Building an assessment system as large, multi-faceted, and sophisticated as the Smarter Balanced system is challenging, but the test-development process Smarter Balanced is using follows a sequence of steps that is familiar to all experienced assessment professionals. Given the extensive expertise of the Smarter Balanced state leadership and staff, the difficulties we have encountered in test development have not been unforeseen or unmanageable. The greater challenge is responding to the intense—and legitimate—interest of so many diverse parties in this work. State assessment directors expect scrutiny by policy makers, parents, interest groups, and others, but the number and diversity of the interested parties is much greater when working on the scale of a multi-state consortium. Keeping this diverse array of interested parties informed about the complex and often highly technical work of building an assessment system has been more challenging than we originally imagined.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth needed to deliver your online, adaptive assessments?

Some states are ready and are currently assessing students online. Other states are in the process of preparing for the assessments and will be ready when the assessments become operational in 2014-15. Recognizing the need for a transition period, for three years Smarter Balanced will support the use of a paper-and-pencil option for those schools not fully ready right away. Further, the minimum technology specifications that Smarter Balanced released last fall allow for very old operating systems and require only the minimum processors and memory required to run the operating system itself (for example, the summative assessment can be delivered using computers with 233 MHz processors and 128 MB RAM that run Windows XP). Likewise, the file size for individual assessment items will be very small to minimize the network bandwidth necessary to deliver the assessment online. Right now, Smarter Balanced provides a bandwidth checker to allow schools to determine the number of students that can simultaneously take tests and is hosting, in collaboration with PARCC, a “technology readiness tool” that allows schools and districts to assess and track their progress toward readiness.

Smarter Balanced has deployed small-scale trials and a pilot test to incrementally improve its technology system; these efforts have also helped districts better understand the technology and human resource requirements necessary to deploy the online assessments. The Smarter Balanced practice test to be released at the end of May and the Smarter Balanced field tests to be deployed in Spring 2014 will provide additional opportunities for schools to gain experience in deploying the assessments.

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed. How can you guarantee test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Actually, under the Smarter Balanced summative assessment design, states will be giving different tests during the same 12-week window at the end of each academic year. In a computer-adaptive assessment, each student’s test is customized based on his/her performance throughout the test. There will be no way for students to copy each other’s answers since each will be looking at a unique question. Further, since the results are captured electronically, it will not be possible for adults to tamper with results once the test administration is completed.

For schools using the paper-and-pencil option, the particular form students receive will depend on their responses to a short “locater test.” Since scoring standards will differ for the various forms, there will be no incentive for teachers to steer students to the less challenging forms.

Beyond elements of the test design that will militate against the risk of cheating, the Smarter Balanced test administration policies will call on states to conform to best practices with regard to independent monitoring and proctoring.

A defining moment on the horizon is when Smarter Balanced attempts to set cut scores and have all member states sign on. Can you help us understand the process you’ll use to reach consensus? How important is it that the cut scores are high and that members agree?

It is essential that the scores accurately reflect student mastery of the Common Core State Standards and that they have a common meaning across Smarter Balanced states. Our member chief state school officers, who will ultimately vote on the cut scores, view rigorous common performance standards as an essential element of realizing the promise of the Common Core State Standards. From its beginning, Smarter Balanced has relied upon a consensus-based process for all its policy decisions. Our experience has been that our states have little difficulty in reaching consensus when we are deliberative and remain open and transparent as policy decisions develop. We don’t expect the standard setting process to be any different.

That said, we acknowledge the challenge in setting performance standards at the scale of a multi-state consortium. Relying entirely on the traditional workshop format typically used for standard setting would make it difficult for each state to feel adequately represented in the process. To address this challenge, we are planning an innovative approach to standard-setting that will take advantage of our online testing platform to allow the participation of as many constituents as interested to review exemplar test items and weigh in on where they think the “cut scores” should be set. This crowd-sourced data, parsed by state and by respondent role (teachers, higher education faculty, parents, etc.) can then inform the comparatively small number of individuals participating in the standard-setting workshop.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The Common Core will succeed or fail in the classroom. Effective instruction is at the heart of meeting the high expectations set by the standards. Smarter Balanced is grounded in the notion that putting good information about student performance in the hands of teachers can have a profound impact on instruction and—as a result—on student learning. By accurately assessing the deeper learning required by the standards, and by helping teachers sharpen their own skills in formative, classroom-based assessment through the Digital Library of Formative Tools and Practices, Smarter Balanced can make a positive contribution to the ultimate success of the Common Core.

Are you confident that Smarter Balanced will be able to deliver online, adaptive assessments on time, on budget, and in all promised grades/subjects to all member states in 2014–15?

We are on track to deliver each aspect of our assessment system on time and on budget in 2014-15. To date, our work has been supported through contracts with every one of the country’s large testing companies. We have successfully sought bids and procured multiple contracts consistent with our overall project plan, and we continue to be on schedule. This spring we are pilot testing the first 5,000 items and tasks we have developed with about a million students, engaging more than 5,200 schools drawn from all 21 of our governing states. The pilot test also serves as a beta test for our test delivery software. In addition to testing out our items, performance tasks, and software, the pilot test also gives us an opportunity to evaluate a variety of accessibility features for students with disabilities and English language learners.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s and Utah’s decisions to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?” Are we about to see a mass exodus from the consortia?

We regret that Alabama and Utah chose to leave the consortium; each state did so for particular reasons unrelated to the progress of the Consortium or to design decisions that the member states had reached. While those states have chosen to leave the Consortium, Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands have recently joined Smarter Balanced, and many states that initially joined as advisory states have transitioned to governing status, reflecting their commitment to the Consortium.

About how many states do you expect to administer Smart Balanced assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

We have no reason to expect changes among our 21 governing states. Recently, our governing states completed a survey asking them to identify the Smarter Balanced assessments they are most likely to ultimately use. All but one state indicated plans to use the full suite of formative, interim, and summative assessments. The one remaining state plans to implement only the summative assessment.

We also currently have four advisory states; some of those states may choose to select different assessments while others may transition to governing status.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below Smarter Balanced costs and without all of the hassles that come along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

A primary benefit of the Smarter Balanced assessment system is that it is built by states, for states. States in the Consortium have a level of direct decision-making control that they could never hope to achieve with an “off-the-shelf” product. They also are assured of a level of multi-states comparability, both within the Consortium and across PARCC and Smarter Balanced, which is unlikely to be reached with a commercial test. Finally, the transparency of the Smarter Balanced system is antithetical to the competitive nature of commercial test publishing. Examples of that transparency include:

• Our open-source test delivery software
• Our open bank of interim items that are built to the same specifications as the item bank for the secure summative assessment
• The extent to which the documents that guide our work invite public review and are published online
• The full and open disclosure of our plans for research and validity and the results of those studies.

Additionally, Smarter Balanced is developing a distributed, multi-actor system of test delivery, with the Consortium maintaining responsibility only for those aspects that are essential for ensuring continued comparability of results, quality improvements, and state-led governance. Under this system, many of the services that states need to administer the tests and deliver results will come from the vendor community. This system allows states to maintain control over content and quality while outsourcing to the private sector those elements of test delivery system that these companies have mastered.

Finally, the estimated total cost for the Smarter Balanced assessments ($22.50 per student for the summative assessment in both English language arts and math, or $27.30 per student for the full system of formative, interim and summative assessments) is less than the amount that about two-thirds of our member states currently pay for their state assessments. These costs encompass both the services provided by Smarter Balanced in common to all member states and the services that states will either provide directly or procure from vendors in the private sector.

One element dominates the cost: approximately 70 percent of the vendor cost for summative assessments is tied to hand-scoring. Measuring the deeper learning required by the Common Core requires that students write extensively and much of that writing cannot yet be scored by technology. Paying teachers, faculty, and other content experts to score student responses is costly, but it is currently the only effective way to measure important elements of the Common Core. Until automated scoring of writing improves, reducing the cost would require reducing the amount of writing—a step that cannot be taken without compromising fidelity to the standards. Smarter Balanced can include extensive writing and maintain a reasonable cost because our size allows us to take advantage of economies of scale. Off-the-shelf tests that cost substantially less than Smarter Balanced assessments almost certainly will not include as many items and tasks that require students to produce a response rather than simply find a correct answer. We believe this is a significant quality benefit of Smarter Balanced.

Could you please describe Smarter Balanced’s relationship with the U.S. Department of Education? For example, how often do you meet with them, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

Smarter Balanced is funded under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that extends through September 2014. The fiscal agent for the federal grant is the state of Washington. The Department of Education has responsibility for fiduciary and programmatic oversight of the grant. In essence, they need to track that we are doing the things we promised to do and spending funds in accordance with our approved budget. Like any federal grantee, Smarter Balanced must operate within the requirements of its federal grant; however, there is a great deal of latitude built into the grant for state decision-making. For example, the grant stipulates that Smarter Balanced must build an assessment of the Common Core State Standards, but the test blueprint specifying the proportion of test material on various topics is something the states in the Consortium decide.

We meet with program officers at the Department monthly and provide them with quarterly financial and programmatic reports. In addition, once a year we undergo a thorough program review, not unlike the program review that states have always gone through for their Title I grants.

Since the inception of No Child Left Behind, the Department of Education has used a process called “Peer Review” to ensure that all state testing programs adhere to the AERA/NCME/APA Joint Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. The consortia assessments will be no different with regard to this Peer Review, and we have already been preparing and submitting materials to the Department of Education for that purpose. This level of review is no greater nor less than the technical scrutiny the Department of Education requires of all state tests designed to meet the requirements of federal accountability.

At the conclusion of the federal grant, Smarter Balanced will transition to being an operational assessment system supported by its member states. The consortium does not plan to seek additional funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

Why do you think 70 percent of “education insiders” say Smarter Balanced is on the wrong track?

Smarter Balanced was created by assessment professionals in state education agencies who determined that by pooling their experience and expertise—and by taking advantage of the federal funds offered by the Department of Education and working in partnership with private sector firms—they could build more sophisticated and accurate assessments of student learning than any individual state could offer on its own. For the last two and a half years, this group of technical experts has been busily doing its work, and the result is that Smarter Balanced is on track and on budget.

Assessment experts around the country have expressed nothing but admiration for the work that Smarter Balanced has done (for example, see http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/R823.pdf). The education insiders who responded to the survey referenced in this question likely aren’t experts in assessment and—because Smarter Balanced is not a Washington, DC-based organization and its leaders are not well known “inside the beltway”—they are not as familiar with the work the Consortium has done. Smarter Balanced is committed to doing more outreach and communication work to better inform all our stakeholders about the progress we have made and the challenges ahead.

Would you please explain your plans for Smarter Balanced’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

In March 2013, the governing states of Smarter Balanced endorsed a sustainability plan that included instructions for the Smarter Balanced executive director to enter into negotiations with the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA to serve as a partner and host for the Smarter Balanced Consortium after the completion of the federal grant in September 2014. These negotiations are moving toward an agreement by UCLA to recognize the shared state ownership of the assessment system content and an independent governance structure much like the one that the consortium currently employs. Smarter Balanced will continue to be governed by its member states, with K-12 and higher education representatives and a small executive committee providing day-to-day oversight. Operations will be managed by a small staff under the leadership of an executive director and two deputies. Funding will come primarily from fees paid by states for packages of assessment services, with UCLA/CRESST providing office space and key administrative support in areas such as finance, human resources, legal advice, etc.

What else would you like people to know about Smarter Balanced?

As part of our commitment to transparency—and in order to help teachers, teacher educators, and other interested parties learn about and prepare for the assessments—Smarter Balanced will be releasing a complete set of practice tests for each subject and grade level at the end of May. These practice tests will be freely available on the Smarter Balanced web site (www.SmarterBalanced.org); they will utilize the same software system that is being used for the operational test and will feature many of the tools, accommodations and accessibility features that will be included in the final software package. Everyone interested in seeing first-hand what the assessments will look like is encouraged to visit our web site and challenge themselves by answering the questions in these practice tests.

We’re launching with a three-day conversation with the primary players in the nation’s progression toward new, common assessments. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Smarter Balanced, and Wednesday’s anchor leg will be run by the United States Department of Education.

But today, we have PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, one of two consortia of states funded by the federal government to develop “next-generation” assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

Its governing board is comprised of some of the nation’s most prominent state chiefs, and it is supported by Achieve, a national nonprofit known for its “college- and career-ready agenda.” While working for the New Jersey Department of Education, a PARCC member, I got to know and admire its leadership and staff. Those relationships and my participation in various PARCC meetings and activities contributed greatly to my appreciation for the enormous complexity of assessment and the critical role of the testing consortia.

So with no further ado: PARCC.

Could you describe the process (including the many challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

It is a rigorous process that requires 22 states to work together every day to drive towards consensus about a range of policies and assessment practices that support a positive and strong learning environment for every student. States have made an incredible commitment to this work. 

There are thousands of state leaders, local educators and postsecondary leaders, administrators and faculty who are engaged in developing the PARCC assessment system. We are also seeking public input on many of our policies, often receiving thousands of individual comments.

Keeping the project on track requires intense daily focus by the entire PARCC team, especially the lead representatives from our states and local school systems. Hundreds of test-item writers and reviewers composed of SEA staff, teachers, higher education leaders and faculty, and education experts have spent countless hours developing and refining thousands of questions and items across all grade levels. 

What is PARCC most proud of?

Below are the milestones that make us most proud:

• The states have full ownership of the development of the test, the quality of the items, the length of the test, the uses and usefulness of the output, etc.
• Developing Educator Leader Cadres — comprised of individual teachers and principals who are helping prepare for the Common Core and new assessments — now have more than 600 members across the states, and are getting bigger each day.
• At every step in the process, states demand a test that is developed with fidelity to the CCSS.
• Spurring collaboration between states that are geographically and politically diverse — from Arizona to New Jersey — is an unprecedented development in American public education.
• Colleges and universities are working overtime alongside their K-12 counterparts to develop assessments that will actually signal college readiness to students, parents and teachers.
• And, that through the consortium, states are able to ensure a higher quality assessment than any individual state could by itself. The power of states working together is going to move and improve the entire testing industry.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Political transitions sometimes result in staffing changes, and that can affect procurement timelines and processes. The good news is: Despite the transitions, the states’ commitment to PARCC remains strong. We are working hard with PARCC states to ensure procurement challenges don’t impede the work and the states’ commitment to PARCC remains strong despite the transitions.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth to deliver your on-line assessments?

States and local school systems are in various states of technology readiness. Some already are conducting online assessments and will be able to easily make the switch to PARCC when the time comes. Others still are making the necessary investments in infrastructure and devices over the next year or so, and many see PARCC as the vehicle to help make the upgrades they’ve wanted all along in order to improve classroom instruction. For school systems that can’t get there in time, we’ll have a backup pencil-and-paper option available.

The reality is for many K-12 students, inside the schoolhouse may be the place where technology is lacking most in their life. Kids play with their parents’ smartphones, play video games, and have computers and tablets at home. If PARCC can be a catalyst for improving student access to new technology, then we are glad to play that role.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The strength of the Common Core is found in the standards themselves. The coalition of teachers, higher education, the business community, Republicans, Democrats and others will determine the fate of the standards.

The importance of the consortia is found in their power to move the testing industry and to get comparable data on student achievement across states lines. 

The new standards and the new tests obviously are part and parcel of a comprehensive new education system. The survival of one is not contingent on the other, but both parts taken together have the potential to dramatically improve teaching and learning in our states and local school systems. If states drop out of the consortia (for any reason, really), the power of the consortia is also diminished – and states will likely use lower quality tests to assess the CCSS, which undermines the promise of the new standards.

The CCSS without a high quality test is only aspirational. The test makes it actionable.

How confident are you that PARCC will be prepared to deliver online assessments on-time, on-budget, and in all promised grades and subjects to all member states during the 2014–15 school year?

Very confident! PARCC is on-track to deliver high quality computer-based summative assessments for mathematics and ELA/literacy in grades 3-11 in the 2014-15 school year. 

About how many states do you expect to administer PARCC assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

PARCC has a total of 19 governing states and three participating states. Smarter Balanced has a similar number of states. Both consortia acknowledge that the numbers are subject to change. Over the past three years, for example, some states have left each consortium and others have joined. In PARCC, our governing states tell us they are in it for the long haul. But we know there are no guarantees. That is why we are working hard to produce the highest-quality assessment that reflects the needs of PARCC states. Maintaining the confidence of our states, and the educators and local school systems that are informing our work, is critical.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below PARCC costs and without all of the hassles that comes along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

The state chiefs have been hearing this sales pitch for years, and they are wise to the ways of the traditional testing industry. In the past, most states just developed specs and handed them off to the vendors and hoped for the best. The consortia assessments are our best chance to move the testing industry towards innovation and quality, to have comparable results across states at all grades, and to have a state-driven product that reflects state interests—not necessarily market interests. 

The chiefs who have been a part of PARCC know all these benefits because they’re witnessing how PARCC is being developed. No vendor or individual state can deliver the kind of state-based quality review of items and oversight of vendors the consortium is doing right now. In addition, the value of “strength in numbers” vis-à-vis taking on new rigorous assessments and related policies cannot be underestimated.

Could you please describe your relationship with the U.S. Department of Education since your 2010 formation? For example, how often do you meet, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

First, the states in the consortium created the PARCC proposal and they own the work. As with any grantor/grantee contract, USED monitors our work, but does not interject itself unless the grant terms are not being met. We participate in regular progress check-in calls and meetings, and USED provides technical assistance as needed or when states request it. For example, early in the grant cycle, USED convened technology experts to review both consortia’s development. Similarly, USED hosted a meeting to help inform the consortia’s approach to students with disabilities. Generally speaking, USED’s role is simply to ensure that we are satisfying the commitments we made in the grant proposal. Ultimately, the states have full ownership of this process and the final product that emerges.

Why do you think 65 percent of “education insiders” now say that PARCC is on the wrong track with that number having grown consistently over the last year?

The “education insiders” who matter most are our state chiefs, local educators and local school systems. They tell us they are pleased with our progress, and we will keep pushing forward as planned.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s decision to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?”

Every state needs to make its own decisions. We respect Alabama’s position. But the consortium remains strong.

Our member states’ first choice is a state-developed test like PARCC. Commissioner Bennett in Florida is simply being a responsible chief who is planning for every possible eventuality. Our job is to make sure that PARCC remains “Plan A” for Florida and every other member state. We are on track to deliver the assessment on time, and look forward to working with our member states to implement it.

Would you please explain your plans for PARCC’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

PARCC recently filed paperwork that will move the consortium from being a “project” of the states to being an independent, nonprofit organization still led by the states. This shift will be completed before the end of the grant period in 2014-15. The chiefs who comprise the PARCC Governing Board continue to have decision-making authority for all of the consortium’s policy, operational and strategic decisions.

The Governing Board has some decisions to make on how we will go forward after the grant. Many options are being weighed. We expect more answers in 120 days.

What else would you like people to know about PARCC?

This is a state-driven effort, and, through PARCC, K-12 and postsecondary have come together as never before to ensure students have the opportunity to get ready for and succeed in college and the workforce. PARCC states are REALLY driving the vendors in a way that most states have never done with tests. 

Our chiefs, key leaders in the state departments of education and local school systems, postsecondary institutions, and individual educators have made an unprecedented commitment to this work. They see this effort as the best opportunity in history to develop a high-quality assessment system that helps move the needle on student achievement and supports high-quality classroom instruction.

PARCC has been a rallying point for K-12 and higher education to come together as never before to ensure that students are ready for a career, college, and life. From the beginning, state leadership and quality have been the hallmarks of PARCC’s work. Those will continue to be our navigation points, moving forward.

To date, most of the anti-Pearson ire has been focused on a calculation error that led 5,000 New York City students to be incorrectly told that they didn’t qualify for the city’s Gifted and Talented program. Sloppy, no doubt, but not corrupt. (The error has since been corrected, and all qualified students are now eligible.)

In New York State, students whose schools purchased and used Pearson's instructional materials had an enormous advantage over those whose didn't Photo by comedy_nose

But there is a far more serious transgression that has gotten very little attention, and it’s one that threatens the validity of the English Language Arts (ELA) scores for thousands of New York students and raises serious questions about the overlap between Pearson's curriculum and assessment divisions.

Last week, the New York Post and Daily News reported that the Pearson-developed New York State ELA sixth- and eighth-grade assessments included passages that were also in a Pearson-created, “Common Core–aligned” ELA curriculum. This meant that students in schools that purchased and used instructional materials from Pearson had an enormous advantage over those who didn’t.

Predictably, reform critics pounced on the announcement. Leonie Haimson, one of New York’s loudest and most outspoken education reform opponents, argued, “The state should be obligated to throw out every item on the exams based on passages in Pearson textbooks assigned elsewhere in the state.”

Also predictably, the testing giant dismissed the overlap as an immaterial consequence of a standards environment that demands an “emphasis on using nonfiction texts in the exams.” In other words, their take is that, as long as the questions were different, the duplication of a passage doesn’t matter.

What’s most troubling, though, is that officials at the New York Department of Education are equally nonplussed. According to the Post, when questioned about the discovery, department spokesman Tom Dunn proclaimed that such overlap was going to happen. “The alternative,” he explained, “would be to exclude many authors and texts that are capable of supporting the rigorous analysis called for by the Common Core.”

This reaction is particularly surprising coming from New York, where officials have been investing enormous time and money into developing curriculum materials, independent of the Pearson publishing machine, that are high quality and faithfully aligned to the Common Core—work that will inevitably be undermined if Pearson continues to link the NY assessment directly to their curriculum.

But does reading a passage in advance of a test really give some students an advantage over others? Surely the students didn’t memorize the passage. And Pearson representatives assured that the questions on the test were different from the questions in the curriculum. So, what’s the problem?

A lot, actually. That’s because a test of reading comprehension isn’t just measuring a series of decontextualized skills. As E.D. Hirsch has long argued, reading comprehension tests are actually assessments of student background knowledge as much as anything else. In fact, as Hirsch and Robert Pondicsio argued in a must-read piece in the American Prospect from 2010,

Even simple texts, like those on reading tests, are filled with gaps -- presumed domain knowledge -- that the writer assumes the reader knows….Researchers have consistently demonstrated that in order to understand what you're reading, you need to know something about the subject matter.

They go on to explain, “Students who are identified as ‘poor readers’ comprehend with relative ease when asked to read passages on familiar subjects, outperforming even ‘good readers’ who lack relevant background knowledge.” 

That means that students who read the Pearson test before seeing it on the state test had the opportunity to fill the gaps in their own knowledge—whether through class discussion or simply by reading and answering the questions provided in the curriculum—before they took the test. And that means that the validity of a test that aims to differentiate between “good” and “poor” readers is necessarily called into question.

Unfortunately, it seems that New York education officials don’t realize how significant this problem is. Or even that it is a problem. (Meryl Tisch, New York Board of Regents Chancellor, actually defended the quality of the assessments, boasting that, thanks to a rigorous new quality-control review, the Department of Education had avoided the kinds of problems that lead to last year’s now-famous pineapple scandal. And that failure to recognize what may be a far more serious and consequential challenge may be the biggest red flag that Common Core assessment decisions are in trouble in the Empire State.

As for Pearson, it’s no stranger to these kinds of conflict-of-interest accusations. In the U.K., Pearson both administers a state “A-Level” qualifying exam—the results of which are used to inform, among other things, university admissions—and sells textbooks aimed at helping students prepare for those assessments. Last November, U.K. officials launched an investigation into “possible conflicts of interest within its role as both a publisher of textbooks and an issuer of academic qualifications.”

By developing both the test and curriculum materials, Pearson will basically control the market, regardless of the quality of their materials

It's a textbook (pardon the pun) anti-trust scenario: By developing both the test and curriculum materials, Pearson will basically control the market, regardless of the quality of their materials. After all, if you were a New York principal and learned that Pearson included passages from their curriculum on the state test—the results of which are used to inform everything from student to teacher to school accountability—whose curriculum would you buy?

Given the importance of statewide assessment to standards- and accountability-driven reform, there is little room for error. Reform advocates need to be vigilant in ensuring that standards-aligned tests are rigorous and valid. And that means taking a much harder look at the relationship between test development and curriculum development—and perhaps taking the time to learn lessons from the missteps of our fellow reformers across the pond.

The NRC initiated the process by developing a “framework” (National Research Council’s Framework for K–12 Education) setting forth the “key ideas and practices in the natural sciences and engineering that all students should be familiar with by the time they graduate from high school.” The Achieve team then embarked on a long process of building K–12 standards based on and faithful to that framework. They released two public drafts, received comments, made revisions, and then, the week before last, unveiled the final version of these “Next Generation Science Standards” (NGSS).

States are being encouraged to embrace and adopt these standards—and it’s no secret that most would benefit from far stronger standards for science than those they’ve been using. (When Fordham reviewed state science standards last year, only six earned an A or A-minus. The average grade across all states was a low-C, and twenty-six states earned a D or worse.).

At the present time, however, we urge states considering NGSS to exercise caution and patience, for three reasons.

First, although the standards themselves are said to be final, Achieve has not yet completed or released some important ancillary documents. These are promised over the next month or so and will address both the alignment of NGSS with the “Common Core” ELA and math standards and a discussion of high school “course sequences” in science that could be crucial in determining the extent to which NGSS itself will sufficiently impart “college and career readiness.” While these documents are not expected to add any science content to the recently released standards, they will provide context for states about the overlap between the Common Core and the science expectations, and they will help articulate content and course expectations and requirements for high school students, including advanced STEM students. This is manifestly important for the entire country, and we hope the promised document does the job.

