PIE Network Guest

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards as their official learning goals. But while adoption came quickly, states must now work to prevent rollbacks and get implementation right. They’ll need to grapple with questions on how curriculum, instruction, and assessments will change and how schools and teachers should be held accountable under the standards.

Implementation strategies: go slow or wait

“We’ve noticed across a number of states that most of them don’t have the capacity to orient their teachers and leaders to Common Core,” said Don Shalvey of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Because of this lack of capacity, there’s a tendency to do two different strategies on implementation: go slow or wait. That’s a big challenge.”

Shalvey described two programs the Gates Foundation is working on regarding the Common Core standards:

1. The Literacy Design Collaborative, now in six states, engages teachers in the development of assignments and appropriate texts. Teachers report it’s taken a year to redesign lessons and assessments to the standards. Shalvey said the Gates Foundation will convene a series of meetings to look at this issue, and has also developed social networking opportunities that can be adapted and adopted across states.
2. The Shared Learning Initiative is a type of marketplace where a school system can look at its own student data, enter it into the market system, and then identify the appropriate texts. This will have policy implications for states like Texas that now centralize textbook adoption.

Continuing to build support

Standards implementation is going to be challenging, according to Margaret Horn of Achieve. “There are little flickers of pushback in states already, even though adoption happened quickly and smoothly in most states,” she said.

Horn said the issue has become somewhat political, with some opponents arguing the standards are a federal initiative versus an effort led by the states. “We need advocates for the standards, we need you to help protect them and build the firewall,” she told the audience. Business leaders, postsecondary leaders, and teachers and leaders should be advocacy partners.

Horn said the case for the standards should focus on college and career readiness. “Your greatest advocates are going to be your teachers,” she said, describing how many educators have said, “This is how we’ve always wanted to teach.” Postsecondary leaders and business leaders share the same sentiment.

The best campaign tools are the standards themselves, said Horn. She suggested that advocates get a couple of good examples of the standards, compare them to current state standards, and talk generally about how they’ll be assessed, which should be particularly persuasive.

Horn said there will be another important political moment in 2014-2015 when common assessments come online. “When we really have honest assessment aligned to college and career readiness, we’re going to see drops in proficiency levels, so we should start talking about it now,” said Horn. She mentioned the “Expect More, Achieve More” campaign in Tennessee which started a conversation about tough new standards in the state. "When there was the drop in scores, parents, legislators, and the public expected it, so it wasn’t as shocking as policy makers had feared,” she said. “We need to start preparing people for this now.”

Horn suggested advocates have a conversation with state education agencies about standards implementation and figure out how they can be most helpful. Questions that could help frame the conversation might include:

• Are there teams of teachers digging into the standards and creating lesson plans, model units, etc.?
• Are you planning to prepare the public for the transition to common assessments?
• .Are you aligning supports to Common Core in a meaningful way—are you asking tough questions about classroom materials, textbooks, support programs?
• Is your teacher quality work (professional development, pre-service training, evaluation rubrics) aligned to Common Core?
• Is the SEA reaching out to alternative certification programs and charters and including them in CCSS implementation?

Tying professional development, performance appraisal, and evaluation to the standards

Making professional development meaningful and relevant as part of the Common Core implementation will require an all-out effort, according to Don Shalvey of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He said there will need to be a carrot and stick approach, which represents a big shift. He said the same holds true for performance appraisal and evaluation. “We’ll start to see a greater role for peers in performance improvement,” said Shalvey, citing Pittsburgh and Houston as examples. He also put Kentucky on top of the list of states to replicate.

Shalvey expects an entirely new industry in professional development to crop up around standards implementation to meet the demand. “We’re looking at whether or not there is the equivalent of academies to do this,” said Shalvey. “It might fail in the first wave, but we need to get it right in the second wave. We know a few folks that are thinking entrepreneurially around this, but we’ll need to start with a few states, such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Illinois.

Shalvey said there are plans to convene about 13 state education agencies to work on this issue and build a cadre of teacher leaders. Efforts are also underway to develop open source performance development modules and curriculum units. “We should learn from each other instead of pretending that it’s all new,” said Shalvey.

Shifts in ELA Standards

Susan Pimentel, who served as a lead writer for the Common Core State Standards for ELA/Literacy, reported that when adopting the standards, states often reported that the CCSS were well-aligned with their own state standards. There are, however, three big shifts in the ELA standards that educators should be aware of as they work to implement the standards:

Shift 1: Spotlight on text complexity
The standards focus on what students read in addition to what students do with what they read. Rather than focus solely on the skills of reading and writing, the standards build a staircase of text complexity so that all students are ready for the demands of college- and career-level reading no later than the end of high school.

Shift 2: Increased emphasis on reading informational text
The standards address reading and writing across-the-curriculum that complement the content standards in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects, thus offering new grounding in informational texts and placing a premium on students building knowledge from that reading. Fulfilling this mandate requires that ELA classes in grades 6-12 place much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional.

Shift 3: New grounding in analyzing texts in writing
Shifting from an emphasis on narrative writing (in response to de-contextualized prompts), the standards place a premium on students writing to sources, i.e., using evidence from texts to present careful analyses, well-defended claims, and clear information. Rather than asking students questions that they can answer from their prior knowledge or experience, the standards expect students to answer questions that depend on their having read the text.

Mathematics standards hone in on focus, coherence, fluency
"As for the mathematics standards, they really hone in on focus, coherence, and fluency,” said  Pimintel. She explained the standards provide a strong focus, similar to high-performing countries. They significantly narrow and deepen