Second, regardless of the quality of the NGSS, a majority of states are already consumed by the challenges of Common Core implementation and will want to weigh how many big changes they can realistically undertake in their K–12 systems at the same time. States are still aligning curriculum to the ELA and math standards, assessments are in the early pilot phase, and much remains to be done by way of preparing both educators and the general public for the major changes that lie ahead. In short: States still have a long road to go to ensure full, smart implementation of their English language arts and math standards. And as yet, there is no clarity as to how or when curriculum or assessments may be developed to accompany the NGSS.

Finally, even at this early stage of Fordham’s review—now underway—of NGSS, it appears that the final version suffers from some of the same challenges that were evident in the first and second public drafts. Five concerns are paramount:

• Is crucial science content missing, especially at the high school level? “Crucial” for what, you may wonder—which is one reason to await Achieve’s document on course alignment, as there’s a big difference between asserting that NGSS is sufficient for a broadly educated high school graduate and stating that it does the job of preparing one for rigorous, college-level work in STEM subjects. It appears that NGSS doesn’t do the latter. We’re digging deeper.
• Are the expectations detailed enough to inform curriculum and assessment development? Or are there gaps that leave implicit critical science knowledge and content that should be explicitly enumerated in a set of rigorous K–12 science standards? And will the assessment limits, which are meant only to inform test development, actually serve to place a ceiling on curriculum and instruction?
• How well is NGSS aligned with the Common Core math and English language arts standards that most states have already embraced? At present, it’s simply impossible to say, though we hope that forthcoming documents answer that question.
• Does the systematic integration of science “practices” throughout NGSS have the (unintended, we presume) effect of constraining and distorting pedagogy by mandating classroom activities, rather than articulating student outcomes?
• Are controversial subjects dealt with in a fair and even-handed manner? (Early signs indicate that, while evolution is well covered, the NGSS treatment of “climate change” slips from content into policy advocacy.)

First impressions aren’t everything. We intend to provide a full review and appraisal of NGSS, as we did of the Common Core. That summary evaluation will be available about two weeks, after our reviewers can access the final NGSS appendices discussed above. (Those documents are reportedly slated for release in mid-May, which would mean our final evaluation would be ready by early June.) Finally, in order to help states weigh the pros and cons of NGSS adoption, we plan to provide some state-specific comparisons.

At the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, we strongly favor rigorous, accurate, content-rich, and user-friendly standards in every part of the core K–12 curriculum, most definitely including science, and we favor their thorough implementation. We’re also mindful that several states have done quite a good job of this on their own and that NGSS is therefore not the only possible alternative available to states seeking to replace weak standards with better ones. Hence, nobody need rush to judgment regarding NGSS (which, after all, took three years to create) and nobody should be talked (or pressured) into hasty decisions that they might later regret regarding so critical an element of American education.

I expect that PARCC and Smarter Balanced (the two federally subsidized consortia of states that are developing new assessments meant to be aligned with Common Core standards) will fade away, eclipsed and supplanted by long-established yet fleet-footed testing firms that already possess the infrastructure, relationships, and durability that give them huge advantages in the competition for state and district business.

In particular, I predict (as does Andy Smarick) that the new ACT-Aspire assessment system, which is supposed to be ready for use in 2014 (a full year earlier than either of the consortium products) and which some states are considering as their new assessment vehicle, will be joined by kindred products to be developed and marketed by the College Board. And the two of them will dominate the market for new Common Core assessments.

One straw in the wind: Alabama’s announcement last week that it is foreswearing both consortia and will use the ACT assessment system. And, of course, both Kentucky and New York have already concocted and deployed their own versions of Common Core assessments—possibly but not necessarily interim models.

Although the College Board and ACT have traditionally focused on the high-school-to-college transition, both also have experience earlier in the K–12 sequence. ACT Explore is aimed at eighth and ninth graders, ACT Engage goes down to sixth grade, and ACT “WorkKeys” is a significant player in determining career-readiness. The College Board’s Pre-SAT test is typically taken in tenth grade. Its “Readiness Pathway” assessment program reaches down to eighth grade, and its “Springboard” program to sixth—with “alignment” guides already prepared for Common Core standards in both English language arts and math for grades six through twelve.

So it’s not too big a stretch for either organization to dip deeper into the K–12 curriculum and assessment business, and it’s no stretch at all for their chief test-administration partners—Pearson in the case of ACT, ETS for the College Board. Each has ample experience in devising and administering tests from the early grades onward. (In fact, Pearson already has pre-K assessments.)

At least as importantly, these organizations know how to give tests to millions of people. They have the infrastructure and the test security. They have the systems for scoring and reporting. Perhaps above all, they have the relationships and the trust of thousands of school systems, dozens of states, and millions of parents. Plenty of states already use ACT products as part of their existing assessment systems. And both organizations are long established, well led, deep-pocketed, and pretty sure to be around a decade or two from now.

As yet, the new consortia have none of those things. They’re struggling with organizational structures, governance, post-federal financing, test-development agonies, uncertain costs, conflicting views of “cut scores,” and all manner of other puzzles.

Those would be significant challenges were there no competition, but ACT has made no secret of its intention to seek states’ Common Core assessment contracts—and Alabama may turn out to be the first of many to sign up. The College Board hasn’t (to my knowledge) announced itself yet, but testing insiders know that it’s lately been on a hiring binge—even luring key assessment developers from ACT—that surely points in this direction.

Will the ACT and College Board versions of Common Core assessments be true “next-generation” tests that probe deeper understanding and more sophisticated (“higher-order”) skills in more revealing ways? Will they be “adaptive” (via computer or otherwise) to kids at different levels of achievement or will they, like most of today’s tests (see discussion here at the seventeen-minute point), do a weak job of differentiating performance at the top and at the bottom of their range of difficulty? I do not know. But I do know that all of these accoutrements carry dollar costs that state assessment budgets may not be able to bear—and veteran testing firms are accustomed to cutting their cloth to fit the wearer’s dimensions.

I assume that scores and scales on the new assessments will be comparable across states (as are current ACT and SAT scores), but individual states will likely set their own “cut points” for purposes of grade-to-grade promotion and high school graduation. That’s tricky, however, if you’re serious about bona fide “career and college readiness,” which is a meaningless concept if it differs by state; what’s more, the new standards aren’t really worth the bother unless “proficiency” levels for every grade cumulate to a desired end-point by senior year. (I predict that, as with consortium-developed assessments, the ACT and College Board folks will recommend grade-specific proficiency scores that do cumulate in the intended way, but individual states will decide for themselves what signifies readiness for promotion and graduation.)

If I’m right that ACT and College Board scarf up much state business, there won’t be a lot left for the consortia—and they may founder. That would, of course, represent a considerable waste of federal dollars. On the other hand, it would remove from the Common Core debate (at least until NCLB-reauthorization time, if that day ever comes) the specter of Arne Duncan and Barack Obama clutching those standards to the federal bosom.

Besides, the consortia could remain useful, even if they don’t do assessments themselves. Neither ACT nor the College Board will want to alienate the many state leaders who have been earnestly advancing the consortium work, and these groups could readily convert into advisory and coordinating bodies that help member states implement and make sense out of the results on the new tests—and advise test developers and standard-setters alike on how their products work in the real world.

Time will tell. I might be jumping to premature prediction—and you may interpret these entrails differently than I do. Letters to the editor are cordially invited.

This piece originally appeared in the Education Gadfly Weekly.

Yet, conventional wisdom is—perhaps ironically—that, in the knowledge economy, what you know isn’t all that important. At least not compared with what you can do with that knowledge. Just this week, New York Times contributor Thomas Friedman shared the “wisdom” of Tony Wagner who argued:

Because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know.

In other words, we needn’t overmuch trouble ourselves with making sure students know a lot. Indeed, because we have mobile encyclopedias at our finger tips, skills development should be the focus of American schools, and content should be used in service of honing the “twenty-first century skills”—creativity, innovation, collaboration, critical thinking—that the knowledge economy demands.

Unfortunately, Wagner and Freidman get it exactly backwards for three reasons.

1. Knowledge is cumulative.

People’s ability to learn new information depends entirely on what they already know. That is why, absent intensive intervention, achievement and knowledge gaps grow exponentially, not linearly. This is seen clearly in the early years with what the “vocabulary gap,” which starts small but grows to as many as 30 million words by the time children reach age three.

In a twenty-first-century context, that means, essentially, that your ability to absorb new information gathered through Internet research—or to think critically about that information—depends almost entirely on what you already know. And employers aren’t looking for people to spend hours poring over voluminous materials trying to get up to speed on their work. On the contrary, they need people who already have a strong knowledge base on which they can build quickly. In fact, in a knowledge economy, where employees are being asked not to perform rote tasks but to demonstrate deep understanding of information and generate ideas, what individuals know matters more than ever.

2. Innovation is the result of iteration, not spontaneous discovery.

Newton, we’re told, “discovered” gravity when an apple fell on his head while resting under a tree. Would that all discovery were that simple—or that is was the spontaneous result of “critical thinking” that was detached from deep knowledge and expertise.

The reality—both about Newton and about innovation itself—is far more complex. Newton came up with his theory of gravitation after years of careful study of physics and mathematics. Indeed, he was the greatest mathematician of his time. And, the apple story is only partially true:

Newton was grappling in the late 1660s with the idea that terrestrial gravity extends, in an inverse-square proportion, to the Moon; however it took him two decades to develop the full-fledged theory.

So, Newton’s discovery was the result of decades of close and careful study, the highlight of which was a capstone “Eureka!” moment that would never have happened without the twenty years that preceded it.

And so it is with all innovation: Our greatest discoveries are brought to us by experts who have generally spent years honing their work through, small, seemingly insignificant iterative changes that add up to major accomplishments. Innovation, therefore, is the result of deep expertise and craftsmanship.

Even more than that, the kinds of innovation that the knowledge economy demands and will continue to demand are likely to be the discoveries that are born of making connections between seemingly unconnected things. And that will require that our students are broadly knowledgeable in a host of subjects, not just that they perseverate from a young age in a single area. Steve Jobs, a champion of the knowledge economy, was well known for studying everything from fonts to mathematics, and he drew on this broad and deep knowledge base to inform his work. True innovators are, at their core, masters: content masters, that is, not master manipulators.

And so, our students need not less coherent curriculum and not more practice with skills, but rather they need deep understanding of mathematics and science, they need to be well read, and they need exposure to art and music. Educators are right to push against rote, because mechanical regurgitation of knowledge is not the same thing as deep understanding. But in today’s economy, a classic liberal education focused on knowledge acquisition and analysis is far more likely to prepare our students than content-lite curricula that prize skill above all else.

3. In an interconnected world, producers need to be experts.

Tony Wagner has argued:

There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In the twenty-first century, at a time when organizations are far-flung and people can work from anywhere, and can learn from almost anyone, the employees who will add the most value will be the ones who are the best —the most knowledgeable. The middlemen will be cut out and the masters will be left.

And so our job as educators is to ensure that all students have a knowledge base that is as broad and deep as it can be. Indeed, as we’ve learned by seeing ninety-five year olds tweet, and octogenarians on computers, skills can be learned far more quickly than knowledge can be accumulated. And pretending that content mastery is somehow less important than skills acquisition will give us a generation of consumers, who know only how to consume the knowledge they have easy access to, but not how to contribute to its evolution and to new discoveries.

Our schools need to evolve and our curriculum and instruction does need to change to meet the needs of a future generation of leaders.

But it’s important to learn the right lessons from our contemporary heroes. Yes, they are all creative, interesting, and critical thinkers and able to navigate and benefit from an increasingly complex and interconnected world. 

But they got there by committing themselves to becoming masters of their craft: They are true experts whose broad and deep knowledge in their subject area has paved the way for the innovative thinking that has changed our world. And in that way, despite all the communications advances of the last few hundred years, the world really hasn’t changed that much at all.

Photo by susivinh

Here’s what the Common Core State Standards are: They describe what children should know and the skills that they must acquire at each grade level to stay on course toward college- or career-readiness, something that conservatives have long argued for. They were written and adopted by governors—not by the Obama administration—thus preserving state control over K–12 education. And they are much more focused on rigorous back-to-basics content than the vast majority of state standards they replaced.

The Common Core standards are also not a curriculum; it’s up to state and local leaders to choose aligned curricula. The Fordham Institute has carefully examined the new expectations and compared them with existing state standards: They found that for most states, Common Core is a great improvement in rigor and cohesiveness.

For decades, students in different states have been held to radically different expectations. Several years ago, a small group of governors joined together in an effort to better align expectations for student learning. In 2007, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers joined together and hired independent curriculum experts to devise the new “common” standards. Drafts were circulated among the states, comments received, and the standards adjusted. Now, forty-five states and the District of Columbia have signed up to implement these new expectations.

Now let’s address the false claims circulated by the most vocal Common Core critics.

While President Obama often tries to claim credit, the truth is the Common Core was well underway before he took office in January 2009

The Common Core is not “ObamaCore,” as some suggest. While President Obama often tries to claim credit, the truth is the Common Core was well underway before he took office in January 2009. Some argue that states were coerced into adopting Common Core by the Obama administration as a requirement for applying to its Race to the Top grant competition (and NCLB waiver program). But the guidelines for both make clear that adoption of “college and career readiness standards” doesn’t necessarily mean adoption of Common Core. At least a handful of states had K–12 content standards that were equally good, and the administration would have been hard-pressed to argue otherwise.

Education policymaking—and 90 percent of funding—remains centered at the state and local level, even though No Child Left Behind (George W. Bush’s signature education law) linked federal Title 1 dollars directly to state education policy. What’s more, states who failed to comply with NCLB risked losing millions in compensatory education funding. Whatever “strings” have been attached to the adoption of college and career readiness standards by the Obama administration are far less consequential. And none were explicitly tied to the CCSS.

Perhaps the clearest evidence that states can still set their own standards is the fact that—so far—five states have opted out of Common Core. More may follow, and states won’t lose a dime if they do.

Critics have also complained that Common Core forces English teachers to abandon classical literature in favor of dry government manuals. This claim reflects a profound and perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of Common Core literacy standards. Yes, the Common Core encourage increased exposure to informational texts and literary nonfiction, but they also explicitly clarify that English teachers alone are not expected to shoulder that burden.

The goal of the Common Core nonfiction standards is to expose all children to challenging, content-rich texts that build vocabulary and background knowledge, a strategy grounded in what education scholar E. D. Hirsch has shown: a broad, content-rich curriculum can reduce the achievement gap between the middle class and the poor.

These “informational texts” include foundational texts of American history—the Gettysburg Address, Common Sense, and works of thought leaders like Emerson and Thoreau. Given the evidence that most American students cannot identify the decade in which the Civil War occurred, one would think that enhancing student knowledge of our nation’s rich history would be welcome.

But facts be damned when there are standards to undermine! Headlines blare, “Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards Mark the End of Literature.” Reporters lament that To Kill a Mockingbird is being stripped from the “U.S. school curriculum.” Never mind that there is no “U.S. school curriculum” from which beloved literary classics were being dropped—or that To Kill a Mockingbird actually appears on the list of “exemplar” texts supported by the standards.

Like all standards, the Common Core are the floor, not the ceiling

Perhaps the most curious Common Core criticism comes on the math side, with opponents arguing that the standards are squishy, progressive, and lacking in rigorous content. While the math standards do articulate ten “practices,” mathematical content dominates the K–12 expectations. Unlike many of the replaced state standards, Common Core demands automaticity (memorization) with basic math facts, mastery of standard algorithms, and understanding of critical arithmetic. These essential foundational math skills are not only required but prioritized, particularly in the early grades. The math standards focus in depth on fewer topics that coherently build over time.

The Common Core standards are not a panacea; much depends on the curricula that states and districts select to implement them. And states seeking to add content or districts hoping to accelerate learning are encouraged to do so. Like all standards, the Common Core are the floor, not the ceiling. But by setting a clearer and more rigorous floor, Common Core offers American students the opportunity for a far more rigorous, content-rich, cohesive K–12 education.

For decades, conservatives have fought to hold students accountable for high standards and an academic curriculum imbued with great works of Western civilization and the American republic. This is our chance to make it happen.

Kathleen Porter-Magee is the Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Sol Stern is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

A version of this piece appeared in the National Review Online.

In spite of poor policy design and implementation, NCLB has kids learning more. Photo by Old Shoe Woman

The anti-testing and accountability drumbeat is constant: A once-rich curriculum has been narrowed to English and math. The arts have been squeezed out. Teachers are teaching to the test. There's no time for recess. And No Child Left Behind is to blame.

These claims are coming not only from the typical anti-test crowd but, increasingly, also from state legislators, governors, and even reformers.

That’s because while some of these claims are probably overblown, many of them are true. Our failure to evolve NCLB and its accountability policies has led to a host of negative unintended consequences, including the aforementioned, the myopic focus on "bubble kids" just below the proficiency cut, and the endless gaming of state tests. But what too few leaders seem willing to admit is that these problems are eminently fixable.

Even more importantly, they are worth fixing. While many would have us believe that there is no value in standards- and accountability-driven reform, the reality is this: In spite of poor policy design and implementation, the vast majority of the high-quality research on standards and accountability policies in general and NCLB in particular finds they've had some positive intended consequences. Chiefly, kids are actually learning more.

With congressional reauthorization impossible for the foreseeable future, Secretary Duncan recognized the need to evolve NCLB and began offering waivers to states, allowing them to scrap some of the worst parts of the law and establish more creative, better-designed accountability systems. My colleagues and I have begun examining the waivers and have found that despite being given fairly broad flexibility, states that have applied for waivers have done very little to correct the flaws of NCLB.

The failures of NCLB and its accountability policies are eminently fixable.

For instance, while waiver states still have to test in mathematics and English language arts, they can test in other subjects and weight the subjects however they want. Yet rather than broadening the focus of their testing and accountability, roughly half of the approved waiver states have actually narrowed it. Specifically, while 13 states added accountability for science tests (which were already administered under NCLB), six for writing, and five for social studies, fully 16 of the 34 waiver-approved states[1]  proposed to take away even the tested (but previously unaccountable) subject of science.

What’s more, while states could establish whatever criteria for accountability they wished (e.g., replacing the proficiency-rate measures used under NCLB with measures that actually accounted for schools' contributions to student learning), nearly every state chose targets either fully or largely based on student proficiency. As more than a decade of research has shown, these kinds of status-based measures of achievement disproportionately punish schools serving poor kids, regardless of the extent to which these schools are actually effective at raising achievement.

To be sure, some states did incorporate student-level growth models in their accountability systems, which is a step in the (right) direction of actually holding schools accountable for the portion of student achievement for which they are responsible. However, all but one of these states chose a variant on the student growth proficiency (SGP) models that many researchers argue are not as appropriate as value-added models for actually measuring schools' impacts.

In other words, despite the anti-NCLB rhetoric, states have opted to stay the course. And where they have made changes, they have not chosen methods that are supported by research. The fact is that if states can't—or won’t—tweak these “updated” accountability systems before they're implemented, we'll get more of the same results we've seen for the last decade.

What’s most frustrating, though, is that fixing these problems wouldn’t take much. A few tweaks would go a long way towards improving the effectiveness of state accountability systems:

1)      Test in additional subjects beyond math and reading, and include the results in accountability systems.

2)      Be creative about the use of non-test-based measures such as graduation, attendance, and even student and parent engagement or satisfaction.

3)      Measure both growth and levels of achievement, and create accountability systems that incorporate both types of data (e.g., different interventions for low-achieving, low-growing schools than low-achieving, high-growing), rather than forcing them into an arbitrary index.

4)      Measure levels of achievement using points along the distribution (e.g., 3 points for advanced, 2 points for proficient, 1 point for basic) rather than percent proficient.

5)      Use appropriate growth models along with multiple years of data to improve stability.

Each of these fixes directly targets one or more of the unintended consequences mentioned above, and each would go a long way toward improving our accountability systems.

So it's time to put up or shut up. If policymakers believe that standards and accountability are important and can help drive instructional improvement (and I think they should), then they need to stop ignoring all that we know about effective policies and start getting serious about fixing testing and accountability in the U.S. Otherwise, those drums will just keep getting louder.

Morgan Polikoff is an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education; he studies standards, assessment, and accountability policies. He is also an Emerging Education Policy (EEP) scholar with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

 [1] We did not analyze Washington state because the measures they will use to identify low-performing schools were not identified in their application.

If Common Core is really going to "change everything," we must focus on what these standards mean for teaching and learning. Photo by horizontal.integration

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of school reform: systemic reform and classroom-level reform.

Systemic reforms are those aimed at reimagining school systems, and they include things like charter schools, vouchers, portfolio districts, and even accountability and some systemic teacher-evaluation policies. Classroom-level reforms, by contrast, are those aimed at actually changing what happens in the classroom. They focus, for example, on changing what is taught, how it is taught, or even how student mastery of essential content and skills is measured.

Over the past decade, education reformers have focused the lion’s share of our attention on systemic reform—to the point where conversations about Common Core implementation are often even dominated by how the standards will impact things like state accountability, teacher evaluation, certification, and on.

Of course, those are all important. But if Common Core is really going to “change everything,” we need first and foremost to focus on what these new standards mean for teaching and learning.

Yet, in many ways, the classroom is a black box to systemic reformers. While many leaders have made it their business to understand inputs and student achievement outputs, too few have focused their attention of what it takes to drive achievement within the four walls of an American classroom.

In many ways, the classroom is a black box to systemic reformers.

There are many reasons for this. For instance, you sometimes need to shake up the system in order to set the stage for classroom-level change. But another reason is that, while driving systemic reform means influencing state departments of education and district offices, classroom-level reform necessitates touching teaching and learning in more than 3 million classrooms. Yet, while classroom-level reform is far more complicated, it is classroom-level changes—those that directly impact teachers and students, curriculum and instruction—that hold the greatest promise for our students.

Of course, there are many nations that have recognized the promise of classroom-level reform practice, and they’ve simply forced changes. National education bureaucracies have made decisions about curriculum and pedagogy, and they’ve dictated what must be taught and how it should be delivered. America obviously—and to its great credit—has a far less centralized education system, grounded in deep respect for local control and autonomy. But while that allows our schools to more nimbly respond to the needs of students and communities, it adds another layer of complexity to the challenge of influencing what students learn and whether all children are held to equally rigorous expectations.

And while we have made significant progress in pushing systemic reform—particularly in places where visionary reform leaders are at the helm (i.e., Florida, Tennessee, Rhode Island, and on)—we’ve made comparatively little progress reaching beyond and into the black box to influence classroom-level change.

Moving forward, if we want Common Core to more directly impact teaching and learning, we’d do well to focus our implementation efforts on three things:

• First, we need to accept the hard truth that when it comes to Common Core implementation, we may be trying to do too much too soon. If we are serious about getting implementation right—and having a classroom-level impact—then we need to take a page from the standards themselves and focus. We need to be thoughtful and systematic about the changes we make and how those changes interact with other policies and reforms.


• Second, while most states don’t have the capacity to wade into every aspect of school-level implementation (professional development, curriculum development, formative assessment, and on), state leaders can give clear and unambiguous guidance that would help practitioners better understand—and internalize—what the Common Core asks. They can organize, develop, and provide resources that clearly communicate, for example, the instructional shifts in ELA and math. And perhaps even more importantly, they can give clear and explicit guidance about what it means for resources and curricula to be aligned to the CCSS so that practitioners can distinguish between resources that are faithfully aligned to the Common Core and those that have merely been “rubber stamped.” As implementation ramps up, they can also create feedback loops so that information about alignment and resource quality flows both out of and into state and district offices, and so that school leaders and teacher leaders are involved in the process.


• Finally, states need to prioritize getting the Common Core–aligned assessments right. The Whiteboard Advisor surveys of education insiders now show that majorities say both consortia are off track. If they are, we need to do whatever we can to get them back on track. And states need to push for higher quality assessments across all content areas—tests that will better measure content and skills mastery, tests that are less predictable and less likely to lead to the kinds of curriculum narrowing and “teaching to the test” we’ve seen, and tests that are valid for the purposes they’ll be used. After all, it’s the assessments that provide the foundation for so many other policies and system-level reforms.

In the end, it is exactly because Common Core is pushing reformers to take classroom-level change more seriously that it has the potential to have such far-reaching impact. But realizing this potential means accepting that, so far, our efforts may be falling short of what the moment requires.

Campbell’s December 1976 article, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” has become a flashpoint in the educational accountability debate. There, he argued,

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Foes of testing and accountability frequently evoke this “Law” to argue against the use of standardized tests and test-based accountability. In a May 25 blog post, for example, Diane Ravitch explained:

Campbell’s Law helps us understand why No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are harmful to education…As high-stakes testing has become the main driver of our nation’s education policy, we will see more cheating, more narrowing of the curriculum, more gaming of the system.

In response to an article posted here last week, Ravitch glibly said, “Porter-Magee should google Campbell’s Law and study it.” Similarly, several people took to Twitter to evoke Campbell’s Law as a way of broadly dismissing the suggestion that standardized testing can and should have a role in school-level accountability or education policy.

@effectsofnaplan @symphily Campbell's Law - and a textbook example, imo.

— Eli Westinghouse (@WestEli) February 17, 2013

But like all things, it’s not quite that simple.

For starters, Campbell wasn’t writing about testing in schools—he was writing about all of the indictors that are used to inform social decision making, from the ways we measure poverty in our cities to the indicators used to determine air quality to the reporting systems for assessing the level of discrimination in the work place. He didn’t set out to argue that there was anything about measurement in schools that proposed any greater challenge than measurement in any other complicated social endeavor. In fact, one of his key insights was that the challenges of using data to inform social decision making and program evaluation were universal and that we could learn a lot about how to minimize these challenges by looking across fields for patterns of failure and examples of success.

Second, to my knowledge, Campbell never argued that because numerical data was susceptible to manipulation or distortion, or because it is imperfect, we should abandon all hope of using these data to improve programs and systems. Indeed, in his conclusion, Campbell goes out of his way to emphasize,

[T]he overall picture is not as gloomy as this seems…And many of the quasi-experimental evaluations that I have scolded could have been implemented in better ways.

Even more than that, Campbell encouraged us to be wary of institutions and administrators whose impulse was to resist evaluation. Specifically, he noted, “[I]n the United States, one of the reasons why interpretable program evaluations are so rare is the widespread resistance of institutions and administrators to having their programs evaluated.” And he argued that we needed to understand “the reasons for this resistance” and identify “ways of overcoming it.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Campbell argued that it was possible to protect against the “harmful” impact of using data to drive decisions by:

1.      Identifying ways that we can uncover the distortion, corruption, and/or misuse of data and institutionalizing them. (In education, for instance, he highlights two instances where independent external observers were able to identify and flag inappropriate behavior that corrupted student achievement data—one in Texarkana and one in Seattle.)

2.      Using multiple measures (both quantitative and qualitative) so that numerical data doesn’t become the only way to judge a program’s effectiveness or impact.

At the same time, Campbell did warn specifically against the use of this kind of quantitative data to evaluate individuals—a useful caution for policymakers seeking to link test-score data directly and systematically with, for example, teacher evaluation.

What does that mean for education evaluation and test-based accountability? In a presentation delivered in 2010, Daniel Koretz, author of Measuring Up, offered some helpful context and suggestions.

Specifically, Koretz argues that “a primary cause of Campbell’s Law is incomplete measurement of desired outcomes.” And the way we’ve structured our testing and accountability systems has set us up for failure. For starters, we have focused the lion’s share of our accountability attention on two subjects: reading and math. That schools have focused an ever-increasing number of hours on these subjects, to the near-exclusion of all else, is a reasonable, if undesirable, response. If we value learning in other areas, we need to measure it. And that doesn’t mean simply adding testing hours but rather being more deliberate and creative about the assessments we administer and the content they measure.

Campbell’s warning suggests not that we abandon state-level standardized assessment and accountability, but rather that we do a better job of protecting ourselves against this kind of manipulation and distortion.

What’s more, practically speaking, even within a particular content area it would be near-impossible to develop a test that measures everything students should know and be able to do. A standardized test, therefore, measures a “sample” of the total knowledge and skills. Problems arise, however, when high stakes are attached to test results and when that “sample” becomes highly predictable. After all, if teachers know precisely what will be measured—and if that changes very little from year to year—they are far more likely to narrow the focus of their instruction on the knowledge and skills that will be assessed. Even at the expense of the broader content and skills that students should master to be prepared for what lies ahead.

Thus, when tests become too predictable, teachers can effectively narrow their instruction to match the particular knowledge and skills that will appear on the test. Or worse, they can “coach” students to game the test even without firm mastery of the content. In such cases, the test isn’t really measuring what it was designed to assess.

This is the kind of instruction many testing critics think of when they deride “teaching to the test.” And this has become one of the most frequently cited—and damning—arguments against the use of standardized tests in accountability.

Of course, the only reason this kind of “coaching” is possible is because state tests have become far too predictable. They test the same narrow subset of the state standards every year—and too often those standards that are easiest to assess and not necessarily those that are most important or most indicative of deep conceptual understanding or content mastery. Teachers, curriculum developers, and school leaders recognize the patterns in state tests, and then many of them focus on ensuring their students can correctly answer the questions that are asked over and over again.

But Campbell’s warning suggests not that we abandon state-level standardized assessment and accountability, but rather that we do a better job of protecting ourselves against this kind of manipulation and distortion. To that end, we should recognize three things:

1.      The greater the consequence we attach to test results, the less “predictable” the questions need to be. If we’re going to attach high stakes to tests, we need to make it hard to predict how to narrow their curriculum to the “tested” content at the expense of the full range of knowledge and skills laid out in the standards. 

2.      The greater the consequence we attach to evaluations, the more we need to diversify the indicators. We need to balance numerical data with other information, including qualitative data—which paints a clearer picture of how well a school is doing and how much or how little its students are learning.

3.      The more we focus on accountability with consequences, the more we need to independently check the data. States could, for instance, invest in inspectorates whose focus is on site visits and other measures that could serve as a “reality check” on the data.

This is where the policy debate should be centered if we want to stay true to the legacy of Donald Campbell’s work. No simple retorts. Just a lot of hard work ahead to make school measurement and evaluation serve our students and schools, rather than the other way around.

That’s the miles of daylight between the platitudes about the new standards’ “dramatic,” “transformational” nature and the distressing reality of implementation.

The report’s upside is that we now know more about state-level planning. The downside is that we know nothing more about the quality of that planning—and this is the whole ball of wax.

We’ve made the necessary oblations to Common Core, and now it’s time to get serious about the seriousness of implementation.

This might sound like the classic unfair criticism of a research project—point out what you wanted a study to answer and then shame the authors for looking into something else.

I’m succumbing to this temptation because I’m troubled by all of the Common Core cheerleading going on. Apart from a still relatively small band criticizing the standards for stealing fiction and states’ rights, most reformers contend that Common Core is just shy of avert-your-eyes miraculous.

Tom Loveless had the temerity to wonder if the standards would improve achievement, and the response from their incredulous supporters was, said Loveless, “like putting my hand in a hornet’s nest.”

We’ve made the necessary oblations to Common Core, and now it’s time to get serious about the seriousness of implementation. That means no longer marveling at the shiny hubcaps and supple leather interior or, worse, just taking the salesman’s word for it, but opening up the hood and poking around.

It’s this mindset that I bring to the Education First–Editorial Projects in Education study on the results of a Common Core survey. It asked state leaders about implementation in areas like professional development and aligned instructional materials.

The high-level headline is that states are better off than they were last year and things are generally looking pretty good.

States do have “plans” in lots of areas; the issue, though, is what these plans amount to.

For example, 42 states report either having plans or building plans to revise their teacher-evaluation systems to comport with the expectations of Common Core. Thirty states claim to have “fully developed” plans to change their instructional materials to align with the new standards.

Moreover, if you just glance at the report’s Exhibit 1, you’ll see most boxes filled with “Completed.”

A reasonable person would walk away thinking that implementation is going swimmingly.

But things aren’t so rosy.

States do have “plans” in lots of areas; the issue, though, is what these plans amount to.

For example, even the best state departments of education were fretting about the massive challenges associated with overhauling educator evaluation systems before Common Core implementation was front and center. Student achievement data for untested grades and subjects and inter-rater reliability of observations were keeping smart folks up at night when state content standards, teacher professional standards, and assessments were static.

With changes afoot in all of these areas, teacher-evaluation reform has gotten exponentially more difficult. Sure, any SEA can put some ideas on paper and call it a “plan.”

But what if the survey had asked something like, “Are you confident that, when Common Core is fully implemented in 2014–15, your educator evaluation systems will accurately differentiate among educators based on their levels of effectiveness, provide meaningful feedback for teachers, and enable administrators and policymakers to make decisions related to preparation, certification, hiring, tenure, and compensation?”

There is no way that 42 states could, with clear consciences, answer, “Yes.” (Take a look at this recent article: Florida’s state board is raising red flags, and the department of education is creating a “Plan B.”)

The same applies to the optimistic self-reporting about professional development. You should dig into your state’s Common Core PD plan. Be prepared for it to look a lot like the SEA’s current PD plans: same state office, same providers, same higher-ed institutions, same quality monitoring, same number of hours required, etc.

There’s a world of difference between what you put on paper and what actually carries you to victory.

Had the survey, instead, asked about states’ confidence that their plans would enable teachers to prepare students for successful acquisition of the skills and information required by the new standards, then the results would’ve been far less sanguine.

I’ll have much more to say about instructional materials in the weeks to come, but for the time being, I’ll leave it at this: Comparing the navigability of the CC-aligned resources marketplace to the Wild West would be an insult to the Wild West. You might want to check your state’s “fully developed” align

resources plan to see how it intends to pilot these rocks.

Finally, the survey didn’t ask states about the area that concerns me most: whether there are any activities underway to improve teacher preparation programs so their graduates are ready for the demands of Common Core. As far as I can tell, most states haven’t even begun working in this area.

So about those vaunted “plans”…

The Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke famously wrote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis said, “Everyone’s got a plan until he gets hit.” In other words, there’s a world of difference between what you put on paper and what actually carries you to victory.

When it comes to Common Core implementation, too much of the ed reform world is still acting like it’s at the ceremonial, bragging-as-currency, pre-fight weigh-in.

But the bell has rung. It’s go time.

Unless we stop hyping the crowd and flexing for the cameras and get down to the real business at hand, a whole lot of states, come 2014, are going to find themselves on the mat.

Photo by Pesky Library.

While the lion’s share of the Common Core ELA implementation debate has focused on the precise proportion of time teachers should spend teaching fiction v. nonfiction in reading classes (see here and here), there is a far more critical discussion that has largely flown under the radar: the conversation about what the CCSS text-complexity guidance means for curriculum, instruction, and standards implementation.

Leveled literacy programs—like Lucy Calkins’s famed Reading and Writing Workshop—focus on assessing students’ reading levels and giving them “just right” books (those whose difficulty matches their independent or instructional reading level). Classrooms using leveled literacy programs typically have libraries with book bins labeled with a letter that corresponds with a reading level, and students choose from the “appropriate” bin for independent reading or instruction.

Such programs are wildly popular—as evidence by the growing number of classrooms with leveled libraries and the growing number of teachers who use “guided reading” programs or who follow the “workshop” model.

Unfortunately for students, the popularity of these programs is not driven by convincing research proving their effectiveness. In fact, as noted literacy expert Tim Shanahan discussed in a series of must-read posts on his blog nearly two years ago,

I have sought studies that would support the original contention that we could facilitate student learning by placing kids in the right levels of text. Of course, guided reading and leveled books are so widely used it would make sense that there would be lots of evidence as to their efficacy.

Except that there is not.

He goes on to explain: “I keep looking and I keep finding studies that suggest that kids can learn from text written at very different levels.” In short, he argues, “we have put way too much confidence in an unproven theory. “

And so, while Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at Heinemann are working overtime to convince teachers that the CCSS is compatible with “just right” books, the reality is that leveled literacy programs and related assessments fail to measure up to what the CCSS demands in at least three important ways.

First, most leveled literacy programs sort books based on sentence-level measures of complexity (none of which take into account the content of the book or the background knowledge of the reader). Books are primarily leveled by looking at sentence length and word rarity—rarity as determined by the word’s frequency of occurrence in a big, representative corpus of texts.

Unfortunately, such “complexity” measures ignore the two most important elements of what makes a text easy or hard: the context and the content being discussed. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how you can pin a text to a particular reading level without an understanding of the reader and his or her knowledge of the subject being discussed.

This is something eminent cognitive psychologist and researcher Dan Willingham has convincingly argued many times. In 2009, for instance, he explains:

The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read…

…For example, suppose you read this: “The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials.”

In this instance, the writer assumed that the reader knew the definitions of “rendition,” “warrantless wiretaps,” what a state secret might be, and the significance of the announcement coming from the executive branch of the government, at the least.

If you know those things, comprehension is effortless. What strategy is going to lead you to correct guesses?

Of course, there is none. If the reader doesn’t have enough background knowledge to parse this sentence, comprehension will break down, no matter how simple the sentence is structured.

And therein lies the problem. By treating reading comprehension as mastery of a series of discrete, transferrable skills that can be demonstrated regardless of the content or context of the text being read, these programs divorce comprehension from the content knowledge and cultural literacy that students actually need to read and analyze complex texts.

Second, most leveled literacy programs are built on the belief that “just right” texts are those that students can read with roughly 95 percent word accuracy. Yet research suggests that 95 percent accuracy is too easy to effectively drive student learning. In fact, some suggests that having students struggle through more difficult texts (those they read with roughly 85 percent accuracy, for example) is a far better predictor of student learning. In other words, in addition to failing to understand the critical link between content and comprehension, too many leveled literacy programs simply ask far too little of our students.

Finally, the reason that many leveled literacy programs protect students from struggle is that they are structured around the idea that students learning should progress with minimal teaching. But, as Shanahan argues convincingly,

…that switches the criterion. Instead of trying to get kids to optimum levels, that is the levels that would allow them to learn most, they have striven to get kids to levels where they will likely learn best with minimal teacher support.

That is exactly backwards. Our goal should not be to minimize the teacher’s role in driving student comprehension. Instead, our goal should be to maximize student learning by giving students the support they need to understand and analyze the kinds of complex texts that are worthy of discussion and close reading.

These are wrongs that the Common Core seeks to right. The standards put the focus squarely on text complexity because we understand the importance of allowing the kind of controlled struggle that helps drive student learning. And they specifically ask to be paired with a “content-rich curriculum” exactly because the CCSS drafters understood the critical link between prior knowledge and reading comprehension. In other words, the Common Core challenge the notion that teaching reading skills and strategies independent of content can systematically prepare students for the kinds of rigorous reading that will be required of them in college and beyond. And they (and the related guidance in the Publishers Criteria) deliberately ask teachers to expose all students to grade-appropriate texts—the kind of texts that are worth reading and that will help build the cultural literacy and content knowledge students need to be able to read increasingly complex texts.

Sadly, while the debate over whether the Common Core mandates the reading of bus schedules rages on, the outcome of the debate over the importance of selecting appropriately complex text and grounding ELA instruction in content-rich curriculum seems more likely to determine effectiveness of Common Core in the classroom.

While nobody should be satisfied with America's overall performance in science education, it's possible to make it even worse. Photo by Atli Harðarson

(Updated February 7, 2013 for the Education Gadfly Weekly)

The public-comment period ended last week on draft 2.0 of the forthcoming “Next Generation Science Standards,” under development by Achieve, umpteen other organizations, and some two dozen states and promised for release in final form next month. Once released, states will be invited to consider adopting them, much like the Common Core for English and math.

Now ‘til March is not much time to repair this important, ambitious, but still seriously troubled document. The drafters might be wise to take more.

We at the Fordham Institute have a long history of reviewing state science standards, and last week, we submitted our review, feedback, and comments on NGSS 2.0. A team of nine eminent scientists, mathematicians, and educators, prepared our analysis. You can find the full review here, including team members’ bios on page 8. (We previously reviewed Draft 1.0, and Dr. Paul R. Gross, the distinguished biologist who heads the team, also reviewed the National Research Council “framework” on which NGSS is based.)

If states are going to make rational decisions to replace their own science standards with NGSS, it’s only right to insist that NGSS be stronger—clearer, with better content, more rigorous, and more easily applied by teachers—than the standards that states have come up with on their own.

Fortunately for the NGSS team, that’s a low bar. In our most recent review of state science standards, published just a year ago, the Fordham team determined that the clarity, content, and rigor of most state K–12 science standards were mediocre to awful. The review assigned grades of C or worse to three quarters of the states. (Ten flunked altogether.)

Still and all, science education in America is no wasteland. Our reviewers also awarded “honors” grades (B or better) to a quarter of the states for their K–12 science standards. Tens of thousands of our ablest high school students every year earn high marks on Advanced Placement exams in physics, chemistry, and biology. On the 2011 TIMSS science assessment, among fifty-six jurisdictions participating at the eighth-grade level, just twelve produced stronger results than the United States. Remarkably, three of those were U.S. states! (Massachusetts surpassed Taiwan, Minnesota rivaled Finland, and North Carolina was strong, too.) And, of course, at the post-secondary level, the U.S. continues to house many of the world’s premier institutions of scientific research, and their scholars continue to win an impressive share of Nobel prizes and other key awards in scientific fields.

So while nobody should be satisfied with America’s overall performance in science education, it's also important to keep in mind that, when one sets out to overhaul that system, it's possible to make it even worse—particularly if, in our effort to raise standards for all students, we wind up lowering them for our best and brightest.

NGSS 2.0 falls into that trap. But that’s not all that’s wrong with it. If the drafters really want their final product to deserve widespread adoption, they still need to solve eight critical problems:

• In an effort to draft “fewer and clearer” standards to guide curriculum and instruction, NGSS 2.0 (like NGSS 1.0) omits quite a lot of essential content. Among the most egregious omissions are most of chemistry; thermodynamics; electrical circuits; physiology; minerals and rocks; the layered Earth; the essentials of biological chemistry and biochemical genetics; and at least the descriptive elements of developmental biology.

• As in version 1.0, some content that is never explicitly stated for the earlier grades seems to be taken for granted in the standards for later grades—where it won’t likely be found in students’ heads if the early-grade teachers aren’t prompted by the standards to teach it.

• Real science invariably blends content knowledge with core ideas, “crosscutting" concepts, and various practices, activities, or applications. Well and good. But NGSS 2.0 imposes so rigid a format on its standards that the recommended “practices” dominate them. The authors have forced practices on every expectation, even when they confuse more than clarify. For example, high school students are asked to “critically read scientific literature and produce scientific writing and/or oral presentations that communicate how DNA sequences determine the structure and function of proteins, which carry out most of the work of the cell.” Here as elsewhere, the understanding of critical content—which should be the ultimate goal of science education—becomes secondary to arbitrary and peripheral activities such as “critical reading” and “oral presentation.”

• Although the drafters made a commendable effort to integrate “engineering practices” into the science rather than treat engineering as a separate discipline, their insistence on finding such practices in connection with so many standards sometimes leads to inappropriate or banal exercises—and blurs the real meaning of “engineering.”

• The effort to insist on “assessment boundaries”—which narrow the focus of a standard by setting a ceiling on the content that can be assessed—in connection with every standard often leads to a “dumbing down” of what might actually be learned about a topic, seemingly in the interest of “one-size-fits-all” science that won’t be too challenging for students. Given that what gets tested is generally what gets taught, this will invariably limit how far and how deep advanced students (and their teachers) might go. (The vague assertion that the problem can be dealt with via “advanced” high school courses helps almost not at all.)

• A number of key scientific terms (e.g., “model” and “design”) are ill defined and/or inconsistently used.

• Even as the amplitude of new appendices attached to NGSS 2.0 adds welcome explanation of what is and isn’t present and why, it also produces a structure that most users, especially classroom instructors, will find complex and unwieldy. Will a fifth-grade teacher actually make her way to Appendix K to obtain additional (and valuable) information about science-math alignment and some pedagogically useful examples? Will the final version of NGSS omit some of the intervening appendices that have more to do with the philosophical, political, and epistemological leanings of project leaders than with anything of immediate value to real schools?

• Although the “alignment” of NGSS math with Common Core math is improved, the drafters seem to have consciously limited the amount of math-dependent science that students need to learn. This weakens the science and leads, once again, to a worrisome dumbing down, particularly in high school physics—which, as the reviewers remind us, “is inherently mathematical.” It must also be noted that Appendix K, valuable as it is in making the science-math alignment clear for grades K–5, is essentially AWOL from the middle and high school grades, where it is most needed.

Hope springs eternal. The NGSS team made some worthy improvements between drafts one and two (though they ignored most of our advice), and they have an opportunity—a final opportunity, it appears—to make further repairs.

We surely hope that they do so. While we did not review NGSS 2.0 with an eye toward grading it, we intend to evaluate the final version much as we did state standards—and provide states with a side-by-side that they may use in connection with adoption decisions. We sincerely hope that NGSS 3.0 fares well in such a comparison—but to get to that point, some major modifications will need to be made. And we urge the drafters to take as much time as necessary to accomplish that, for the present draft is problematic in more ways than it is strong.

This week, Student Achievement Partners announced a new partnership with the NEA and AFT, which will be funded with a three-year, $11 million grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, “to jointly design tools and digital applications to support teachers in their practice.”

Here’s what Sue Pimentel told Education Week:

…The New York City–based nonprofit would be "the engine room" for the new project, but teachers would be the fuel behind it. It will cover both ELA and math.

SAP will meet regularly with teachers to find out what they need most in the classroom, and come back to them with early versions that can then be reviewed and revised, Pimentel said. Teachers from the two unions will also play a key role by piloting the tools in their classrooms next year, she said. The tools will be available on SAP's website, Achieve The Core, and NEA and AFT websites, she said.

Given the dearth of quality, CCSS-aligned materials available to teachers who are already working to align their practice to the new standards, this additional investment is welcome and will hopefully help spur the development of the classroom-level resources teachers need.

The claim that Common Core will be the death of great literature wilts under scrutiny. Photo by Zitona via photopin cc.

To believe the latest criticisms of the Common Core is to believe that these rigorous new standards for English language arts, despite their focus on increasing the quality and complexity of the books read in English classes across grades K–12, signal the death of great literature in American schools. Like many arguments against the Common Core, however, this latest one wilts under scrutiny.

At the heart of this critique is a two-paragraph section found on page 5 of the introduction to the CCSS that mentions the NAEP assessment framework, shows the distribution of literary and informational texts across the grades (50/50 in 4th grade, 45 percent literary to 55 percent informational in 8th, and 30 percent literary to 70 percent informational in 12th), and suggests that teachers across content areas should “follow NAEP’s lead in balancing the reading of literature with the reading of informational texts, including texts in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.”

Never mind that the document immediately clarifies—no fewer than three times!—the fact that “a significant amount of reading of informational texts take place in and outside the ELA classroom.” Denizens of the anti-Common Core fever swamps choose not to read that bit of “informational text.” They also choose to ignore the fact that the only genre the standards explicitly ask ELA teachers to spend more time teaching is literary nonfiction—something that is essential to literary study and absolutely belongs in literature classrooms.

Facts like that don’t make it into the swamps—not when there is a straw man to attack and standards to undermine! The Pioneer Institute, fronted by one-time Massachusetts education official Sandra Stotsky, led off by asserting that great works like Huck Finn and The Catcher in the Rye will be relegated to the dustbin of American education when Common Core is implemented.

Now education reform’s foremost critic Diane Ravitch has joined this fray with multiple posts on the topic. In the first of these, she acknowledged that

As readers may know, articles have appeared in the international press about the removal of well-known works of fiction from English classes. I know of no justification for such statements. The standards do not have a list of banned books.

In the two posts that followed, Ravitch focused on the “70-30% rationing of informational text to literature,” thus helping to perpetuate the myth that the CCSS aim to shift the focus in literature class from literary study to the reading and analysis of mind-numbing informational texts. She then personalizes her objections, chiding Common Core co-author (and College Board president) David Coleman, saying, “I know you have explained and explained that the Common Core is not anti-fiction, is not anti-literature. But when you have to keep explaining, that means you have made a mistake.” Then she adds, “Those who agree with you are paid to agree with you.”

Besides the squalid nature of that outrageous and insulting statement, people who say things like that are inadvertently signaling how weak the substantive foundation of their argument actually is. Consigning those who agree with Coleman about English language arts to the ranks of bribe-takers or sell-outs doesn’t change the facts, which point in the opposite direction of the case Ravitch is making.

Further, by focusing their attention on nonexistent informational text quotas and absurd examples of such texts, Ravitch and Stotsky—both of whom are legitimately committed to improving the quality and rigor of what’s taught in schools across the land—and their allies encourage teachers and school leaders to dwell on two paragraphs of the standards that are being misread, rather than the 200-plus pages that are aimed at helping educators select culturally significant, content-rich, and appropriately complex texts. Among the guidance in these 200 pages are lists of the kinds of fiction and literary nonfiction texts that teachers aligning their instruction to the Common Core should choose from, including:

The list goes on and on with titles that are important, interesting, and almost exclusively at the top of most educators’ list of worthy reading.

Conspicuously absent from the Common Core’s guidance is anything resembling a directive to teachers to assign bus schedules, trade manuals, or technical reports. Perhaps there are publishers who are trying to include such low-level texts as part of their supposedly “Common Core-aligned” materials, but those who do are ignoring the explicit guidance from the CCSS themselves. And nobody in their right mind would purchase such things.

Those with a serious interest in improving English language arts in American schools would do better to spend time highlighting the kinds of texts that are actually recommended by the Common Core rather than perpetuating misinformation and dripping with malice. 

In an irony so rich even Alanis Morissette would correctly label it, at this point the debate over Common Core implementation has become so heated that opponents of the standards are publically and repeatedly misrepresenting what the standards require in ways that will actually lead these standards to be implemented in ways that run contrary to both what they actually require and these critics’ own deeply held beliefs.

For those of who want to refocus literature instruction on teaching the kinds of rigorous, high quality texts—fiction and nonfiction alike—that students need to succeed in college and beyond, it’s time to call out the nonsense being pumped by this anti-Common Core noise machine and help teachers and school leaders focus their attention on the voluminous guidance included in the CCSS that is aimed at doing precisely that.

Research has long shown that reading comprehension and vocabulary are well correlated. Photo by Јerry via photopin cc.

While there are achievement gaps between low-income and affluent students across content areas, none seem more vexing to close than the reading gap. While the enormous investment of time and resources that was poured into the Reading First initiative resulted in modest gains, particularly at the elementary level, we have not made the progress we had hoped for in either improving reading achievement or closing the comprehension gap.

There are no doubt a host of factors that contribute to this gap in reading, not least of which the fact that low-income students are far less likely to be read to and talked to in the early years, or to be exposed to the kind of content-rich curriculum they need to build knowledge and expand vocabulary—both critical drivers of reading comprehension.

Research has long shown that reading comprehension and vocabulary are well-correlated. The results from the latest NAEP vocabulary assessment provide additional ammunition to those who argue that if we ever hope to address the reading gap, we must find a way to address the language and knowledge gap between our lowest- and highest-performing students. Specifically, the NAEP results show the following:

• Fourth-grade students performing above the 75th percentile in reading comprehension in 2011 also had the cohort’s highest average vocabulary scores. 
• Lower-performing fourth-graders at or below the 25th percentile in reading comprehension had the lowest average vocabulary score. 
• The patterns are similar for grade 8 in 2011 and for grade 12 in 2009. (Grade 12 was not assessed in 2011.) 

Of course, E.D. Hirsch has long argued that once students learn how to read in the early years, they need broad and systematic exposure to the kind of curriculum that will help them build the knowledge and vocabulary they need. Studies have shown that our most disadvantaged students tend to be read to less, talked to less, and generally exposed to far less sophisticated vocabulary and sentences. Worse, because it is far easier to build knowledge and vocabulary once you have knowledge, these gaps only increase through the years, further disadvantaging our most struggling students.

How can we address this worrisome vocabulary gap? As Hirsch reluctantly acknowledges, since “word rich” children will always be able to acquire language (and content knowledge) more easily than “word poor” children, we may never completely close the gap. Worse still, because the most effective way to increase vocabulary is through multiple “incidental” exposures to the kinds of rigorous, academic, content-specific vocabulary that students need to drive comprehension, explicit vocabulary instruction can only make a small dent in closing the word gap.

Instead, Hirsch argues that since “acquiring word knowledge and domain knowledge is a gradual and cumulative process” and since “early learning of words and things is the only way to overcome early disadvantage, the argument for including optimal content in language arts as early as possible seems compelling.” More specifically, we should focus, as early as possible, on developing “oral comprehension” (through read-alouds, exposure to complex sentences and words) and on exposing all students—particularly our most disadvantaged—to content-rich curriculum as early as possible.

First, it’s literally wrong. Nowhere do the CCSS “mandate” the percent of time ELA teachers need to spend on nonfiction. In fact, the reference to the balance of fiction and nonfiction in the classroom specifically warns,

The percentages on the table reflect the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings. Teachers of senior English classes, for example, are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts. Rather, 70 percent of student reading across the grade should be informational.

It’s hard to imagine the authors being clearer on this point. Yet commentators on all sides of the debate regularly—and mistakenly—claim that the CCSS wants to see literature in ELA classrooms go the way of the dinosaur. Even as recently as this weekend, New York Times education writer Sara Mosle wrongly claimed that the Common Core pushes for up to 70 percent of time in 12th grade English classrooms be devoted to reading nonfiction titles. (To Mosle’s great credit, she subsequently corrected and edited her piece, but the error reflects the proliferation of this incorrect—and perhaps deliberately misleading and hyperbolic—idea.)

The second and far more troubling issue is that the focus on this nonexistent nonfiction “mandate” has distracted us from a far more important implementation conversation—specifically, how we can meet the content and rigor demands of the Common Core by upping the quality, complexity, and rigor of the texts students read and the analysis they do.

Commentators on all sides of the debate regularly—and mistakenly—claim that the CCSS wants to see literature in ELA classrooms go the way of the dinosaur

Mosle alludes to this in her article when she argues that “what schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction...” Unfortunately, she gives little credit to the standards for their attempt to refocus the conversation on ensuring that all students—regardless of their ability—are exposed to a healthy diet of rich, high-quality, and appropriately complex texts across all genres. And the truth is, whether teachers spend 20 or 90 percent of their time teaching nonfiction will matter very little if the texts students study aren’t worthy of reading and analysis.

The focus on text complexity is also where the Common Core is on its firmest footing. There is abundant research that underscores the importance of having students grapple with appropriately rigorous, high-quality literature and literary nonfiction. A 2006 ACT report, for example, found the following:

..while it is important for students to be able to comprehend both explicit and implicit material in texts, as well as to understand how various textual elements (such as main ideas, relationships, or generalizations) function in a text, the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are college ready and students who are not is the ability to comprehend complex texts." [emphasis added]

In other words, what was most critical was not student mastery of transferrable reading skills but, rather, their ability to read, understand, and analyze complex texts.

This is the kind of research that informed the CCSS focus on text complexity, and it’s why the standards subordinate skills so that they are taught only in service of deep comprehension and analysis of grade-appropriate reading. (Previously, standards focused on student mastery of reading skills and aligned curriculum and instruction often used texts as mere vehicles for helping students practice those skills.)

Unfortunately, this critical Common Core shift is all but lost amidst the noise about whether ELA teachers should spend 50 to 70 percent of their time assigning informational texts. And if Mosle is right that we need not more but better nonfiction—content rich texts that help build knowledge and lay the groundwork for future reading and learning—then the best way to get there is to stop talking about arbitrary (and nonexistent) nonfiction quotas and to start searching for the kind of content-rich, engaging literary and narrative nonfiction that will not only help build background knowledge but will also help students improve their comprehension and analysis skills and bestir a lifelong love of reading and learning.

Does education reform, like JFK's White House, suffer from groupthink? Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Janis, who passed away in 1990, focused much of his research on the meetings and conversations that preceded several key presidential decisions, including those that led President Kennedy and the best and brightest “whiz kids” he brought into his administration to move forward with the Bay of Pigs invasion—an American-supported attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba that was, by all accounts, a spectacular failure. In the end, Janis concluded that Kennedy’s biggest failure was not the final decision, but rather the process he and his advisors followed to get there. Most importantly, he felt that they failed to have open, critical conversations that might have pushed them to rethink their assumptions, and that individuals within the group failed to either voice their own concerns, because they felt there was already consensus, or listen to objections that would have helped them reshape the invasion plan.

Of course, education isn’t warfare and ed reform doesn’t lack for critics. But there is a lot we could learn from Janis’ insights.

While there are plenty of people pushing back on some of the most popular reforms, because the loudest voices tend to focus on loopy dangers—warning, for instance, that the entire reform movement is a grand, right-wing, hedge fund-fueled conspiracy to “privatize public education”—the reform community tends to tune critics out. As a result, the real danger is not that reformers are puppets of some fictitious “billionaire boys club,” but rather that the fights over education policy have become so acerbic and polarized that leaders on all sides feel that, in order to make any progress, they need surround themselves with (and listen only to) “true believers” who share their goals and beliefs. The danger is in the failure to seek out the counsel of critics who are more likely to see—or point out—holes in our reform plans.

The reality is that, even in the best circumstances, debates over education reform and policy (on all sides) are perfectly positioned to support groupthink. Look to nearly any education debate these days—whether on Twitter, at conferences, or in statehouses—and you’ll witness some of classic signs of groupthink at work:

• a feeling of moral superiority among group members;


• collective rationalization, where members discount warnings or fail to rethink assumptions;


• overly negative and stereotypical views of the groups “enemies”


• and censorship of dissenting opinion—either via self-censorship or direct pressure put on those who disagree.

Making matters worse, reform leaders aren’t firebrand upstarts but major public figures in charge of vast public institutions. In stark contrast to the scrappy movement of the 1990s, today’s reform leaders hold key positions of power and have won sweeping policy victories—from setting rigorous standards to holding schools accountable to increasing educational options, particularly for poor and minority parents in urban areas. But the shift from advocacy to analysis and implementation has been a rocky one, and it’s possible that we are already seeing some evidence of groupthink at work in our decision making. What, for example, would Janis make of the push to force through teacher evaluation systems in statehouses across the country over the past two years?

In 2010, in a rush to win out in the Race to the Top competition, policymakers across the country pushed to pass teacher evaluation reform. At the core of most of these efforts was the belief that a strong statewide teacher evaluation plan would include a requirement that 51 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on student achievement.

Why 51 percent? No one really knew. Did such a rigid formula contradict what successful principals were telling us about how they made staffing decisions? Were the assessments being used valid and reliable measures of student learning? Were they aligned to the curriculum teachers were using? Were the results from those assessments valid at the classroom level? And how were state teacher evaluation-reform mandates going to interact with other statewide reform efforts, like the decision to adopt the Common Core and transition to the related assessments?

These were questions that too few leaders seemed to really grapple with. If the unions or the most vocal anti-reformers were against it, it must be a good idea.

Worse, perhaps because discussions over teacher evaluation reform included mostly those who generally supported the plans, state-level discussion seemed more focused on incidental matters like the precise percentage of a teacher’s evaluation student achievement should play. Don’t like 51 percent? Let’s compromise on 35 percent and call it a day.

It doesn’t have to be this way. And there are states that are thoughtfully phasing in new policies or piloting plans and earnestly soliciting feedback before they are mandated statewide. If reform leaders want to get this right, that’s exactly what needs to happen.

Of course, leaders are right to stand tall and stick to core reform principles, but we also need to get serious about seeking thoughtful—even if not always friendly—critics who will challenge our assumptions and help reveal the most damaging holes in our plans. Most of all, we should be slowing down the decision-making process to make sure we are making the right decisions for our students and teachers before writing our ideas into law. Time is of the essence, but moving quickly at the expense of smart decisions and effective policies is worse than doing nothing at all.

Yet, there is a dearth of good, independent research that can help state, local, and school-level leaders determine which programs are most effective and which are most likely to meet the needs of the students they serve. That is why the results from a just-released report, published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, deserve some attention.

The study, “Large-Scale Evaluations of Curricular Effectiveness: The Case of Elementary Mathematics in Indiana,” focused on district-level curriculum adoption in the Hoosier state, mostly because Indiana is one of very few states that collects and tracks information about district-level curriculum adoption. This information allowed the researchers to investigate the relationship between curriculum and student achievement (as measured by the state’s ISTEP test).

Of course, the authors acknowledge that there are several limitations of the study, and the results don’t point to a clear “winner” or “loser” when it comes to elementary math curriculum. But, there are, in my opinion, three important take-aways.

1. States can exert enormous influence over curriculum decisions.

Every six years, the Hoosier State develops a list of “approved” programs and distributes that list to districts. Then district leaders work with teachers, parents, and community members to make curriculum adoption decisions. They can either choose a program from the approved list, apply to use an “alternative” curriculum that isn’t on the state list, or they apply to continue to use the textbooks and materials that were selected during the previous review cycle.

It is rare for a district to deviate from the state-approved curriculum list. In fact, during the 1998 adoption cycle, “over 98% of the districts in Indiana adopted math curricula from the approved list.” This means that, for better or worse, districts take direction from state departments of education seriously, and they are unlikely to eschew state recommendations.

2. How content is taught does not determine curricular effectiveness.

In math in particular, there is fierce debate between “traditionalists,” who favor teacher-directed learning) and constructivists who believe that students learn better when lessons are focused on conceptual learning and “discovery” methods. (Similar pedagogical debates rage on in nearly every core content area.)

There is a dearth of good, independent research that can help leaders determine which curricula are most effective.

One interesting, if unsurprising, take-away from this study is that pedagogy—how the material is presented—is less important than other factors, such as the content covered or curricular coherence. For example, of the three programs studied, both Saxon and Sliver-Burdett Ginn (SBG) focused on more traditional, teacher-directed methods, yet SBG “meaningfully outperformed Saxon.” It’s impossible to know precisely what accounted for the difference, but SBG presents content differently (related content is presented together in units, rather than being “spiraled” throughout the year) and covers more rigorous content (in second grade, Saxon only teaches addition and subtraction with two-digit numbers, whereas students following SBG are taught addition and subtraction up to three-digit numbers).

3. Context matters enormously.

Finally, this study supports the notion that, even when it comes to selecting effective curriculum, there is no one-size-fits all solution. In this report, for example, the authors found that Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley (SFAW), a “reform” math program that focuses on less-traditional pedagogy and teaching methods, outperformed Saxon. Yet, Whitehurst’s 2009 research came to the opposite conclusion. In that study, the end-of-year math achievement scores were 0.24 standard deviations higher for students who were taught using Saxon than for those who were taught using SFAW. (In a similar study, conducted in 2010, Saxon also outperformed SFAW.)

Why the differences? The authors suggest one possibility. They note that the 2010 study analyzed data from schools where students were significantly more disadvantaged than the average Indiana student. Perhaps Saxon better serves the needs of our most struggling students and that a different program, like SFAW, would better meet the needs of more advantaged students?

Alternatively, it’s possible (perhaps even likely?) that the SFAW program is better aligned to the ISTEP assessment and Indiana standards than Saxon in terms of both content and rigor. And, since the alignment between curriculum, instruction, and assessment is critical to proving a program’s effectiveness, any misalignment of content or rigor would impact the results. Either way, the bottom line is that context matters. Understanding the effectiveness of a particular program is important, but it’s also critical to understand whether the program is aligned to the content and rigor of the standards and of the assessments that will be used to measure student mastery (and teacher effectiveness).

Taken together, what does this mean for state-level Common Core implementation and for curriculum selection in particular? As FDR once said, “Great power involves great responsibility.” States are in a position to heavily influence curriculum selection, giving them the opportunity to affect the way the CCSS are implemented in nearly every public school classroom in the state. But they should take that responsibility seriously and work to focus far more time and attention on helping educators make the right curriculum choices for the students they serve.

When looking for a model of smart Common Core implementation, it’s easy to get depressed. Most state plans are confusing, their guidance buried deep in government websites (usually in hard to read documents full of jargon), their tactics difficult to follow, and their policies disconnected, compliance-oriented, and unlikely to set educators up for success.

I know what you are thinking: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

But there is some hope amidst the noise. And fittingly enough for these voluntary common standards, that hope is in the Volunteer State. Tennessee has been quietly developing what might be the most thoughtful, cohesive, and outcomes-driven state CCSS implementation plan in the nation.

There are three areas, in particular, where Tennessee seems to be outshining the rest of the states: leading with outcomes; clarity of communication and smart prioritization; and growing leaders, as opposed to micromanaging teachers. 

Leading with outcomes

Far too often, Common Core implementation efforts are an amalgam of compliance-oriented activities and programs masquerading as thoughtful and effective implementation plans.

Tennessee’s approach seems refreshingly different. The state has set specific goals for each of its first four years of CCSS implementation. In 2012-13, for instance, they expect a 4 point scale score growth for all students on the NAEP 4th grade math, and a 5 point scale score growth for students on the NAEP 8th grade math test. Next year, they hope to see average growth of at least 3-5 percent increase in the percent of students scoring at proficient and advanced. And by 2014-15—the first year of full implementation of the PARCC assessment—they are hoping to rank 12th overall of all PARCC states (they are currently 18th).

By tying the implementation plan to student achievement goals, rather than to “full implementation” of the standards, state leaders are putting the focus where it needs to be: on helping students meet expectations, not on helping teachers implement new tools. What’s more, by focusing on outcomes rather than inputs, state leaders have allowed themselves the flexibility to adapt their implementation plan as they learn from mistakes and success stories over the next several years.

Clarity of communication and smart prioritization

For anyone who’s spent any time trying to navigate the often confusing websites of a typical state department of education, surfing to the Volunteer State’s Common Core site is a welcome change. TNCore.org is clear and user-friendly; it’s focused on summarizing the most important elements of the Common Core and on presenting a straightforward overview of the Tennessee’s implementation plan.

But perhaps more importantly, rather than making the mistake of equating strong implementation with the development of materials and tools from the statehouse, Tennessee leaders are clearly seeking to capitalize on the “commonness” of the Common Core. ELA teachers are, for instance, directed to text complexity guidance released by Student Achievement Partners and by the Council of Chief State Schools Officers. Parents are directed to information created by the Council of Great City Schools that communicates what they can expect their children to be learning in classrooms guided by the CCSS. And teachers and leaders are directed to external blogs that share resources and guidance about how to implement the ELA and math standards in the classroom.

By focusing on sharing rather than creating, state leaders seem able to marshal their resources towards developing and adapting materials that can’t be—or haven’t been—created elsewhere. State leaders have, for instance, clearly communicated state implementation priorities and plans in a useful PowerPoint slide deck, including the state’s plans for thoughtfully phasing out the expectations into ELA and math classrooms from 2011 to15. And they are making smart changes to the statewide assessment, the TCAP, that match the curricular changes they are asking teachers to implement. They are, for instance, phasing out content that isn’t included in the Common Core and that won’t be assessed by the forthcoming CCSS-aligned assessments, and they are introducing questions that match the Common Core in terms of both content and rigor. Even more importantly, these assessment changes will not impact teacher evaluations for at least two years, showing that the state also understands that the first priority of assessments is to provide educators with data they need to drive teaching and learning.

Growing leaders rather than micromanaging teachers

Finally, Tennessee leaders seem to understand that for standards to truly “change everything,” they need to be the foundation of a systemic statewide reform plan that opens the door for innovation while holding educators accountable for results.

Take, for example, Tennessee’s teacher evaluation plan. While the Volunteer State is far ahead of others in terms of using student achievement data to inform teacher evaluation, it also has a plan to phase in CCSS-aligned assessment questions, including more difficult constructed response items. It will not use results from these items to inform teacher evaluations for two years. This gives teachers some space to begin implementing the new standards and to use the data gleaned from these assessments to inform instruction before they are held accountable to the new expectations.

The state has also adapted a tool created by Student Achievement Partners that will help ELA teachers judge how well aligned various curriculum and instructional materials are to the new standards. And they’ve developed what appear to be optional, targeted professional development modules that seem aimed not just at disseminating information or sharing state-mandated tools, but also at developing educators who can meet the content and rigor demands of the CCSS.

Of course, this is a risky strategy. It is, on some level, easier for state educrats to focus on driving change by controlling as much of classroom-level implementation as they can—developing model curricula and mandating professional development. While tightly controlled implementation might help avoid catastrophic failure, it’s unlikely to lead to excellence. And if Tennessee’s public plans and guidance are any indication, they seem to have erred on the side of sharing knowledge, tools, and best practices by allowing educators the freedom they need to take ownership over CCSS implementation.

It's too early to tell if the Volunteer State’s bet on a “tight-loose” approach to Common Core will drive effective implementation in the classroom. But it seems clear that Tennessee has emerged as an important model that deserves more attention than it has gotten so far.

Knowing precisely how the Common Core will be assessed is critical.

Yet, both federally funded assessment consortia have only given glimpses of how they plan to measure student mastery of the Common Core—which of course makes the information communicated and sample items shared by the consortia all the more critical to classroom-level Common Core implementation efforts.

Most recently, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium released a small handful of web-based English language arts and math sample test items, which are available for public comment and feedback until November 2. While useful for painting a picture of how a few standards will be assessed and how technology will be used, the quality and rigor of the questions themselves are a mixed bag. While some help demonstrate just how different instruction aligned to a standard needs to be to meet the content and rigor demands of the CCSS, others seem poorly constructed, or misaligned to the demands of the new standards.

The Good

To begin, several questions are quite strong and very clearly demonstrate how SBAC will focus reading assessments on one of the most critical elements of the CCSS—pushing students to use evidence drawn directly from the text to support conclusions and analyses. Item 43001, for instance, tells the students that “Naomi is worried and has done something wrong,” and asks them to highlight three sentences from the text that support the conclusion. In the past, related questions might ask students to draw that conclusion—something they might arrive at without fully understanding or analyzing the text—but would rarely push them to defend the conclusion using text-based evidence. This question goes well beyond what we’ve seen in the past and really pushes students demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the text. What’s more, the question shows teachers how technology will be maximized to score questions like this quickly, and in a way that would make it difficult for a student with limited understanding of the text, or the skill being assessed, to earn full credit.

Similarly, item 43008, is an effective constructed-response item that would be difficult to answer without close reading and deep understanding of the passage itself. (That said, a more specific scoring rubric would add significant value and would make it far clearer what students need to know and be able to do to demonstrate mastery.)

For item 43016, students are asked to read a paragraph, identify sentences that should be removed, and explain why each is superfluous. This is an excellent, higher-level question, and the related scoring rubric is clear, specific, and leaves little room for confusion or interpretation.

The Bad

Unfortunately, some questions miss the mark. Item 43600, for instance, is an open-ended question that would work better as a multiple choice. The item is a simple “right there” question that asks what the main character learned about her grandmother. The answer is simple, straightforward, and doesn’t require students to draw conclusions or make inferences. Yet students are asked to “use details from the text to support the answer.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how supplying details would add anything, except possibly confusion. A multiple-choice item—or an item where students were asked to highlight the area in the text where they would find the answer—would focus the question more clearly and provide just as much (if not more) useful information.

Item 43007 is perhaps more troubling because it seems poorly written. It asks students what they learned about diamonds from the passage, but the answer relates not to what we learned about diamonds, but rather about the formation of galaxies. Rather than asking students to dive deeper and analyze the text, this question seems to serve only to confuse.

Finally, in item 43599, students are asked to edit a text. Unfortunately, as part of the editing process, they are asked to retype the entire paragraph, noting the changes as they type. This is as much an exercise in transcription as in editing, and it seems like we would have done better to simply ask students to add their edits directly to the paragraph itself.

The Ugly

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the released items relates to how the CCSS writing standards are assessed. Two of the most significant shifts in the CCSS ELA standards are their focus on writing to texts and on shifting from narrative to persuasive and analytic writing through the grades. Unfortunately, neither of these shifts is well represented in the sample items.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the released items relates to how the CCSS writing standards are assessed.

For starters, the prompts don’t seem much different from those that have dominated state assessments for years. Consequently, they don’t give much information about how different the CCSS expectations are, or how student mastery will be measured differently. The first prompt, aimed at fourth graders (43009), is a typical narrative-writing prompt, asking students only to complete a story. And the related scoring rubric is generic, asking only broadly for “supporting details,” “appropriate word choice,” and on.

The additional extended-response items (43010 and 43019) seem designed to focus on taking a position and supporting it with evidence from text, but they seem poorly designed for that purpose. The first (43010) asks little more than the students’ personal opinion on why the school day should be lengthened, and it’s hard to imagine students gleaning much useful evidence or detail from the “school schedule” they’re asked to read and refer to in their answers. Furthermore, the rubric is so general that it is nearly meaningless.

The final extended response item (43019), aimed at sixth graders, goes a bit further than the fourth-grade example, but not much. It gives students eleven bullet points to read (seven that are arguments in favor of allowing cell phones in school, four that oppose allowing cell phones) and then asks students:

Based on what you read in the text, do you think cell phones should be allowed in schools? Using the lists provided in the text, write a paragraph arguing why your position is more reasonable than the opposing position.

Again, no real “sources” are given, and students are not really asked to cite authentic evidence from text to support their position, a key element of the CCSS writing standards.

Teachers around the country have already begun the daunting task of aligning their work to the content and rigor of the Common Core. If we’re going to hold them and their students accountable for mastery of these standards, it’s time to get much more serious about giving them the assessment guidance they need to inform that work and keep it on track.

Perhaps no applause line has done more damage to effective teaching than these attacks on repetition. This is something that Doug Lemov knows intimately, thanks in part to the thousands of hours he spent observing outstanding teachers in action. What he learned was that great teaching is born not of spontaneous and unpracticed excellence, but rather of spending more time than seems to make sense mastering seemingly mundane but crucially important knowledge and skills. In his first book, Teach Like a Champion, Lemov described 49 of the fundamental techniques that great teachers incorporated into their daily practice.

Lemov builds upon these insights in his latest book, Practice Perfect (coauthored with Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi). The book is, at its core, a damning critique of the multi-billion dollar teacher professional development industry, which focuses almost no time and attention on actually helping teachers focus on and hone the skills they need to be effective. Teachers, Lemov suggests, are being served up the equivalent of art appreciation courses and then asked to paint a masterpieces. They are eager to learn new skills but “the plain fact is that we don’t help them to do so.”

Describing their own failure to help teachers translate techniques they learned in Teach Like a Champion into classroom practice, the authors explain:

we would show teachers one short video clip after another of superstar colleagues demonstrating a particular technique. We would analyze and discuss, and then, once our audience understood the technique in all of its nuance and variation, we went on to the next technique. Evaluations were outstanding…But then we noticed something alarming. If we surveyed the same participants three months later, they were not quite as upbeat. They still knew what they wanted their classes to be like, but they were unable to reliably do what it took to get there.

The problem was that the workshop participants, upon returning to their classrooms, “were trying to do the equivalent of walking onto center court at Wimbledon and learning a new style of backhand in the midst of a match.” And so Lemov and his colleagues changed the focus of their workshops. They taught fewer skills and they worked to create the space for practice. In short: They tried to do for teacher professional development what legendary coaches like John Wooden did for professional athletes—to focus on repetition, feedback, and practice aimed at helping teachers master a selective number of fundamental skills and techniques to automaticity.

Drawing on their own experience working to create a culture of practice in their workshops and schools, Practice Perfect offers 42 “rules” designed to help people “get better at getting better.” While ostensibly written for anyone, the book draws heavily on the authors’ experience as teachers and school leaders, as well as their experience trying to help educators improve their craft.

Teachers are rarely given the time and space to practice.

And that is where Practice Perfect has the potential to make the biggest impact. After all, other professions—sports, medicine, and on—understand the importance of practice and incorporate it into their training and development. But unlike doctors, who spend the first several years of their professional career focused on practice, or athletes who never stop practicing until retirement, teachers are asked to execute and perform, and, as they authors note, they “listen, reflect, discuss, and debate,” but they are rarely given the time and space to practice.

Like the techniques described in Teach Like a Champion, these “rules” are as simple, practical, and grounded in common sense and a respect for the practice and repetition we need to help teachers achieve mastery.

Of course, there will no doubt be plenty of skeptics—teachers among them—who worry that asking teachers to “practice” basic skills outside the context of a classroom will be contrived and ineffective. (Done poorly, it undoubtedly will be.) But those are the same people who would have scoffed at John Wooden for making his players practice—time and again—how to put on socks in just the right way, or for making them shoot without a ball to ingrain the proper form into muscle memory. Let’s hope that more use this as an opportunity to rethink the role of practice in teacher development and the importance of repetition to the artistry of teaching.

A recent Common Core-sympathetic article carried by the WSJ begins with an anecdote about a too-seldom mentioned potential upside of tougher standards: that fewer parents will need to pay for remedial courses when their kids reach college (“something parents of about a quarter of all New York students entering college now do”).

It’s a lot easier to say “Common Core implementation” than to do it.

But what really comes through in this article is that it’s not completely clear what “Common Core implementation” actually means. This is something I’ve been fretting about since my time at the New Jersey Department of Education.

Though the reporter and numerous sources quoted throughout the article use buzz words (“rigorous,” “complex texts,” “ready for college and career success,” “mapping backward,” “analytical reading and writing skills,” and “text-based instruction.”), their translation into real-life practice is garbled English at best, ancient Greek at worst.

It seems to me that many of the Common Core’s most strident defenders don’t understand or appreciate that state and local leaders don’t know exactly what they should be doing. That confusion trickles down to teachers, preparation programs, and lots of other players.  In short, it’s a lot easier to say “Common Core implementation” than to do it.

This is why Checker Finn’s piece about “How the Common Core changes everything” is so valuable. And scary. Finn lists twenty areas of practice and policy that will need to be amended—in some cases adjusted, in others overhauled—if we’re to successfully transition to these new standards.

The list includes everything from ESEA and accountability systems to NAEP and graduation rates to technology and the school day to teacher evaluations and curriculum guides.

Finn’s list is a great start. I worry that policymakers and education thought leaders would be astonished and terrified if they realized how far behind the field is on these issues. Worse, it’s not at all clear who is doing what already or who is ultimately responsible for leading on each of these issues (SEAs? LEAs? Schools?  Individual teachers? The market?).

A big part of my education in doing state-level work after lots of think-tankery and bouncing around the federal government can be boiled down to the acronym “ATAMO.”

In this case, were you to make a step-by-step guide for transitioning from state standards and assessments to common standards and assessments, you’d probably begin with, “organize a group of standards experts.” Further down the list would be “have draft standards reviewed by higher education and business leaders,” and “acclimate state boards of education to new standards prior to proposed adoption.”

Toward the end, maybe #746, would be “check that new standards have been implemented faithfully in each classroom across the nation.”

Somewhere on the checklist—as the work moves from the feds, CCSSO, and D.C.-based wonks to actual classrooms where teachers teach and students learn—would appear “ATAMO.”

And then a miracle occurs.

We’ve been so excited about Common Core and all of its benefits that we’ve spent entirely too little time working out the nasty details that Finn enumerates, the details that make all the difference to practitioners and kids.

Someone needs to replace ATAMO with a game plan PDQ or things aren’t going to end well.

Photo by Jessica Allan Schmidt.

Correcting inaccuracies about the Common Core is like playing Whack-A-Mole—only less fun. Photo by Julia Rubinic.

The political opponents of the Common Core—like the self-interested publishers and consultants—are quick to make broad and often inaccurate claims about the new standards. Though their intent is different, the impact may be equally damaging, particularly since they hope to bury the standards entirely, not just make a buck off the coming wave of CCSS implementation. The great irony, though, is that, by pitching the Common Core as something that it isn’t, CCSS opponents may inadvertently end up promoting exactly the kind of content-less, skills-driven instruction that they claim to be fighting against.

Take, for example, Phyllis Schlafly. Godmother of the modern conservative advocacy movement, Schlafly burst onto the scene in the 1970s with her successful campaign to stop the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She not only helped halt the ERA it in its tracks—at a time when most political commentators considered it a done deal—but actually got five states that had ratified the amendment to roll back their votes. Sound familiar?

Now her ire is aimed at Obama, and she is using some (fairly weak) anti-Common Core ammunition to try to undermine his bid for reelection. To that end, Schlafly's latest piece, posted last week to Townhall.com, begins as a familiar warning of federal overreach, but ends with a sea of misconceptions and misrepresentations about the standards themselves. She argues, for instance, that:

Many parents will recognize the math standards as “Fuzzy Math,” i.e., teaching very little arithmetic or standard algorithms, and class time wasted in having kids describe how they got their answers instead of teaching them the best way to get correct answers.

Never mind that the CCSS explicitly require fluency with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division using the standard algorithms. Or that the standards unambiguously prioritize arithmetic in the early grades. In fact, contrary to what Schlafly claims, standards covering arithmetic account for well over half of all expectations in elementary school. But nevermind such trifles: There are standards to undermine!

Schlafly’s critique no doubt arises from the existence of “mathematical practices,” which are effectively a list of eight overarching skills included in the standards. But the document makes it clear that these practices must be connected to the math content outlined in the standards. More than that, the practices are given comparatively very little attention. A thorough read of the CCSS-M makes it clear that deep content mastery comes first and leads to mastery of the skills outlined in the practices, not the other way around.

It would be funny if it weren’t all so serious.

On the ELA side, Schlafly is on equally weak ground when she argues that the “English and literature standards are worse because they omit traditional and classical literature, confine kids to boring informational readings such as instruction manuals, and fail to teach cursive writing.”

On the contrary, even Mark Bauerlein—the co-author of the recent Pioneer Institute report blasting the Common Core ELA standards—acknowledges that the Common Core gives us an opportunity to return classic literature to its rightful place in literature classrooms. “The states that have adopted Common Core,” Bauerlein asserts, “have to observe the standards, and so the high school English classroom will thus preserve Hawthorne, Irving, Melville, Whitman and other authors who don’t match the PC mentality.”

Yes, the CCSS put a greater emphasis on informational text and literary nonfiction across all subjects. It emphatically does not ask literature teachers to abandon Shakespeare and Twain for bus schedules and task passages. (And lamenting the exclusion of cursive writing seems curious, particularly since I don't know of a state that assessed student mastery of cursive prior to the CCSS.)

It would be funny if it weren’t all so serious. These relentless distortions and attacks are reshaping a popular reform into an ideological fight, one that supporters are ill-equipped to win. What Schlafly lacks in understanding of the standards themselves she makes up for in political savvy and persistence. Supporters of Common Core will need to redouble their efforts to knock down these distortions if they hope to win.

It’s become increasingly obvious that charters have hit a wall in their quest to put their students on the path to college.

Of course, the top charter management organizations got this level of attention the old fashioned way: they earned it. The best CMOs—like KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First—have done amazing work. The teachers work long hours and do—often quite literally—whatever it takes to give students the kinds of opportunities they’ve had.

But, while charters have made important strides, it’s become increasingly obvious that they’ve also hit a wall in their quest to put their students on the path to college. While the best among them have been able to get more and more students to hit proficiency targets, there are no charter schools—to my knowledge—that have figured out how, at scale, to prepare all students for the rigors of college and careers. Yet, over the next few years, as statewide assessment and accountability systems align to the Common Core, charters are going to be held accountable not for catching kids up, but for adequately preparing them for what comes next.

To its great credit, this is something that KIPP readily admits, citing college completion as one of their biggest challenges. Perhaps less publicly, nearly everyone I know who works at the top CMOs would acknowledge that, while they may have figured out some ways to close proficiency gaps, they have yet to figure out how to both catch students up and adequately prepare them for college. And this challenge is likely to become more and more obvious as Common Core implementation gets underway.

It’s a shame, though perhaps not a surprise, that these raw, honest conversations—which get to the heart of what is driving the entire education reform movement—mostly take place in hushed tones behind closed doors, outside the spotlight. After all, charter schools and their leaders are under siege almost daily, their motives questioned and their flaws viewed under harsh public scrutiny.

The challenge is that charters may have reached a point where, in order to break through the wall they’ve hit and take their performance to the next level, they need to enlist the help of a greater number of outsiders. They need to earnestly listen to more critics (friendly and unfriendly) who can do for charters what charters did for traditional districts over the past two decades—highlight what’s not working and propose new, often very different solutions to common problems.

Yet, when you are on top, you have every incentive is to listen only to those who are bought into your success. Why give air time to those who might want to see you fail? as a result, some of the biggest CMOs—intentionally or unintentionally—have surrounded themselves with likeminded educators who are more likely to tinker around the margins of their beliefs and model than to suggest the kinds of bold changes they need to take their game to the next level. These organizations—or groups—have their own conferences, journals, professional development, teacher preparation programs, research institutes, lobbyists, and all the other trappings of a well-resourced industry. They can now succeed as organizations whether or not they succeed in their missions.

Enter Carol Burris.

Burris is a public school principal, author, and, by all accounts, a vocal critic of education reform in general and of the instructional and curricular practices of “No Excuses” charter schools in particular. She’s perhaps an unlikely place to turn for advice on how No Excuses charters can improve their craft, but that may be exactly what makes her right for the job.

Earlier this year, in a post on Valerie Strauss’s blog, The Answer Sheet, Burris published a damning critique of a “model” video that was posted on the Relay Graduate School of Education website. It was a post that far too many charter supporters probably ignored or tuned out, assuming it was no more than the idle ranting a charter foe looking to undermine the work of these hard working, gap-closing leaders.

The truth, however, is that her critique was exactly right. The lesson, which was pitched as a model of “rigorous classroom discussion,” included low-level questions, inadequate wait time, and was generally rushed and superficial. (After Burris’s post, Relay changed the name of the video, acknowledging that it was not a rigorous discussion, but leaving it up as a model of “culture of support.” They would have done better to really listen to Burris’s critique and to take it down entirely.)

Opening the Common Core.

Her most recent book (coauthored by Delia T. Garrity), Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness, is equally thoughtful. The entire book is worth a read. While I certainly don’t agree with all of it (I am generally skeptical of constructivist pedagogy, and I might push on the details and direction of some of the model lessons, for instance), Burris’s thoughts on accelerated instruction and planning for “critical thinking” are spot on. In fact, as I read them, I was surprised at how closely her work resembles the goals of the major CMOs. For starters, at its core, the book promotes the idea that exposing all students to a rigorous, content-rich curriculum is the backbone to any effective reform strategy. And while Burris and Garrity acknowledge the importance of helping students master critical thinking and other skills, they recognize that skills mastery can only be accomplished in the context of learning rich content.

More than that, the authors’ description of “accelerated instruction,” is thoughtful—and more closely resembles what schools like KIPP are trying to achieve than most would think. It is grounded in three key principles:

• Maximal use of instructional time


• Spiraling curriculum to reduce redundancies


• Exposing all students to the kind of content-rich, rigorous curriculum that has traditionally been reserved for “gifted and talented” students.

I’m sure charter leaders reading these goals would find themselves nodding in agreement more often than not. After all, maximizing every moment is precisely what charter teachers are trying to do with their relentless focus on systems, routines, expectations setting, and on. While Burris and Garrity may take a different tack, they share the same goal. Their thoughts on how to use assessment (formally and informally) to spiral curriculum, eliminate redundancies, and accelerate learning are strong, and their push to eliminate ability grouping and tracking as a way to put all students on the path to college is thought provoking. Given how intentionally Burris and her fellow educators are trying to achieve the same goals as many “No Excuses” charters, the fact that they approach the problem from a very different perspective could undoubtedly contribute to the conversation among charter leaders about how to better help students “climb the mountain to college.”

Of course, Burris and Garrity’s book is not the kind of “how to” guide that educators can take an implement tomorrow. But it offers some different solutions and some thoughtful guidance about how a school could rethink how curriculum, assessment, instruction, planning, and support intersect to help all students meet the rigors of the CCSS.

Unfortunately, the debate over school change and education reform has become so polarized that people are painted neatly into boxes and told that they are either “in” or they are “out.” And because Burris is ideologically aligned with some of the harshest and most vocal critics of ed reform, her book is unlikely to be read by those of us who believe in the power of (thoughtfully developed) accountability and choice. But for those eager to figure out how to help all students meet the content and rigor demands of the Common Core, Burris’s latest book makes it clear that we may be drawing the fault lines in exactly the wrong places, and closing ourselves off to precisely the kind of pushback that could help us all do better.

Nearly every state is working hard to look busy, lest they be accused of not taking the Common Core seriously.

Many education reforms are designed to shift away from this thinking, placing the emphasis on outcomes instead of inputs, encouraging the use of objective data to drive judgments about performance, to shift the conversation to one grounded in genuine productivity and effectiveness. The crucial insight of these efforts is that management styles that prioritize “busy-ness” over effectiveness encourages people to make grand, often complicated plans that may not be well suited to drive the kind of change we need.

Yet, isn’t this exactly what we’re seeing in our rush to implement the Common Core?

Since its inception—and with the exception of the development of the actual K-12 expectations—the Common Core has encouraged haste. Four states (Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland, and West Virginia) adopted the standards before they were even final.

Twenty states adopted them within one month of their release. All but six states had, in their Round 1 Race to the Top applications, developed plans to transition to the Common Core five months before the final CCSS were released. And districts have begun to align curriculum and instruction to the standards with very little guidance about how the expectations will be assessed, even though knowing how mastery of the knowledge and skills will be judged is essential to long-term planning.

In other words: Nearly every state is working hard to look busy, lest they be accused of not taking the Common Core seriously.

Of course, looking busy isn’t the same thing as being effective. In fact, it can often be the opposite. And, when it comes to CCSS implementation, doing nothing may well be better than doing something that undermines the intent of the standards themselves.

In our zeal to change everything, will we end up accomplishing nothing?

That’s why I read Checker’s latest Gadfly editorial, “How the Common Core changes everything,” with some trepidation. It’s not that he’s wrong on the details. Yes, schools whose curriculum and instruction are not well aligned to the content and rigor of the new expectations have much work ahead of them. Yes, teachers with knowledge and skills gaps will need effective, targeted professional development to improve their craft. Yes, our professional expectations for teachers and school leaders will need to change. But as the saying goes, “You can’t boil the ocean.” In our zeal to change everything, will we end up accomplishing nothing?

It certainly seems like our drive to get implementation underway immediately may be encouraging decisions that will take us off track.

For example, a quick search of district CCSS implementation reveals somewhat distressing trends. While many—perhaps even most—districts are on board and working earnestly to get implementation underway, the haste to align resources, materials and practices to the standards is leading some to make questionable, perhaps even damaging decisions about curriculum and instruction. After all, it took the lead authors of the CCSS math standards two years to release thoughtfully crafted criteria that could be used to judge whether “updated” curriculum materials and resources are meaningfully aligned to the new standards. But some districts had announced grand curriculum shifts much sooner, and with neither the Publishers Criteria nor adequate information from either assessment consortium to guide their decisions.

I find it hard to believe that those decisions, however well intentioned, are all going to help point educators in the right direction. And how will educators feel when, eventually, they are held accountable via assessments that are only loosely aligned to the materials that have been chosen for them to drive instruction? Particularly when publishers have assured them that they materials they’ve selected are aligned to the Common Core?

Of course, this is just one and perhaps the most immediately obviously example of where our haste to implement the standards quickly is making waste that we’ll regret down the road. I’m certain it wouldn’t be hard to find more. States are, for example, wading into the murky waters of “model curriculum development” and Common Core professional development, even when their own understanding of the instructional shifts needed to help students meet the new expectations is emerging. And even when state bureaucracies are probably poorly suited to providing instructional leadership to all of the teachers and schools in their purview. Meanwhile, other areas—where states are well positioned to affect change—have been largely untouched.

The reality is that, if state implementation of the Common Core is going to succeed where so many other standards implementation efforts have failed, it’s going to require less busywork and more genuine, systemic change. And to make that happen, states and districts should take a page from the CCSS creation playbook by taking their time, prioritizing what is essential, and focusing their work on the areas where they can have the biggest impact.

The challenge is that tracking implementation is tricky.

The first report, released in 2006, focused primarily on whether high school academic standards and graduation requirements were aligned to “college and workplace expectations.” (In all but two states, they hadn’t been, though as many as thirty-five states were working towards it.) This year, the landscape has obviously shifted dramatically: Thanks in part to the Common Core, schools in every state and the District of Columbia are guided by standards that are aligned to College and Career Ready (CCR) expectations.

Of course, that means that the report must shift to match the changing landscape. To that end, this year’s report has, for the first time, begun to track state progress towards implementation of the standards. According to the authors, the report “provides an overview of the progress states are making” and it “draws attention to key issues states should consider as adoption and implementation work continues.”

The challenge is that tracking implementation is tricky. There is no one right way to implement standards from the state level and, while there are promising practices from across the country, no state has gotten standards implementation exactly right. So, while the authors are right that “every state clearly as an important role to play,” it’s not at all clear what that role should be.

Yet, Achieve wades into the muddy waters of state implementation and tracks a small handful of indicators that it thinks will help focus state implementation efforts. Unfortunately, by failing to make judgments about the quality of state implementation plans, the report fails to say much of anything about the actual progress states are making towards CCSS/CCR standards implementation.

For instance, Achieve reports that forty-five states and D.C. are providing “high-quality processes, protocols and exemplars,” such as rubrics and implementation tools that can be used by school and district leaders and teachers. But, absent any information about the quality of these tools, what does that really tell us?

Similarly, thirty-nine states are developing their own curriculum and instructional materials for voluntary use and five are requiring that schools use specific standards-aligned materials. But, again, what does this tell us? Perhaps the state is not ideally positioned to develop materials in-house and should focus more attention on helping curriculum directors and teachers vet materials (as sixteen states are doing)? Or perhaps states would do well to stay out of the curriculum business entirely. After all, there is little indication that the time and energy states have spent on statewide textbook adoption has had any impact on student achievement.

What made the Achieve report useful in the past is that they made tough judgment calls or they called attention to a failure to meaningfully link standards and accountability to student achievement. They called out states whose K-12 standards weren’t rigorous enough to meet CCR expectations, for instance. And they named states who had failed to link accountability to college and career readiness.

Of course, it’s always tough to develop criteria that judge the quality of complicated and nuanced systems and standards. But their failure to discuss the quality of state CCSS/CCR implementation plans or to contextualize state practices in terms of student achievement makes this report less useful than it could be.

The authors hammer home their message with all the subtlety of a wrecking crew.

The authors hammer home their message with all the subtlety of a wrecking crew: The Common Core English language arts expectations are poor—far lower in terms of content, clarity, and rigor than the Massachusetts English language arts standards, they clearly believe—and their adoption in states across the country “places college readiness at risk.”

The reality—as evidenced by the substance of the report, if not its title—is far more nuanced. And the authors of this report, Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky, have much to contribute to the discussion of how best to implement the CCSS.

For starters, and despite the promotional material Pioneer has issued surrounding this publication and its associated event, Huck Finn is not in at risk of disappearing from high school English class. At least not any more so today than it was the day before forty-six states and the District of Columbia adopted the CCSS for English language arts. This implication that it, and other classic works of literature, are headed for the dustbin of ELA history rests on Bauerlein’s and Stotsky’s false assertion that the Common Core mandates that English teachers in grades 6-12 devote a minimum of 50 percent of their instructional time to informational texts.

That is simply not true.

On the contrary, while the ELA standards do ask that, by twelfth grade, all students spend as much as 70 percent of their in-school time reading informational texts and literary nonfiction, the document explicitly says that that percentage

…reflect[s] the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings. Teachers of senior English classes, for example, are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts. Rather, 70 percent of student reading across the grade should be informational.

Bauerlein and Stotsky themselves even acknowledge, in a parenthetical, that “nothing in the standards themselves requires 50/50 teaching.” Yet, the bulk of the paper is devoted to a thin and fairly unconvincing take-down of this non-existent “quota” for English classes. At one point, in fact, the authors hint at how a thoughtful teacher could organize her curriculum to weave carefully selected works of literary nonfiction that complement the rigorous literature students should be reading. “Informational readings,” Bauerlien and Stotsky explain:

should either come directly from the foundational/classic corpus (we may treat Franklin’s Autobiography, Emerson’s essays,  Walden, important speeches such as Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” and other non-fiction, non-poetic, non-dramatic classics as informational texts) or apply directly to them (for example, assigning essays about Huckleberry Finn as well as the novel itself).

There is useful information and pushback in this report amidst the noise.

Given that the standards clarify that English teachers, particularly in high school, should not shoulder sole responsibility for teaching informational text, guidance that prioritizes literary nonfiction over informational texts in English classrooms is sound. In fact, weaving together fiction and literary nonfiction as the authors suggest could help broaden students’ understanding of complex literature while also helping them understand the history and significance of the texts they’re reading. And yet, this is used as part of a broader argument against incorporating more informational text and literary nonfiction into English class?

Still, the most unfortunate aspect of the dismantling of the non-existent 50/50 instructional mandate is that it distracts attention from some thoughtful criticism and useful guidance for policymakers and practitioners. The authors wisely caution, for instance, that the increased attention that the Common Core draws to reading informational text could

…produce less rigorous English classes than we already have if teachers assign more topical, present-oriented, and ‘relevant’ readings that lack the literary craft and historical remoteness demanded by Common Core’s literary-historical standards and text complexity requirements.

True, and a useful caution for curriculum developers earnestly working to align their materials to the Core—or to practitioners sifting through materials that have been aligned in name only.

Bauerlein and Stotsky also seem to support Common Core’s emphasis on reading appropriately complex texts, but worry that the guidance included in the standards about how teachers can select appropriately complex texts misses the mark. They argue, for instance, that CCSS guidance weights subjective observations about text complexity too heavily and they believe the standards “should have warned against letting subjective judgments about text complexity always trump objective measures of text difficulty.” They also criticize the standards because:

The terms “exceptional” and “foundational” are not defined, and the discussion of “text complexity” in Common Core’s Appendix A does not emphasize texts whose difficulty derives from their literary-historical nature…

And they lament the absence of a list of “recommended” authors and titles. (Although this is a curious criticism, since the CCSS do provide a list of exemplar texts for each grade band.)

Those are fair, if not exactly spot-on critiques of the standards, and it’s useful to help state policymakers focus their time and attention as they develop state-specific implementation guidance for educators.

In the end, though, Pioneer’s near myopic focus on knocking down the standards overwhelms the smaller number of useful contributions made by Bauerlein and Stotsky in this report. But just as the authors of this report shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the Common Core, nor should CCSS supporters be too quick to dismiss the authors’ caution and feedback as the empty rantings of CCSS foes. There is useful information and pushback amidst the noise. And we would do well to listen carefully.

Top-down systems that bypass or undermine school leaders rarely produce excellence in the classroom.

The problem is not about the details of these evaluation systems—although clearly some are better than others—but rather who should be in the driver’s seat in making the decisions about how to hire, fire, and evaluate teachers. And the reality is that teacher-evaluation reforms are unlikely to succeed for reasons education reformers should know well: Top-down systems that bypass or undermine school leaders rarely produce excellence in the classroom.

It wasn’t that long ago that education reform was driven forward by a commitment to freeing determined principals who had a vision for excellence from the constraints that prevented them from developing the teams and practices they needed to drive school-wide change. Today, by contrast, reformers seem to have lost faith in the transformative power of school leadership and are now pushing teacher-quality reforms directly from district offices and statehouses through a combination of legislative mandates (like the one passed in Illinois requiring at least 30 percent of a teacher's evaluation to be based on student achievement) and top-down evaluation systems (like those developed by the CPS, or those being implemented in New York and New Haven). What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. As I argued in a post published in February:

… 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.

What’s more, even relatively balanced versions of teacher evaluation proposals, like the one being fiercely debated in the Windy City, oversimplify what is perhaps the most important challenge in all of education—how to translate teacher practice into student outcomes.

As Albert Einstein once quipped, “everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler.” There is nothing simple about building, supporting and coaching a team of teachers to excellence. Unfortunately, most of the proposed teacher evaluations systems give the illusion that this work can be reduced to a simple formula and produce outputs that are nothing more than false precision. And the Manichean debate about these systems leaves little room for discussing whether principals are willing and able to provide the guidance and support that teachers need to succeed.

Focusing on student results is an important element of teacher selection and evaluation, but it’s not enough.

If we’re going to glean any lessons from the highest-performing private, charter, and traditional public schools around the nation, it should be that, while focusing on student results is an important element of teacher selection and evaluation, it’s not enough. Indeed, the key is pairing a focus on results with committed leaders who make the time to observe teachers regularly and provide systematic, specific, and actionable feedback on how they can improve their practice. And failure to link teacher evaluation reforms with changes in our expectations for school leadership will only serve to hold teachers accountable for what, in many cases, school and district leaders have failed to give them.

Partially in response to reformers’ push to link teacher evaluations to student outcomes, many are pointing to peer evaluation programs, like the one in place in Montgomery County, as models of what teacher evaluation should look like. They argue that Montgomery County’s system pairs evaluation with the kind of coaching and feedback teachers need to improve. Perhaps it does, and they’re right to highlight alternative models that might help us improve teacher quality. But even if it is groundbreaking, I’m equally skeptical that thrusting it on an unwilling or unprepared district is any more likely to succeed without strong teacher and leader buy-in. That’s because as anyone who’s ever worked in a school or district knows, no program is going to be successful unless a critical mass of teachers and/or leaders are on board and supportive of the changes it will bring.

This is something that all great leaders understand, sometimes intuitively: You simply can’t lead if nobody wants to follow you.

And that is where Rahm Emanuel has found himself. He is trying to push reforms on unwilling teachers through sheer force of will. The problem is, even if he gets his way, he’s likely to do more damage to the reform movement writ large because he hasn’t built the support he needs for his reforms to take hold and transform schools. And that means the results we all want are unlikely to follow.

The more reformers succeed in driving top-down reform, the more I find myself longing for a return to the entrepreneurial, educator-led, and results-oriented innovations that made so many of the charter networks we look up to so successful. That’s the moral center of the reform movement and we lose sight of it at our peril.

According to the unions, the fact that Chicago children have been denied the education they deserve is unfortunate but necessary to stop what they perceived as an unfair and unjust evaluation system that “would rely heavily on student standardized test scores.” One of key talking points being thrown around by the media is that student performance on standardized tests would account for as much as 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, something that even many reformers can’t stomach.

However, a close read of the final teacher-evaluation proposal from the Chicago Public Schools reveals a very different picture. In fact, the CPS proposal is more thoughtfully crafted and balanced than the rhetoric suggests, using a well-developed and tested teacher evaluation rubric, peer evaluation from master teachers, and student performance on teacher-created and teacher-scored performance assessments.

In fact, according to the final proposal, student achievement on standardized tests will never account for more than 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. And, even then, the district ensures that the often-derided state assessments—which, as critics note, are in desperate need of improvement—will not be used to judge a teacher’s effectiveness.

According to the CPS proposal, there are four essential elements of a teacher’s performance evaluation:

1. Teacher Practice

Chicago Public Schools has worked with noted educator, Charlotte Danielson, and developed a rubric that is a modified version of the well-known “Danielson Framework for Effective Teaching.” Each teacher would be evaluated across four categories—effective planning (10 percent of the score), the classroom environment (25 percent, and this includes “creating an environment of respect,” and “encouraging a culture of learning), professional responsibilities (25 percent, including reflecting on learning, communicating with families, maintaining accurate records), and instruction. 
What’s more, the city has also offered to provide mentor teachers who will help evaluate probationary teachers and who will help calibrate scores across the district.

2. Standardized Tests

This is of course the most controversial element of the teacher evaluation proposal. It’s also the smallest. At most, student performance on standardized tests will account for 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. And that is only for teachers of tested subjects. 
But perhaps most importantly, the state tests—which people most often think are used in these teacher evaluation plans—will never be used. Instead, in grades 3-8, the state will administer the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) “Measure of Academic Progress” (MAP), a computer-adaptive reading and math test, to each group of students twice a year, once in the beginning and once at the end of the year.
 For high school teachers, students will take one of three College Board assessments—the EXPLORE, PLAN, or ACT test.
Of course, it’s fair to push CPS on whether these are the right tests to use, and whether they are aligned to the standards and curricula teachers are being asked to teach. But as for whether or not student results will factor “heavily” in a teacher’s evaluation, it seems clear from the final proposal that that is not true.

3. Performance Tasks

According to the final CPS proposal, student performance on performance tasks, that will be created by a team of Chicago teachers and scored by each student’s own teacher, will account for between 15 and 20 percent of each teacher’s evaluation. Again, this is hardly the kind of assessment that most fear when they hear that teacher evaluations are going to use “student achievement” to judge teacher performance.

4. Survey

For teachers in grades 4-12, the final 10 percent of a teacher’s evaluation will be informed by a student survey.

In isolation, any of these things can be scary. A student survey! What if I ask too much of my students and they hate me! Or, a standardized test? What if my students have a bad day? Principal evaluation? What if we don’t get along?

But taken together, it’s easy to see how these can give administrators a fair, holistic view of each teacher’s effectiveness.

What’s more, because CPS realizes it’s navigating uncharted waters, its final proposal to the union included provisions whereby CPS would partner with the union to study the effectiveness of the evaluation plan, and where they would jointly decide on next steps once the results of the study were released.

Yet, this proposal is being held up as the main reason that the Chicago Teachers Union denied 350,000 of our neediest children access to schools and meals for at least a week.

Copying success doesn't always lead to success. Photo by Andre W.

Too often, though, replication falls short of these high expectations. It ends up more like an old-fashioned Xerox, where each new copy is a little worse than the one that came before.

In education, the Xerox effect often stems from a shift in focus. In the high achieving schools and classrooms so many seek to copy, teachers and leaders work together with their eyes firmly focused on the goal of improving student achievement. In replication schools, however, that focus is too often diverted from student outcomes to the faithful implementation of “proven” programs, systems and tools.

What’s more, feedback in replication schools too often becomes unidirectional and is aimed at how well the program is being implemented, rather than on whether—faithful to the program or not—teachers are driving outstanding achievement. Unfortunately, when fidelity to a program becomes the goal, the program itself becomes a distraction, rather than a catalyst for great instruction.

Understanding the limitations of simple replication is one of the many things that sets Doug Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, apart from so many others. He makes it clear that his book:

…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.

The strategies in Teach Like a Champion are suggested only inasmuch as they serve the goal of improving student achievement. Indeed, what Lemov outlines are tactics aimed at improving the skills and technique of teaching. They are not meant to provide a “step-by-step guide” to great instruction. That’s because, as so many educators know all too well, getting results in schools is about much more than implementing a program, it is about the knowledge, skill, and commitment of those doing the implementing. In other words: In schools, the chef is at least as important as the recipe.

That is why data-driven instruction is difficult to do well, but why it can be so powerful in the hands of a skilled teacher. Effectively implemented, data-driven instruction centers on setting clear outcomes for student learning, frequently assessing student progress towards mastery of the knowledge and skills they need, and thoughtfully planning and tweaking short- and long-term plans in response to the needs of the students. It relies on the skill of the teacher as much as the curriculum, analysis tools, or instructional program.

In schools, the chef is at least as important as the recipe.

This is something that Paul Bambrick-Santoyo understands intimately. Paul is managing director of the North Star network of Uncommon Schools in Newark, New Jersey, author of Driven By Data, and an educator for whom I have a deep and abiding respect. In his new book, Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools, of the seven core areas—or “levers”—he lists as the most important drivers of school-wide student achievement, “data driven instruction” is highlighted as the most important.

Yet, despite his deep understanding of the importance of setting goals and using programs and processes only in service of achieving them, much of this new book falls into the “replication trap.” In Leverage Leadership, Bambrick-Santoyo seeks to pen a “step-by-step method for creating exceptional schools.” Unfortunately, by doing so, he focuses more attention on the systems and processes that effective principals use than on the importance of setting clear instructional, planning, and PD goals, and on honing the skills that will help leaders help their teachers achieve excellence.

This focus on processes first and substance second is perhaps most evident in the chapter on “observation and feedback.” Here, Bambrick-Santoyo rightly notes that “effective observation and feedback…[is] about coaching,” and he recommends that principals spend far more time observing and giving feedback to teachers than is typical. 

Bambrick-Santoyo is, of course, absolutely right. The traditional teacher evaluation model—where teachers are observed barely once a year and given very little in the way of actionable feedback—is deeply flawed. And spending more time in classrooms and having one-on-one feedback conversations with teachers will go a long way towards helping teachers improve their craft.

Yet what Bambrick-Santoyo all but glosses over is how important the quality of that feedback is to a teacher’s development. Yet this is an area where the principal he profiles is truly exceptional. Yes, Jackson does make more time for teacher observations and for direct, one-on-one feedback. And yes, she does create systems that ensure that feedback translates to action. (Two of the four “keys to observation and feedback” Bambrick-Santoyo outlines.) But effectively identifying the “one or two most important areas for growth” is where Jackson likely rises far above her peers. And that is the “step” that will be most difficult for inexperienced or struggling school leaders to replicate.

In fact, in order to better prepare her to give the kind of focused, targeted feedback teachers need to develop, Jackson has gone above and beyond. She has developed her own rubric of the “Top 10 Areas for Action Steps,” where she clearly and concisely articulates the vision of instructional excellence towards which she and her team are driving. And she uses these indicators to inform her observations, to map teachers’ professional development plans, and to frame her feedback conversations. Given the sizable investment of time and learning she has put into this work, it would be near-impossible for another leader in a distant network to merely replicate what she’s done and achieve the same results. And most attempts to do so would lead inevitably to the Xerox effect.

In the end, there is no “step-by-step” guide to creating exceptional schools and there is no way we will replicate our way to outstanding student achievement results. Bambrick-Santoyo’s book is full of tips and advice that are as important and they are pragmatic. But the only way to take excellence to scale is to keep our eyes firmly focused on the outcomes towards which we’re driving.

Is school just like chess? Perhaps not.  Photo by Adam Raoof.

The first half of Tough’s book unpacks clinical research that demonstrates the importance of parents protecting children from adversity in the first years of life. But it is the ability to persist in difficult tasks that ultimately seems to lead to success. Tough’s book, broadly speaking, makes the case that, insofar as there is any formula for success in life, it starts with a child’s need for protective, nurturing parenting, followed by independence and challenge to develop resiliency and “grit.”

A chapter entitled “How to Think” describes in vivid detail the remarkable success of the chess team at IS 318 in Brooklyn, New York and the uncompromising approach of teacher Elizabeth Spiegel. At the end of the chapter, she takes on the challenge of preparing James Black, one of her star chess players, for New York City’s specialized high school test—the entrance exam for Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and other super-elite public secondary schools. Under Spiegel’s tutelage, James, an African American boy from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, had become a national chess champion and achieved “master” status in the game, one of only three African-American masters under age thirteen.

John Galvin, the vice principal, told her that she had given herself an impossible mission, that there was no way a student who consistently scored below average on statewide standardized tests could ace the specialized-school exam. But Spiegel had seen James absorb chess knowledge astonishingly quickly and she had faith in her own teaching ability. As she put it to me in an e-mail message in April, ‘I figure with six months, if he’s into it and will do the work, I can teach a smart kid anything, right?’

Wrong. By mid-July, Tough writes, James’s progress was minimal. Still, his teacher tried to keep him motivated:

When James would get downhearted and say he just wasn’t any good at analogies or trigonometry, Spiegel would reply cheerfully that it was just like chess: a few years earlier, he had been no good at chess, and then he got specialized training and worked hard and mastered it.

Is school just like chess? Perhaps not. UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham points out that, at the elite level, chess becomes in part an exercise in memory. You and I look at a chess board and must painstakingly evaluate endless permutations of attacks and counter attacks as we try to think several moves ahead. James and other masters see patterns. “For some kids their learning curve is rapid. They get good quickly in ways that most people do not,” says Willingham.

But broad, general knowledge is different, Willingham notes. “Academic knowledge and skills are wide ranging and accumulate over a very long time.” It is nearly impossible to “get good quickly.” Spiegel's principal might have been exactly right.

Tough writes that James “represented for me (and for Spiegel, I suspect), a challenging puzzle. Here was a young man clearly possessed of a keen intelligence. (Whatever intelligence means, you can’t beat Ukrainian grand masters without plenty of it.) And he seemed to be a case study in grit.” Yet despite his own and his teacher’s clear and obvious efforts, James failed to win entry into Stuyvesant, New York’s most selective high school, whose best chess players, Tough ruefully notes, James “will no doubt crush.” Why?

When Spiegel talked with me that fall about studying for the test with James, she sometimes sounded shocked at how little non-chess information he had been taught thus far in life…“He’s at the level I would have been at in second or third grade. It feels like he should have learned more.”

“The specialized high-school exam is, by design, difficult to cram for,” Tough writes. “Like the SAT, it reflects the knowledge and skills that a student has accrued over the years, most of which is absorbed invisibly throughout childhood from one’s family and culture.” [emphasis added]

Tough is undoubtedly correct that much essential knowledge is indeed family driven. There are clear benefits to growing up in a home filled with books and college-educated parents who engage their children in rich dinner-table conversation, museum visits, travel, and other enriching cultural experiences. But even without knowing a thing about James’s schooling, it’s not hard to surmise that Spiegel is precisely right. James should have learned more and it’s his failure to accrue a young lifetime’s worth of academic content, background knowledge, and vocabulary—not his grit or raw intellectual talents—that likely doomed his effort to get into Stuyvesant.

Family background matters. But it doesn’t follow that schools cannot or should not make a concerted effort from the very first days of Kindergarten to provide as much rich content knowledge across the curriculum as kids need to be successful. This is especially true for “school-dependent” learners who are less likely to be exposed to it, like second-hand smoke, through their daily lives, contact with educated adults, or via what the renowned sociologist Annette Laureau termed “concerted cultivation.” Paul Tough hints at this when he observes,

It might not have been possible to turn him into an elite student in six months, as Spiegel had hoped. But how about in four years? For a student with his prodigious gifts, anything seems possible—as long as there’s a teacher out there who can make succeeding in school as attractive a prospect as succeeding on the chessboard.

Right.

Paul Tough has written an outstanding book, and one that will no doubt be deeply influential on parents and educators, and deservedly so. But I fear the takeaway—through no fault of Tough’s—will be “it’s all about character” or “grit trumps cognitive ability.” Not quite right. As James’s experience shows, grit matters a lot, but it’s not sufficient to compensate for a lack of knowledge if we expect kids to clear the high academic bars we place in front of them.

Robert Pondiscio is vice president of the Core Knowledge Foundation. A version of this editorial was originally published on the Core Knowledge blog.

I’ve seen bad schools with good test scores before. Any good schools with bad test scores?

It’s a timely and important question that gets to the heart of the emerging debate over whether standardized tests can fairly and accurately measure student learning, and whether accountability systems based on their results are too often mislabeling successful teachers and schools as “failures.”

Obviously, no accountability system is perfect, but we can all agree that one that gets it wrong as often as it gets it right is in need of serious reform. But is there any proof that is happening?

No accountability system is perfect, but we can all agree that one that gets it wrong as often as it gets it right is in need of serious reform.

Enter Kristina Rizga, a Berkeley-educated muckraking journalist who recently took the reins as the education reporter at Mother Jones after stints at Wiretap Magazine and AlterNet. In preparation for her new article, “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong,” Rizga spent a year “embedded” in Mission High School in San Francisco. Her goal was to seek a “grassroots view of America’s latest run at school reform,” with an eye towards how we know “when schools are failing,” and whether “the close to $4.4 billion spent on testing since 2002…[is] getting results.” The culmination of her work at Mission High is the story of a “good” school that is being wrongly—potentially damagingly—labeled as “bad.”

The first-person account of her time at Mission High School is woven together with warnings from leaders like Diane Ravitch who lament that “accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else.” Rizga also warns readers that

the push to improve scores has left behind traditional assessments that, research indicates, work better to gauge performance: classroom work and homework, teachers’ grades and quizzes, the opinions of students and parents about a school.

Of course, if Rizga’s goal is to show that a “good” school was being inappropriately misjudged by a flawed accountability system, then Mission High might not have been the best example. On the one hand, Rizga is right that it did land on California’s list of “persistently failing schools” despite being, by all accounts, a safe, caring environment, full of hard-working and dedicated teachers.

On the other hand, Mission High’s recent success might better be understood as the hopeful story of how the teachers, leaders, and community have banded together to help a previously struggling school begin to chart a new course.

Indeed, in one of Rizga’s earlier articles, from December 2010, she noted that it was in 2009 when “things started to change in dramatic, visible ways. Dropout rates fell from 32 percent to 8 percent in one year. Test scores shot up. College acceptance rates grew.” In fact, in the 2009-2010 school year, Mission “made the largest gain for a San Francisco High School in the annual Academic Performance Index (API) report, a record that measures school performance based on a combination of state standardized test scores.”

Despite these promising improvements, Rizga was herself surprised by what she found at Mission:

Judging from what I’d read about ‘troubled’ schools, I’d expected noisy classrooms, hallway fights, and disgruntled staff. Instead I found a welcoming place that many students and staff called ‘family.’ After a few weeks of talking to students, I failed to find a single one who didn’t like the school, and most of the parents I met were happy too. Mission’s student and parent satisfaction surveys rank among the highest in San Francisco.

Of course, Rizga is right to shine a spotlight on the hard work educators serving in our nation’s toughest neighborhoods are doing to improve the opportunities for the students in their charge. But this hard work doesn’t mean that the idea of a “troubled” or even a “persistently low-performing” school is an illusion, as too many parents and students in many of our nation’s lowest-performing schools can attest.

What’s more, before we use stories like Mission’s to undermine an accountability system that, frankly, might have helped spur some of Mission High’s recent success, there are two things worth considering.

First, in California, the state takes into consideration achievement results from the previous three years to identify its list of “persistently failing schools.” Assuming the dramatic gains that began in 2009 continue, Mission will not languish long on that list. Perhaps it would be better if such a lag didn’t exist, but in order to ensure that student achievement gains are the result of lasting curricular, instructional, or leadership changes—or to ensure that achievement dips are due to something other than fleeting demographic, curricular, or leadership changes—states are wise to look at more than a single year of achievement data. Will Rizga rethink her conclusions if Mission High comes off the “persistently failing schools” list in 2013?

Second, despite the improvements Mission has seen, the low test scores that continue to plague the school say something significant that shouldn’t be overlooked.

In her article, Rizga focuses on the experience of one student in particular. Maria is an immigrant who came to the United States in middle school, unable to speak English, and who was all but written off by her teachers and her community. That is, until she came to Mission. At Mission High, Maria met a team of caring, engaged, and dedicated teachers who helped her with her work and opened a world of opportunity to her.

Yet, despite Maria’s hard work in the classroom, and despite the good grades she received from her Mission teachers, she still struggled mightily on the California state summative assessments. In tenth grade, despite earning As and Bs in modern world history, Maria scored at the lowest level on the state test.

Rizga hints at why she thinks Maria performed far worse on the state assessments than she did on her classwork and teacher-created assessments. She was in the classroom when Maria and her class took a practice exam in class preparation for the state test. It had two parts: a multiple-choice test designed to mimic the state exam and an essay question created by her teacher. By the end of the first section:

Maria had spent too much time on the first five questions and now she had to rush. She translated another page and randomly bubbled in the rest.

When she switched to the written section of the test, her leg stopped bouncing. When the bell rang, Maria kept writing, and didn’t stop until Roth collected the pages from her.

Roth waiting until the last student had left the room, and we looked over Maria’s test together. She got almost all the answers wrong on the practice multiple-choice section, the only one that would have counted for the state. On Roth’s essay question, she got an A+.

Unfortunately Maria isn’t alone. On the end-of-year tenth grade history exam, just one in five of her fellow Latino students—19 percent—scored proficient or better. And, according to the state test results posted on Greatschools.net, the results for other subgroups—African Americans, special education students, and on—are equally poor.

There is abundant research that suggests that student GPA and teacher feedback is often biased.

This enormous gap between student performance on classroom assessments and their results on statewide assessments is important, and it says something about the struggles that Mission High continues to face. Yes, the Mission faculty have made great strides in some critical areas—attendance, graduation rate, college acceptance, etc. But before we pronounce state tests worthless because they don’t take into consideration these other factors, it is worth exploring the expectations to which Maria and her classmates are being held in their classrooms and whether these test are revealing real gaps in their preparation for the world that awaits them beyond their high school’s walls.

There is abundant research that suggests that student GPA and teacher feedback is often biased, largely because the expectations teachers have for students—or groups of students—are different. In one recent study, researchers found that teachers were less likely to provide critical feedback on student work if they thought the student writing the essay was Black or Latino. Indeed, GPA itself is often a misleading indicator, with some evidence that A-level work in high-poverty schools being the substantively equivalent to B- or to C-level work in low-poverty schools.

Of course, it’s exactly this kind of unconscious bias that contributes to the achievement gap, even in schools that might seem to be getting so much else right.

So, perhaps Rizga is right that much of what we’ve heard about failing schools is wrong. But that’s not because the idea of struggling or “failing” schools is an illusion; rather it’s because the struggles run deeper and are more vexing than they first seem.

Up until now, the Common Core (CCSS) English language arts (ELA) standards were considered path-breaking mostly because of their reach: This wasn’t the first time a group attempted to write “common” standards, but it is the first time they’ve gained such traction. But the Common Core ELA standards are revolutionary for another, less talked about, reason: They define rigor in reading and literature classrooms more clearly and explicitly than nearly any of the state ELA standards that they are replacing. Now, as the full impact of these expectations  starts to take hold, the decision to define rigor—and the way it is defined—is fanning the flames of a debate that threatens to open up a whole new front in America’s long-running “Reading Wars.”

A new front opens on a war worth waging.  Photo by Ben Stephenson.

The first and most divisive front in that conflict was the debate over the importance of phonics in early-reading instruction. Thanks to the 2000 recommendations of the National Reading Panel and the 2001 “Reading First” portion of No Child Left Behind, the phonics camp has largely won this battle. Now, while there remain curricula that may marginalize phonics and phonemic awareness, we see few if any that ignore these elements completely.

But the debate over phonics is limited to the early grades. There remain important divisions over how best to devise curricula and teach literature in the years that follow, and minimizing (or papering over) these divisions has been central to most standards-setting efforts. After all, the “grand compromise” of standards-driven reform has always been: States get to define what students should know and be able to do at each grade, but teachers retain the flexibility and autonomy to decide how best to assist all of their pupils to reach those goals. And standards-setters have been loath to provide too much guidance to curriculum developers, particularly in ELA.

Common Core is no different in that regard. Page six of the CCSS ELA standards states:

The Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach…

Yet in a field like this, where the content is ill-defined and its substance changing—sometimes dramatically—from early elementary to high school, where is the line drawn between the “what” and the “how”?

Most state-level ELA standards have defined the “what” as the skills and behaviors that great readers share. These expectations have therefore described only very broadly what students should actually be able to do, and they’ve only hinted at how teachers should define content and rigor at each grade level.

Sounds marvelously adaptable, yes, but the actual result was that most state ELA standards were vague and virtually meaningless directives that led to the kind of low-level reading assessments and “teach to the test” preoccupation that has plagued far too many classrooms for the past decade.

Enter the Common Core.

Like the state ELA standards that preceded them, the CCSS describe the skills and behaviors that great readers and writers exhibit at each grade level. But, in an effort to define the rigor more clearly than their predecessors, the Common Core standards specify that the sophistication of what students read is as important as the skills they master from grade to grade. To that end, Standard 10 clearly asks that all students be exposed to and asked to analyze grade-appropriate texts, with scaffolding as necessary.

No one likes war, but this is an important fight that’s worth having. And it’s one that has been put off for too long.

This seemingly innocuous directive—to read appropriately complex texts and to use scaffolding to help struggling students understand what they’ve read—is perhaps the most revolutionary element of the Common Core standards. For the first time, the standards guiding curriculum and instruction in forty-six states plus D.C. clearly define what it means for an ELA curriculum to be aligned to the level of rigor necessary to prepare students for college and beyond.

But this clarity means picking sides. There have long been two very different schools of thought about the best way to organize curriculum and instruction in literature. On one side are those who believe that reading comprehension will improve if teachers assess students’ individual reading levels and give them a bevy of “just right” books that will challenge them just enough to nudge them to read slightly more challenging texts. Yes, teachers do provide some guidance and instruction, but that instruction is limited. In essence, the book choice is leveled to meet the student where he or she is; the “heavy lifting” of reading is placed squarely on the students’ shoulders.

On the other side are those who believe that reading comprehension improves as domain-specific content knowledge deepens and students are exposed to increasingly complex literature and nonfiction texts. Here the role of the teacher is more pronounced, and instruction more explicit. The instruction, not the text, is scaffolded to meet the students where they are.

Until now, the vagueness of state standards allowed teachers to decide where their instruction would fall, and to choose between programs like “Great Books” or “Junior Great Books,” which put the emphasis on reading and analyzing rich and complex literature, or programs like the Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop or Heinemann’s Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy System, which focus on assessing students’ reading levels and assigning “just right” books for them to read.

If you are to take the Common Core at its word—that the sophistication of the text is equally as important as the skills that students master—then it will be increasingly difficult for publishers of curricula that focus on matching books to readers, rather than scaffolding instruction to meet their needs, to claim that their materials are truly aligned with the new standards. It’s a sweeping change that holds enormous promise for improving the quality of ELA curriculum in America’s classrooms.

This is also a debate that, until now, has mostly been waged in classrooms and among curriculum developers, outside the scope of state standards and below the radar of the national press. But with the specific guidance in the Common Core state ELA standards, the critical question of how to define rigor in an ELA classroom now has front lines in all but four jurisdictions. And while some believe that, by wading into this debate, the Common Core has violated the principles of the “grand compromise” of standards-driven reform, others believe that this guidance gives these standards more clarity and purpose than teachers have had for years.

No one likes war, but this is an important fight that’s worth having. And it’s one that has been put off for too long.

Perhaps.

On the other hand, if Utah education leaders seize this moment as an opportunity to prove both that the CCSS is truly a state-lead initiative and to show how a state can take the reins to ensure that the aligned assessments are clear and rigorous and to give teachers the implementation tools they need, this move could do more to garner support for CCSS implementation than either consortium has done to date.

The reality is that, more than two years after the release of the final version of the CCSS, SBAC and the other assessment consortium, PARCC, have released scant information about what their assessments will look like—and how (if at all) they’ll differ from the mediocre tests we have now. Nor have they given teachers the information they need to guide lesson planning and instruction. Given the pressure that states are feeling to develop implementation plans, and that teachers are feeling to quickly align their practice to the new expectations, this lack of information is troubling. Assessments are, after all, where the rubber meets the road, and if they remain focused on lower-level, more easily assessable skills, instruction will likely change very little. But, if they change as much as the hype suggests they will, teachers will need more information than they have been given to align their practice to the new expectations.

The CCSS hold much promise, but only if the assessments tied to them are clearer, better measures of student learning than anything we’ve seen from traditional assessment vendors to date.

Of course, the fact that much of the drive to push the state out of SBAC came from anti-Common Core forces like the Eagle Forum should have Common Core supporters across the country on guard. But this is a small battle in the larger war. And, if SBAC or PARCC deliver on their promises, Utah will still have the chance to rejoin a consortium and implement one of the common assessments.

In the meantime, though, education leaders in the Beehive State have the opportunity to prove that this decision was more about getting implementation right than it was about politics. To do that, though, they will need to ante up and fund the development of rigorous, CCSS-aligned assessments and the related materials that teachers will need to help align their lessons and instruction to the standards and assessments. And they will need to move more quickly than either consortium has been able to do to date.

The CCSS hold much promise, but only if the assessments tied to them are clearer, better measures of student learning than anything we’ve seen from traditional assessment vendors to date. Let’s hope that Utah leaders are serious about getting this right and that they are working to put kids first.

On page one, the authors explain the book’s mission:

Pathways to the Common Core will help you and your colleagues teach in ways that will bring your students to the Common Core State Standards’ level of work in literacy. This book will illuminate both the standards themselves and the pathways you can take to achieve those ambitious expectations. It will help you understand what is written and implied in the standards and help you grasp the coherence and central messages of them….

…Pathways to the Common Core is written for teachers, literacy coaches, and school leaders who want to grasp what the standards say and imply—as well as what they do not say—deeply enough that they can join in the work of interpreting the standards for the classroom and in questioning interpretations others may make. [emphases added]

And question the “interpretations” others propose, they do, as they often contradict not only the guidance released by the lead authors of the Standards (including that found in the “publishers criteria” for ELA, something the authors outright dismiss), but also the guidance included within the four corners of the CCSS document itself. Of course with any set of expectations there is room for debate on some of the finer points. But the lengths that the authors go to explain away the parts of the standards with which they are least comfortable is breathtaking.

For example, on page twenty-four, Calkins et al. explain:

The low-level literacy work of sound-letter correspondence and so on—work that dominated the National Reading Panel report (2000) that has undergirded NCLB for years—has been, thankfully, marginalized in its own separate section of the CCSS.

That work, the authors go on, “doesn’t even qualify as part of the reading and writing standards. Reading, in the Common Core, is making meaning.”

Continuing in the same vein, on page twenty-nine, the authors list five essential “Implementation Implications of the Reading Standards.” The first is that “The Common Core’s emphasis on high-level comprehension skills calls for a reversal of NCLB’s focus on decoding and low-level literacy skills.”

These statements are patently false and represent a damaging misdirection of the expectations laid out in the Common Core standards.

The truth is that there is an entire section of the standards—a section that is given the same prominence and importance as the Reading Standards for Literature and the Reading Standards for Informational Text—called “Reading Standards: Foundational Skills (K-5).” There, the standards make the importance of student mastery of these supposedly “low-level” skills abundantly clear, not only by delineating precisely what is expected of students, but also by saying that they “are necessary and important components of an effective, comprehensive reading program designed to develop proficient readers with the capacity to comprehend texts across a range of types and disciplines.”

Unfortunately, rather than deal with the uncomfortable reality that programs that marginalize these critical reading skills are not aligned to the Common Core, Lucy Calkins and Heinemann seem to rewrite the standards to match their own interests.

Another example is found in the focus Common Core places on text complexity. The CCSS are unambiguous in their requirement that all students read grade-appropriate texts. Standard 10, for instance, asks all students—regardless of their independent level—to read texts “at the high end” of the complexity band for the grade. Furthermore, the expectations make it clear that it’s the scaffolding, not the complexity of the text, that should bend to meet students where they are.

To help teachers identify which texts are grade-appropriate, the standards reference specific quantitative and qualitative tools that can be used by teachers. It is important to note two things about this guidance. First, it is focused squarely on matching the text to the grade and the task, not to the reader's independent or instructional reading level. 

Second, several tools for judging text complexity are mentioned in the Common Core guidance—Lexiles, ATOS, Flesch-Kincaid, Dale-Chall, etc. Noticeably absent is the best-selling, Heinemann-published and supported, Fountas and Pinnell (F&P) leveling system. Calkins and her coauthors call this absence “puzzling.” But, rather than engage in an honest assessment of why F&P was excluded from the list—and what that might suggest about the alignment of the F&P program to the standards—they simply say:

Because the criteria used by the CCSS to assess text complexity are similar to the criteria used by Fountas and Pinnell, it seems clear that a school that is already assessing students according to Fountas and Pinnell levels should continue doing so.

No doubt Heinemann sales reps can breathe a sigh of relief at that artful parsing of the facts.

Unfortunately...Lucy Calkins and Heinemann seem to rewrite the standards to match their own interests.

Of course, the F&P system may be “similar” to the CCSS criteria, in that they are both used to select instructional texts. But there are several important differences that raise doubts about whether continuing to use the F&P leveling system and its related instructional materials and guidance will ensure teachers are aligning their curriculum and instruction to the level of rigor the Core demands. For starters, F&P is designed to help match books to readers—the precise opposite of what the Common Core demands. And the purpose of the program is to give students “just right” rather than grade-appropriate texts—exactly the practice that the Common Core seeks to end. 

Again, it’s unsurprising that a corporation—Heinemann—whose livelihood is defined by selling books, resources, and professional-development services that are different from what the Common Core now demands would seek to explain away differences so that its programs could continue untouched. It’s troubling, though, that thought leaders like Calkins seem to be such eager participants.

In the end, we don’t all need to agree that the expectations laid out in the Common Core are the right ones to guide instruction in classrooms across America. But we will never have an honest discussion about the relative merits of one approach versus another if publishers avoid the difficult conversations and merely seek to bend the Common Core to their own will—and self-interests.

The criteria are clear, readable, and user-friendly.

Enter the lead authors of the CCSSM and their just-released “K-8 Publishers Criteria for the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.” While ostensibly aimed at publishers earnestly struggling to align their resources with CCSSM, the ten criteria (and accompanying rubric) can also be used by math teachers, department heads, instructional specialists, principals, and superintendents who are wading through and trying to judge the quality and alignment of materials for their schools and classrooms. They can, in fact, be treated as a “buyer’s guide” that helps show which publishers have made the necessary changes for this big shift in math education. And here is hoping that is one way they get used.

The criteria are clear, readable, and user-friendly. For instance, one of the most critical aspects of the standards is their focus on essential content. “Focus,” the criteria explain, “requires that we significantly narrow the scope of content in each grade so that students more deeply experience that which remains.” To that end, the first criterion unambiguously states that, in any grade, students and teachers using properly aligned curriculum materials will spend approximately three-quarters of their time on the “major work” of the grade as set forth in the Common Core. The second criterion goes a step further and delineates some content that would not be included in CCSS-aligned material. It says, for instance, that probability (and kindred topics) should not be included before grade seven. Statistical distributions should not be included before grade six. And similarity, congruence, or geometric transformations should not be included before grade eight. For educators looking to narrow their search for quality CCSSM-aligned materials, this kind of explicit guidance is welcome.

The clarity of these criteria may unnerve some publishers.

The clarity of these criteria may unnerve some publishers, as they make it harder for the authors of some popular resources to claim alignment to the new standards without, in fact, making significant, maybe even profound, alterations to their content. But, if we’re going to give teachers the resources they need to drive CCSS-aligned instruction, this is exactly the clarity we need.

What's next? The criteria and illustrative rubric definitely make it easier for every district to carry out its own evaluation of available materials to judge their quality and alignment to the CCSSM. But should they have to? Should states or an independent watchdog group weigh in to provide educators with some guidance and point them to a handful of the best resources available? What about those five big national organizations—the NGA, CCSSO, Achieve, the Council of Great City Schools, and NASBE—whose logos appear at the top of these criteria? Who is going to name names: Which materials ARE well aligned and which are not?

A few big publishing houses have largely cornered the textbook market. Now that we have an independent way to judge materials, however, we also have the opportunity to work with smaller publishers, nonprofits, and teacher-created resources that might be as good—one hopes much better!—than the mostly mediocre (and now seriously antiquated) stuff that’s been lining classroom shelves for decades.

…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. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document. [emphasis added]

Proponents of content-driven curricula would do well to keep the champagne on ice. Photo by James Cridland.

An article penned by Sol Stern in the latest edition of the City Journal argues that this call for a content-based curriculum is perhaps the most important element of the standards and that is has led to at least one “undeniably positive development” in American education: “States are now having a serious discussion about the specific subject matter than must be taught in the classroom. And that’s a discussion that hasn’t happened in American schools for almost half a century.”

Yet, proponents of content-driven curricula would do well to keep the champagne on ice because, while the standards hint at this important restoration, they alone can’t deliver on it. Instead, it will be up to state and district leaders and teachers to wade through the morass of new and updated curriculum materials and select those that put the focus squarely on content over process.

Perhaps the best example of a content-based curriculum is E.D. Hirsch’s K-8 Core Knowledge program. According to Stern, while Hirsch has been seen in the past as “the odd man out in the school-reform movement,” now that nearly every state has adopted the Common Core, “Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum has suddenly become highly relevant to the national education debate.” In fact, “school leaders from several states are now knocking on Hirsch’s door, looking for help in implementing the standards.”

If results from a three-year pilot study in New York City are any indication, shifting from typically process- and skills-driven reading programs to Core Knowledge’s rich, content-based curriculum would do wonders for student achievement. In New York, the pilot study compared reading achievement at twenty “demographically similar” schools—ten that implemented Core Knowledge and ten that continued to implement Lucy Calkins’s readers and writers workshop, a balanced literacy program that has been in place across Gotham schools since 2003.

The results, according to Stern’s article, were striking. After the first year, “students in the schools using the Hirsch curriculum had made gains in reading five times greater than those in the comparison schools.” And after the third year, the New York Times reported:

Children in New York City who learned to read using an experimental curriculum that emphasized nonfiction texts outperformed those at other schools that used methods that have been encouraged since the Bloomberg administration’s early days.

Former NYC schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who left his post before the final results from the pilot came in, called the findings “enormously encouraging,” and hinted that they could have national implications for Common Core implementation. According to Klein, now that forty-five states have adopted the Common Core, Core Knowledge should “get the widespread adoption and attention it so richly deserves.” After all, like Core Knowledge, “Common Core focuses much more on understanding complex texts and dramatically increases the amount of non-fiction that students will be required to read.”

Not everyone has been convinced that teaching content is the best way to teach reading.

While the alignment between Core Knowledge and the Common Core is clear to many, it is certainly not alone in claiming alignment to the new standards. In fact, beginning almost immediately after the final standards were released, publishers have been rushing to align—or claim alignment—between their materials and the CCSS. Even Lucy Calkins—the creator of the virtually contentless readers and writers workshop program that has been in place in NYC schools since 2003, and whose student achievement results paled in comparison to Core Knowledge in the three-year NYC pilot—has issued guidance to educators suggesting that the best way for teachers to align their instruction to the Common Core is to “implement a spiraled, cross-curricular, K-12 writing workshop curriculum.”

While perhaps unsurprising, such guidance is questionable given the critical link between content knowledge and reading comprehension, and given the push in the standards towards content-driven instruction.

The challenge, however, is that not everyone has been convinced that teaching content is the best way to teach reading. And only time will tell if the few critical but passing phrases that link the Common Core ELA standards to a content-rich curriculum will be enough to drive instructional changes our students so desperately need.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush captured the scale of the [Common Core implementation] challenge when he told the gathering on the first morning that states are heading for a “train wreck.” He noted that when the new standards and assessments come fully online in 2014-15 that many communities, schools and families are in for a rude awakening... He said, “My guess is there’s going to be a lot of people running for cover and they’re going to be running fast.”

The need for higher standards was brought home by business leaders:

During breakout sessions business leaders from some of the largest, most innovative and successful companies in the world – General Electric, IBM, Boeing, Disney World, Apple Inc., and Intel – lamented that they had good jobs in American factories and offices they couldn’t fill because they couldn’t find candidates with the required math and science skills to do the work.

Terry also recounts the remarks by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, AFT President Randi Weingarten, and CCSS architect David Coleman. It's worth a read.

How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s classrooms?

You can’t “field test” what a state should expect its students should learn.

This sounds like sage advice. After all, field testing is a proven way to refine and validate solutions to complicated problems. But in this case, just because it sounds like sage advice, doesn’t make it so. In fact, suggesting that we “field test” Common Core betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what standards are and what they are not.

Standards aren’t an instructional program or curriculum that helps teachers and students reach an academic goal. Standards are the goal. They are nothing more or less than a simple list of knowledge and skills that students should learn at particular grade levels. You can’t “field test” what a state should expect its students should learn.

Of course, reasonable people can and should debate what should comprise that list of the essential knowledge and skills all children should learn. And educators can quibble over what whether students should learn particular content in fifth or sixth grade. Many critics of the Common Core math standards, for instance, believe that the standards should require all students to take Algebra in the eighth grade, something that isn’t explicitly required by the standards.

What’s important to recognize, though, is that these decisions are ultimately judgment calls. To be sure, debating what students should learn and when they should learn it is critical and teachers’ voices are essential to guiding them, but we shouldn’t pretend that piloting the Common Core in a handful of states will yield decisive information about whether these or any expectations are “right” for students. Because that question depends, at least in part, on the goal we are driving towards.

Of course, therein lies the standards-setting challenge. Ultimately, state leaders—educators among them—need to decide what expectations students across the state will be held to. Pretending that we need to delay standards adoption to test whether or not students will be better off having been asked to master specific content is foolish. The challenge of standards adoption is reaching consensus about what we should expect students to learn. And no amount of field testing will ever solve that dilemma.

It’s hard to justify taking 3-4 weeks out of a roughly 36-week school year away from instruction.

There is an old engineering maxim: “Good, fast, cheap; pick two.” When it comes to summative state assessments, we seem to have picked just one: cheap.

The truth is, if we want to build a better assessment, we need to set a more ambitious goal. The current crop of time consuming, low-quality tests isn’t the way the world needs to work; it’s simply the byproduct of a failure of imagination and leadership.

But what if we simply raised our expectations? Why can’t we, for example, have a new kind of test, aligned to the Common Core and leveraging the latest technology, that requires only 3-4 days of testing rather than 3-4 weeks?

Can’t be done? That’s what they said about the iPhone.

Apple’s innovations were as much a product of Steve Jobs’ commitment to doing the impossible as anything else. As Gregory Ferenstein wrote in a Fast Company article:

Jobs's vision for products were driven by his ultra-ambitious beliefs in what technology for the masses could achieve, as described by Isaacson in a telling example of when Jobs wanted to motivate an engineer to decrease the Macintosh boot time.

If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes saved per year." [Engineer, Larry Kenyon] was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," [Bill] Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.

Steve Jobs inspired heroic innovation to avoid the nuisance of a few extra seconds of boot time. We are wasting weeks of children’s lives on subpar tests and, as far as I can tell, all the future holds right now is more of the same. Where is education’s Steve Jobs? Think of how many lifetimes would be actually saved if we built a better assessment—one that not only painted a more accurate (and holistic) picture of student learning, but that did so by taking no more than 3-4 days away from the instruction that students need?

The truth is our education leaders have simply failed to make this a goal—or really to articulate an unambiguous vision of what we want from our summative assessments and to demand that we make that vision a reality. For example, this was the guidance given by the Department of Education for the Race to the Top Assessment Grant Program:

[The Department of Education will] provide funding to consortia of States to develop assessments that are valid, support and inform instruction, provide accurate information about what students know and can do, and measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace. These assessments are intended to play a critical role in educational systems; provide administrators, educators, parents, and students with the data and information needed to continuously improve teaching and learning; and help meet the President's goal of restoring, by 2020, the nation's position as the world leader in college graduates.

Such a goal is so broad as to be meaningless. It is a request for mediocrity.

If we are going to develop the assessments we so desperately need—and that teachers so desperately want—the first step is to make both quality and efficiency the priority. What if, instead, the Department of Education held a competition for a single assessment that:

• Is a valid and reliable assessment of four key areas: ELA, math, science, and history.


• Is flexible enough to benchmark both to the Common Core ELA and math standards as well as individual state science and history standards.


• Takes no more than three to four days to administer—inclusive of all core content areas.


• Provides data that are valid for the purposes of school- and teacher-level accountability (for teachers of ELA, math, science, and history).


• Ensures that the data can be disaggregated and compared (in ELA and math) across states.

Would this cost more to develop. Absolutely! The R&D for such a test would be far more than any individual state has so far been willing to pay. But, as I argued last December:

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.

It may seem improbable that a new assessment system could meet all of these criteria right now, but that’s the point of innovation. You set a clear vision—perhaps one that seems impossible to achieve—and you put the smartest people in the country to work investing the time and resources to put “a dent in the universe” with their amazing ideas.

Given the importance of assessment to education, this investment in innovation is essential. And long overdue.

Providing information assessments is critical for teachers working to align their planning, curriculum, and instruction to the new expectations.

Today—seven months later and just two years from implementation of the new tests—we aren’t much closer to giving teachers a clear sense of how they and their students will be held accountable to the new standards. And while state and district leaders have begun to put pressure on curriculum developers to provide CCSS-aligned materials, there is very little public pressure being put on the consortia to release more information that would help teachers (and curriculum writers) in their quest to align planning, curriculum, assessment, and instruction to the Common Core.

Fortunately, a few states have started to provide more of the guidance that teachers so desperately need. To that end, the New York department of education has released a set of sample assessment questions for grades 3-8 for both ELA and math. (New York is a governing member of the PARCC consortium, but this work is separate from—though I assume informed by—the work being done by the consortium. PARCC is expected to release sample items sometime this summer as well.) The sample test questions were developed to show to teachers—finally—some concrete examples of how quality and rigor of content aligned to the Common Core needs to change to align to the new expectations. The Department cautions, though:

These sample questions are a change from what NYSED has traditionally provided to schools to illustrate changes to assessments. They were developed primarily for the purposes of communications and training. They are not test samplers, and are not meant to mirror full-length assessments. Additional information about the composition of the full-length assessments will be provided by NYSED during the summer.

The move by the New York State Department of Education is welcome for many reasons, not least of which because, without the aid of sample assessments that show how expectations are apt to change with the new standards, there is a lot of room for interpretation and misinformation about what adoption of the Common Core means for the classroom.

But are the new samples any different than the assessments they replaced? I took a deeper look at the ELA samples (I hope to dive into math shortly) and was pleased to find that the short answer is yes, they are different, in several important ways:

1. The passages selected are authentic, sufficiently rigorous, and for the most part, actually interesting.

At least in the samples, there is evidence that NY has learned a lesson from the pineapple debacle.

2. Particularly in the sixth-grade sample, several of the questions are rigorous and demand that students not only deeply understand the text, but also that they actually draw on evidence from the text to inform their answers.

I was particularly impressed by question five on the sixth-grade test, which showed how you might craft a multiple-choice question that actually demands that students go back to the passage and provide evidence to support a conclusion.

3. Many of the questions illustrate the kinds of text-dependent questions teachers should be asking to drive comprehension and analysis in class.

One of the changes the Common Core architects hope the new standards will bring is that teachers will force students to linger on the texts and to grapple with the author’s words and ideas. Too often in the classroom, students read an important text and are immediately asked for their opinion, or to make a connection between what they’ve just read and something they’ve read previously, or a personal experience.

Of course, this impulse is natural—great readers are always making those kinds of connections and it can be seductive to move beyond the text quickly to get into “deeper” or “more interesting” discussions. We must remember, though, that students at all levels are emerging readers—and if we’re asking them to read complex texts, they will likely need to be encouraged—perhaps even forced—to go back and re-read for understanding. And the best way to do that is for a teacher to develop a series of thoughtfully sequenced, text-dependent questions.

Of course, these sample assessments are a work in progress and there are some ways to raise the bar.

First, New York includes on its fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade assessments a “paired passage.” For this, students have typically had to read two passages that are related in some way, then to answer a series of short-answer and one extended-response question. The released samples still include paired passages, but I think the Department could have used them to better effect. For starters, in both the fourth- and eighth-grade tests, the extended response question that was based on the paired passage is a fairly low-level “compare and contrast” question. The Common Core standards seek to push students to do higher-level analytical writing. New York could provide better examples of the kinds of writing that the new standards ask of students. (In fairness, the sixth-grade extended-response question is much better.)

More than that, though, the Common Core standards focus on two things: text complexity and the thoughtful sequencing of texts. The sample assessments could have capitalized on the “paired passages” by showing how texts can be thoughtfully sequenced to maximize comprehension without spoon-feeding the information students need.

Second, there remain some relics of old assessments that don’t ask students to go back to the texts to search for answers. (For instance, the vocabulary-in-context questions seem to be little more than vocabulary questions—students who’ve never read the passage but know the word will get them right, and students who’ve read the passage but don’t know the word likely won’t!)

Third, several of the question stems pay only lip-service to the Common Core. For example, six of the fourteen eighth-grade questions direct students to “closely reread” a small portion of the passage, but none of these questions actually provides a solid model of the kind of “close reading” the Common Core demands.

On balance, though, New York is to be commended for going further than either assessment consortium has gone in giving teachers the guidance they need to align instruction to the Common Core. And other states would be wise to look to these samples to help guide discussions about how ELA instruction should change to align to the Common Core.

(Updated: 5:15PM EDT on 6/29/12)

Take, for example, the book recently released by the International Reading Association entitled Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading. The first chapter of the book (blogged here), made a strong argument against the practice of assigning “just right” books and in favor of selecting more rigorous texts.

Having made a persuasive case for upping the rigor of readings, the authors devote the better part of the remaining eighty pages to showing, in great detail, just how complicated this process can become when put into practice. What unfolds is a dizzying array of quantitative and qualitative measures that teachers can use to select appropriate texts. 

The authors warn teachers that relying on quantitative measures alone (word and sentence length, word frequency, and text cohesion), which are by far the easiest and perhaps even the most reliable way to pin a text to a particular grade band, is “too problematic to be effective.”

Of course, the authors are right that quantitative measures alone can’t give you a complete picture of a text’s complexity. Poetry, for example, is notoriously hard to pin to a particular grade. And even children’s literature has shades of meaning that, depending on the purpose, could make it appropriate to read in an advanced philosophy course. And quantitative measures become increasingly unreliable at the high school level for literature.

That said, their very thorough explanation of the remaining two dimensions of text complexity—qualitative factors and “reader and task considerations”—turns text selection from a fairly straightforward practice to a time-consuming exercise that seems fraught with error.

The book explains those factors as follows:

• Qualitative dimensions: these refer to “those aspects of text complexity best measured or only measurable by an attentive human reader, such as levels of meaning or purpose; structure; language conventionality and clarity; and knowledge demands.”


• Reader and task considerations: “While the prior two elements of the model focus on the inherent complexity of the text,” the authors explain, “variables specific to particular readers (such as motivation, knowledge, and experiences) and to particular tasks (such as purpose and the complexity of the task assigned and the questions posed) must also be considered when determining whether a text is appropriate for a given student.”

That seems relatively straightforward until you realize that the “qualitative measures of text complexity rubric” has thirteen indicators that teachers can use to score a text—from its “density and complexity” to its purpose, genre, organization, text features and graphics, and on. Included are four indicators that address the “knowledge demands” of the text. The book also encourages teachers to examine the “levels of meaning” in the text, since obviously there are many books that can be read at different levels.

Yet, is such a complex rubric not overcomplicating the process of text selection? And, is it any more reliable than simply asking teachers to use a quantitative measure coupled with some level of common sense?

Do the texts we’re asking students to read have important cultural and literary significance?

In fairness, the authors do note that teachers should rely on quantitative measures and use these qualitative measures primarily to drive planning and instruction. But that note is very much an aside, and their conclusion very clearly directs teachers not to rely on quantitative measures—a message that, I fear, too many will take very much to heart. And I worry that the focus on evaluating texts on each of these qualitative measures leaves out what is perhaps the most critical question: Do the texts we’re asking students to read have important cultural and literary significance?

For instance, given the choice between young adult fiction that is considered “appropriate” for eighth or ninth grade and Little Women, wouldn’t it be better to encourage teachers to teach Little Women than to use “qualitative dimensions” and “reader and task considerations” to justify the book with less literary significance?

This is precisely what Diana Senechal wisely suggested in a comment on this blog a few months ago. She warned:

We get so hung up on measuring exactly what students are getting out of their reading that we forget the importance of being in a little over one's head, being surrounded with language, allusions, and ideas that go beyond the cozy and familiar, and NOT having it all made clear. 

But, to get there, she suggested a different, simpler approach than the one outlined in Raising Rigor in Reading:

I'd like to suggest something different from the "just right" and the "grade appropriate" approaches: an "excellent works" approach. Of course, the works selected should not be inappropriate for the grade. But no work of literature is "grade appropriate," strictly speaking; if it's worth its salt, it can be read at many different levels.

Some will say that Romeo and Juliet is not appropriate for eighth grade—for the simple reason that students won't understand all of it. But you have to give students the experience of reading things they don't fully understand at first. Otherwise you will have to exclude a great deal of literature.

It’s possible that a “great books” approach to text selection would yield far better results because it might steer teachers clear of teaching young adult literature, even when it’s technically grade appropriate, in favor of higher-quality literature and literary nonfiction. And, in the process, teachers save some time that could go into prepping lessons up to the challenge of bringing these works to life.

Setting a high bar for academic performance is key to international competitiveness. Photo by EO Kenny.

There is a reason big, modern countries care about education: Decades of experience and heaps of research have shown a close tie between the knowledge and skills of a nation's workforce and the productivity of that nation's economy.

One way to ensure that young people develop the skills they need to compete globally is to set clear standards about what schools should teach and students should learn—and make these standards uniform across the land. Leaving such decisions to individual states, communities, and schools is no longer serving the U.S. well.

We know from multiple sources that today's young Americans are falling behind their peers in other countries when it comes to academic performance. We also know that U.S. businesses are having trouble finding the talent they need within this country and, as a result, are outsourcing more and more of their work.

One major reason for this slipshod performance is the disorderly, dysfunctional way we've been handling academic standards for our primary- and secondary-school students. Yes, an effective education system also requires quality teachers, effective administrators, and a hundred other vital elements. But getting the expectations right, and making them the same everywhere, is important and getting more so.

Rewarding Mediocrity

Every state has gone through the motions of developing standards in core subject areas such as reading, math, and science, but few have done it with care and rigor. The Fordham Institute has been evaluating these state standards for fifteen years, and our findings are grim. In science, the subject our reviewers most recently appraised, just twelve states and the District of Columbia earned A's or B's. More than twice that number have standards that deserve grades of D or F.

Read The State of State Science Standards 2012.

Uncle Sam is partly to blame for pressing in ways that reward low standards. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, for example, coerces states into deeming the maximum number of kids "proficient" on their tests, but leaves it up to the individual states to determine what score qualifies as passing.

Some argue that Washington could solve the problem by butting out. But the issues plaguing American education—low achievement, poor technical skills, too many dropouts, etc.—are nationwide, and so is the challenge of economic competitiveness. The federal government's screwy incentives are just part of the problem, and straightening them out needs to be part of a larger solution.

Perhaps most damaging to our international scores and economic competitiveness has been our reluctance to follow the example of nearly every other successful modern country and establish rigorous national standards for our schools and students. States, districts, schools, and individuals would, of course, be free to surpass those expectations—but not to fall below them.

We need rigorous national standards because we live in a mobile society where a fourth grader in Portland, Maine, may find herself in fifth grade in Portland, Oregon, just as a high school senior in Springfield, Illinois, may enter college in Springfield, Massachusetts. We need them because our employers increasingly span the entire country—and globe—and require a workforce that is both skilled and portable. This is no longer a country where children born in Cincinnati should expect to spend their entire lives there. They need to be ready for jobs in Nashville and San Diego, if not Singapore and São Paulo.

Yet our education system hasn't kept pace with these fundamental changes. It is still organized as if we were living in 1912.

Opponents contend that different youngsters need to learn different things in different ways, and that national standards will go too far in homogenizing curriculum and standardizing instruction. I would argue that good teachers, the imaginative use of technology, and widening school choice will allow for ample individualization.

A First Step

Just as important, uniform standards don't need to originate in Washington. Indeed, forty-five states have recently signaled they will shift over to new so-called Common Core standards for English language arts and math developed by a consortium of governors and state-level school chiefs. (A similar project is now under way in science, with no federal involvement whatsoever.)

To be sure, much progress in education can be made through choice and competition. But decentralization also makes it easier for states and school districts to lower their expectations, pander to interest groups such as teacher unions, and hide their own mediocrity.

In time, we'll be able to compare the achievement of the states that adopted the Common Core with those that chose to go it alone. But setting the right expectations is at least a first step in giving our entire K-12 education system the makeover it sorely needs.

This essay was originally published by the Wall Street Journal as part of a debate with Jay P. Greene on the value of national standards .

• Clearly define a minimum bar for all students (i.e., set standards).


• Hold students, teachers, and leaders accountable for meeting those minimum standards.


• Back off: Give teachers and leaders the autonomy and flexibility they need to meet their goals.

The push for greater accountability has often been paired with less autonomy and more centralized control.

It’s a powerful formulation, and one that we’ve seen work, particularly in charter schools and networks where teachers and leaders have used that autonomy to find innovative solutions to some of the biggest instructional challenges.

Unfortunately, in far too many traditional school districts, the push for greater accountability has been paired with less autonomy and more centralized control. That is a prescription for a big testing and accountability backlash. 

You needn’t look far for examples of how traditional districts have gotten the accountability balance all wrong. There are a host of stifling district practices that unintentionally hamstring, rather than free, our teachers and leaders. And that unintentionally encourage precisely the kinds of practices most testing critics loathe.

Many of these top-down district policies stem from the earnest desire to replicate the practices of the best and most effective teachers. Unfortunately, what too many state and district leaders miss is that you can’t script your way to great instruction from district offices or from the statehouse. And trying to do so saps teacher and principal buy-in and morale, often while making instruction less effective.

Perhaps the most egregious example is the creation and use of curriculum “pacing guides” that are meant to help teachers align their instruction to the standards.

The theory behind pacing guides sounds good: In a standards-driven classroom (or any classroom, really), the most successful teachers create detailed, long-term plans that are backwards mapped from the knowledge and skills that all students should have by the end of the year. Well-designed long-term plans—or pacing guides—help teachers avoid the practice of opening the textbook on page one and realizing in May that you’ve only gotten halfway through the content you’re meant to teach, forcing you to rush through the rest of the curriculum.

The problem is that there is an enormous difference between a teacher creating her own plan, based on her own curriculum and the specific needs of her students, and one being thrust upon her from a central office. In the case of the former, the teacher understands that the plan is written in pencil, not ink, and she uses real-time information about her students (and from her curriculum) to inform the planning and to make adjustments and changes throughout the year.

With top-down district-created pacing guides, much of that customization and nuance is lost. There is, for example, no one pacing guide that can meet the needs of all students. But even more troubling, when districts force these guides on schools, leaders too often manage not to a clearly defined instructional vision or to student achievement outcomes, but instead to fidelity to the curriculum guide. In some cases, teachers are reprimanded for veering off course.

In a recent article in the Huffington Post, John Thompson described the inherent absurdity of this perfectly. He wrote:

…the worst testing outrage that I experienced…occurred when our frightened administrators forced teachers to attach stakes to bi-weekly benchmark assessments, which previously had been diagnostic. I was supposed to cover a major standard, such as the New Deal or the Cold War every eight minutes, every hour of every day. I was supposed to prepare lesson plans documenting full coverage of world history standards. I was supposed to follow a scope and sequence and in one day cover lessons such as:

Standard 16.4, Examine the rise of nationalism, the causes and effects of World War II (eg Holocaust, economic and military shifts since 1945, the founding of the United Nations, and the political positioning of Europe, Africa, and Asia).

I was supposed to document my approach to teaching, evaluating, and reteaching, while keeping to the pacing schedule with one-day lessons such as:

Standard 7.2, Describe China under the Qin, Han, T'ang, and Sung Dynasties; the traditions, customs, beliefs, and significance of Buddhism; the impact of Confucianism and Taoism, and the construction of the Great Wall.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to teach such enormous swaths of history in a single day. And any reasonable teacher would adjust their teaching by prioritizing important content—ideally with the help of assessment results, quality curricular resources, and so on.

The entire point of standards- and accountability-driven reform is to define what we want students to know and be able to do, to measure whether they’ve learned it, and then to give teachers and leaders the freedom to meet those goals in a way that best serves the needs of the students they teach. If autonomy doesn’t grow in sync with accountability then the testing backlash we are seeing right now will only grow, bringing standards-based reform down with it.

For supporters of Common Core, the stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s time that all of us who care about strong standards put the autonomy agenda back on the front burner where it belongs.

Yesterday in Ed Week, an article by Nora Fleming highlighted the results from a recent NAEP assessment of “hands-on” science skills, which demonstrated that “elementary, middle, and high school students failed to demonstrate a deep understanding of science concepts when they performed activity-based science tasks and investigations…” This breathless account hardly merits close attention. The NAEP data will receive it in due course. But the remarks of the NAEP Governing Board’s spokesman, here quoted, are disturbing. They call for a response not much longer than statements quoted in Nora Fleming’s article.

All scientific "situations" are "real life." Photo by Umberto Salvagnin.

First, the comment attributed to Alan J. Friedman implies that, until now, K-12 science education has consisted of “rote memory and how to follow instructions.” Abandonment of this canard by science teachers (and their teachers) is long overdue. There is no evidence to support it. For half a century, specialists in school science and their professional organizations have stressed, and overstressed, the importance of “hands-on” science learning. That insistence antedates by decades the advent of computers. The suggestion that until now science education ignored the “grasping of concepts,” in favor of rote memorization, is false. All good science teaching and learning, in school and the early college years, is about concepts, and about their application in situations beyond the original locus of elaboration.

Second, whatever these lauded new tests assess, it is probably not “scientific reasoning.” There is no reasoning, scientific or otherwise, in the absence of knowledge. Scientific knowledge, moreover, always includes or is based on reasoning. Every major topic within K-12 science is a series of reasons—evidence and (only) the valid conclusions drawn from it. The reasons show why a particular rule, theory, or law about the physical world is correct—for now. Scientific reasoning is thinking hard about right and wrong answers or explanations. That’s why science is hard.

Third, all scientific “situations” are “real life.” Calculating the force necessary to life a weight, with and without the aid of block and tackle, is as real-life as you can get. Learning the facts from listening, reading, and observing in the lab—of the development of an animal from a fertilized egg—is exquisitely real life. It has been going on in science classes for a hundred years.

For reasons that escape me, the belief persists among school science educators that scientific reasoning is separable from the content of science, or worse, that the content of science is some form of skill, parallel to, but not to be confused with, knowledge and experience. The poor performance, on average, of our students in science assessments here and abroad is at least in part a consequence of such notions. With the rise of cognitive science, they should have been abandoned long ago.

Does a focus on “just right” texts adding to the gap between advanced readers and their below-level peers?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post wondering whether this focus on “just right” texts was doing a disservice to our most-struggling students, even adding to the already large reading and content gap between advanced readers and their below-level peers.

A new book published by the International Reading Association and written by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Diane Lapp provides yet more evidence that the focus on “just right” books may in fact be undermining student learning in three critical ways:

1. Assigning “just right” books makes reading too easy.

“Perhaps one of the mistakes in the past efforts to improve reading achievement has been the removal of struggle,” the authors argue.

As a profession, we may have made reading tasks too easy. We do not suggest that we should plan students’ failure but rather that students should be provided with opportunities to struggle and to learn about themselves as readers when they struggle, persevere, and eventually succeed.

Of course, advocates of the “just right” theory would argue that they allow for this struggle. After all, a student’s “instructional” reading level is defined as being difficult enough that they need to struggle, but not so difficult that they throw up their hands in frustration.

However, the authors argue that the most common method for determining a student’s “just right” reading level is misguided, and that it actually encourages teachers to assign texts that are simply too easy to push comprehension and learning. Commonly, teachers are told that just right texts are those that the student can read with approximately 95 percent accuracy with a comprehension level of 90-100 percent (as measured by comprehension questions). The authors cite evidence that suggests that we’d do better to help students struggle through more difficult texts—those that the students can read with only 85 percent accuracy and with a comprehension level of 75 percent comprehension—or even lower.

2. The “just right” theory overlooks the important role instruction should play in improving comprehension and building knowledge.

Central to the “just right” theory of reading instruction is the idea that students will learn more by reading books that are pitched at their personal reading level, than by being forced to read books that are too difficult for them to understand.

Of course that’s true, assuming those are the only options. In reality, though, students learn more—and their comprehension improves more dramatically—when they read more challenging and difficult texts with appropriate scaffolding and instruction from the teacher.

How best to scaffold texts depends, of course, on the students: their knowledge and skills gaps, and so on. But, if we are to help students improve their comprehension and build knowledge, the burden should be on the teacher to develop short- and long-term plans and lessons that are focused on helping students read and understand more difficult and complex texts.

In other words, according to the book, “the text difficulty level is not the real issue. Instruction is. Teachers can scaffold and support students, which will determine the amount of their learning and literacy independence.”

3. It has focused attention on teaching skills, rather than on teaching texts.

The only way to develop reading skills is to use them while actually struggling through texts.

Strong readers are those who have developed broad and deep knowledge about the topics they’re reading and who—unconsciously—apply a variety of comprehension strategies as they read. Skilled readers will, for example, slow down when reading a more challenging passage. Or they’ll re-read the passage multiple times. Or they’ll look up unfamiliar words. And on. These are coping strategies that they’ve developed and honed over-time. And they are muscles that will simply not be exercised if students are not regularly asked to struggle with more difficult and complex texts.

Unfortunately, too much reading instruction has focused on teaching skills in isolation or having students “practice” them in contrived ways with relatively simple texts. Such exercises are pointless. The only way to develop these skills is to use them while actually struggling through texts. And the only way to force that struggle is to select appropriately complex texts and to ask students to engage with those texts in deep and interesting ways.

In the end, the “just right” theory of reading instruction is focused on the right goal—having students read independently and with deep understanding. But the way it tries to get there may be exactly what is holding our students back from achieving at the levels they need.

I love literature. History. Science. I love grappling with ideas. I’m excited to know how things work and to share what I have learned with others, especially eager-to-learn children. Standards, by contrast, are unlovely, unlovable things. No teacher has ever summoned his or her class wide-eyed to the rug with the promise that “today is the day we will learn to listen and read to analyze and evaluate experiences, ideas, information, and issues from a variety of perspectives."

No teacher has ever summoned his or her class to the rug with the promise that "today is the day we will learn to listen and read to analyze and evaluate experiences, ideas, information, and issues from a variety of perspectives. Won't that be fun boys and girls?!" Photo by Fort Rucker.

“Won’t that be fun, boys and girls?!”

Well, no, it won’t. Standards are a joyless way to reverse engineer the things we love to teach and do with kids. Thus I understand and sympathize if beleaguered teachers view Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as just one more damn thing imposed on them from on high, interposed between them and their students. But if they do, that’s a shame. Because far from being just another compliance item on the accountability checklist, the Common Core State Standards, implemented well and thoughtfully, promise to both improve literacy and make teaching a lot more fun and significantly more rewarding.

In the essential primary grades, where most of our educational battles are won or lost, CCSS promise to return sanity to the work of turning children into readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers. David Coleman, the principal architect of the English language arts standards, recently said CCSS “restores elementary teachers to their rightful place as guides to the world.” He’s exactly right, and here’s why:

Content is back

“A student never thanked me for teaching the main idea,” a teacher wrote to me recently. “But many thanked me for teaching them about animal migrations.” CCSS remind us to engage children not just with rote literacy skills work and process writing, but also, and especially, with real content—rich, deep, broad knowledge about the world in which they live. The conventional wisdom has become that CCSS “add nonfiction to the curriculum,” but that’s not right. Common Core restores art, music, history, and literature to the curriculum.

Why did they ever leave? Reading is “domain specific.” You already have to know at least a little bit about the subject—and sometimes a lot about the subject—to understand a text. The same thing is also true about creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. Indeed, nearly all of our most cherished and ambitious goals for schooling are knowledge-dependent. Yet how many times have we heard it said that we need to de-emphasize teaching “mere facts” and focus on skills like critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving? CCSS rescue knowledge from those who would trivialize it, or who simply don’t understand its fundamental role in human cognition.

Coherence matters

Common Core asks not just for more nonfiction, but for a coherent, knowledge-rich curriculum in English language arts. Yes, there’s a difference. Perhaps the gravest disservice done to schoolchildren in recent memory is the misguided attempt to teach and test reading comprehension not just as a skill, but as a transferable skill—a set of tips and “reading strategies” that can be applied to virtually any text, regardless of subject matter.

Putting history and science at the center of ELA instruction doesn't exclude literature. Photo by Amanda Munoz.

Make no mistake: Building the foundations of early reading—teaching young children to decode written text—is indeed skill-based. The CCSS recognize this crucial truth by calling for the systematic teaching of explicit phonics skills. However, "the mistaken idea that reading [comprehension] is a skill,” University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has written, “may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge-base problem must be solved." CCSS aim to solve it by requiring a curriculum “intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” Let’s be clear: The standards are not a curriculum and do not pretend to be. But they have plenty to say about the importance of “building knowledge systematically” and choosing texts “around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students.”

Sandra Stotsky recently expressed her dismay “that one badly informed person [lead Common Core author David Coleman] could single-handedly alter and weaken the entire public school curriculum in this country.”  But how do you weaken something that does not exist? But at least at the K-5 level there is no curriculum. The fruitless focus on teaching reading as a content-neutral skill—find the main idea, identify the author’s purpose, compare and contrast—created conditions where what kids read doesn’t matter; in that regime, “text” becomes a vehicle for practicing non-existent comprehension “skills.” Big mistake. Putting history and science at the center of ELA instruction doesn’t exclude literature. It repudiates the imperialism of trivial fiction that has debased ELA and deprived students of the knowledge they need to understand serious fiction—and just about everything else.

By asking teachers to focus their efforts on building knowledge coherently—and making it clear that doing so is fundamental to literacy—CCSS represent an essential breakthrough for reading comprehension and vocabulary growth. The intellectual DNA of Common Core ELA Standards belongs to E.D. Hirsch, Jr., whose fundamental proposition has long held that a knowledge-rich classroom is a language-rich classroom.

CCSS invite elementary-school teachers to rethink the tedious regimen of content-free “mini-lessons” and empty skills practice on whatever reading materials happen to be at hand. "There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through fifth grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts. Period,” Coleman said recently at an event run by Common Core (the non-profit organization). “It is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text," he said.

Show what you know

Perhaps the most controversial new thrust of CCSS is their “reliance on text and evidence-based reading” for fiction as well as non-fiction. Too many people have tried to characterize this as diminishing the importance of fiction and literature. That is not the case—and close reading of text is necessary for both. The very worst that can be said about a reliance on text- and evidence-based reading and writing is that it’s an overdue market correction.

As any teacher can tell you, it’s quite easy to glom on to an inconsequential moment in a text and produce reams of empty “text-to-self” meandering using the text as nothing more than a jumping off point for a personal narrative. (“How do you feel about the character’s decision to hit her friend?”) The skill, common to most existing state standards, of “producing a personal response to literature” does little to demonstrate—or to build—a student’s ability to read with clarity, depth, and comprehension. I understand the criticism of those who find the focus on texts and evidence as too narrow, but I don’t agree. Indeed, it has always struck me as inherently condescending to assume that children cannot be engaged or successful unless they are reflecting upon personal experience nearly to the exclusion of other subjects.

In sum, Common Core strikes me as, at long last, the re-emergence of common sense in our classrooms. We’re no longer ignoring what we know about reading comprehension and language development. And we’re making elementary-school teachers the most important people in America. I still don’t love standards. I never will. But the big ideas enshrined within CCSS were long overdue to be restored, renewed, or otherwise placed at the heart of ELA instruction from the first days of class in every American school.

Even Common Core opponents should be pleased.

Robert Pondiscio is the vice-president of the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former fifth-grade teacher.

Updated 6/15/12

The CCSS take on the fallacy that fiction is the only—or perhaps even the best—way to develop students’ love of reading, learning, and critical comprehension skills.

Diane Ravitch recently added fuel to the fire when she penned a post entitled, “Why Does David Coleman Dislike Fiction,” where she lamented the standards’ focus on informational texts and literary nonfiction. She argued:

Maybe David Coleman thinks that education is wasted on the young. But how sad it would be if future generations of young people never read the poems and stories and novels that teach them not only how to think but how to feel, how to dream, how to imagine worlds far beyond those they know.

Of course, none of the CCSS architects or supporters imagines a world where students don’t read fiction. Coleman himself has acknowledged that “literature plays an essential role in cultivating students’ reading skills and developing their love of reading” and he has argued that “the standards celebrates the role literature plays in building student knowledge and creativity.”

Instead, the Common Core seeks to rebalance what has been an almost exclusive focus on fiction in reading and literature classrooms. In a recent post, Dana Goldstein cited research that suggested that only 20 percent of the reading that students are assigned in school is nonfiction. In the early grades, those numbers are even worse—one study of first grade classrooms found that students spent an average of only 3.6 minutes engaging with nonfiction texts in reading classrooms. (In low income classrooms, they spent only 1.4 minutes per day, adding further to the already enormous content and reading gap between low-income students and their more affluent peers.)

But more than just increasing the amount of time spent reading nonfiction, the standards push teachers to improve the quality of the nonfiction reading they assign. Particularly in the upper grades where teachers have a wealth of beautifully written literary nonfiction to choose from.

Common Core detractors would have you believe that will be near-impossible to do. Reading their anti-nonfiction laments, you’d think that there has been little of value written in the genre and that somehow students are going to be forced to pass up Shakespeare and Whittier for bus schedules and trade books.

There is a wealth of literary nonfiction that is at least as captivating and stirring as the most finely written, imaginative fiction.

Of course, the opposite is true. There is a wealth of literary nonfiction (essays, letters, biographies, and so on) that is at least as captivating and stirring as the most finely written, imaginative fiction. Take, for example, the following newspaper article written by veteran war correspondent Ernie Pyle talking about the heroism of front-line soldiers who fought in World War II:

I heard of a high British officer who went over this battlefield just after the action was over. American boys were still lying dead in their foxholes, their rifles still grasped in firing position in their dead hands. And the veteran English soldier remarked time and again, in a sort of hushed eulogy spoken only to himself:

"Brave men. Brave men."

Or this one, where Pyle captured the unabashed joy felt by the soldiers and the French upon the liberation of Paris:

For fifteen minutes we drove through a flat gardenlike country under a magnificent bright sun and amidst greenery, with distant banks of smoke pillaring the horizon ahead and to our left. And then we came gradually into the suburbs, and soon into Paris itself and a pandemonium of surely the greatest mass joy that has ever happened.

The streets were lined as by Fourth of July parade crowds at home, only this crowd was almost hysterical….As our jeep eased through the crowds, thousands of people crowded up, leaving only a narrow corridor, and frantic men, women and children grabbed us and kissed us and shook our hands and beat on our shoulders and slapped our backs and shouted their joy as we passed.

How such writing could possibly limit the imagination or fail to stir emotion is beyond me. And we do a grave disservice to our students when we pretend that the only things that could possibly spark their interest in reading are young adult novels or creative fiction.

What’s more, nonfiction has the benefit of being true; of telling stories that help enhance student knowledge of history, science, art, and on. Things that our students need to know to be able to think critically and make deep connections about what they learn and what they read, no matter the genre.

Of course, for teachers who have spent 80 percent of their instructional time teaching novels, short stories, and poetry, the challenge will be finding and selecting the kind of nonfiction that can enhance learning, bestir emotion, and spark the love of learning we all want students to have. But that is a challenge worth facing.

Download Putting a Price Tag on the Common Core to learn more.

• Business as Usual. This “traditional” (and priciest) approach to standards-implementation involves buying hard-copy textbooks, administering annual student assessments on paper, and delivering in-person professional development to all teachers.


• Bare Bones. This lowest-cost alternative employs open-source instructional materials, annual computer-administered assessments, and online professional development via webinars and modules.


• Balanced Implementation. This is a blend of approaches, some of them apt to be effective as well as relatively cost-efficient.

The report examines the tradeoffs associated with each strategy and estimates how much the three approaches would cost each state that has adopted the Common Core. The authors also point out that, since states already invest billions annually in professional development, assessments, textbooks, and other expenses in connection with existing standards, proper forecasting of Common Core costs should “net out” the sums that states would spend anyway for activities that this implementation process will replace.

To learn more, download the report and watch this short video explaining the key findings:

Also, be sure to tune in to the webcast of this afternoon's panel discussion on the costs of implementation at 4 p.m. EDT, featuring Murphy, Achieve President Michael Cohen, former Florida Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith, and former Department of Education official and Common Core skeptic Ze'ev Wurman.

We need to look at what works for the wealthy and emulate that in all of our public schools.

Too many of us draw exactly the wrong lessons about what should be replicated from elite private (and public) schools.

It’s a familiar theme, and one that I—and many reformers—are sympathetic to. Unfortunately, when observing teaching and learning at elite private (and public) schools, too many of us draw exactly the wrong lessons about what should be replicated. And by doing so, we unintentionally promote strategies that end up widening the knowledge gap between children born to privilege and those born to poverty.

I wrote about this a year ago, responding to an article written by Alfie Kohn that accused urban schools in engaging in what he called “a pedagogy of poverty.” At the time, I argued:

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…

…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.

High-poverty schools simply don’t have that luxury.

But there is another, potentially more serious problem that is aptly illustrated in a recent article discussing the widely recognized and respected International Baccalaureate program. Here is how director general of IB, Jeffery Beard, describes the essential elements of the program:

The [IB] curriculum emphasizes teamwork, critical thinking skills, and cultural and linguistic fluency, and it encourages students to think about issues from different points of view.

The teacher will ask leading questions: Why is this important? Why do you think this way? Students are forced to articulate,” says Beard. Rather than lecture, teachers use discussion and writing assignments to pull out concepts. “It’s ‘explain, define, compare and contrast,’” he adds. “The skills they pick up, as a result, are at a much higher level.”

To be sure, those are important skills—skills that, for what it’s worth, are included in the Common Core. But what’s missing from this article—and, frankly, from far too many discussions about the value of elite programs and elite schools—is a discussion of the rigor of the material being studied. This is the critical what question: What students should be reading, learning, and discussing when they demonstrate mastery of essential analytical skills.

What students are reading, researching, and writing is at least as important as how teachers are pushing them to think.

Yes, we should absolutely push students to analyze and explain, to draw evidence from reading and research to support ideas, and to write for various audiences and purposes. However, what students are reading, researching, and writing is at least as important as how teachers are pushing them to think. And the rigor and content gap between elite schools and traditional schools, while less visible, is much more important that the gap in the way they engage with the materials and content they do use.

That is precisely why we need strong standards and content-rich curricula. (And it’s precisely why states need to take seriously the charge of adding the needed 15 percent content atop the CCSS.) Instructional practices, teaching styles, and critical thinking exercises matter very little if the content being taught is weak. And, historically, the content being taught in elite schools is just far more rigorous than the content being used to drive learning in schools serving our most disadvantaged students.

So, yes, by all means let’s find ways to drive better discussions in the classroom. But let’s also recognize that what makes those discussions work in America’s elite private schools is that they are built atop of solid foundation of rigorous content and hours and hours of practice.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

• ?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.)

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

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

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.

Policymakers 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. The news here has been discouraging for quite some time, but, in a painfully ironic twist, things seem to be getting worse as a direct result of the “reform” strategies pursued by the Bush administration, then intensified under President Barack Obama, and cheered by corporate executives and journalists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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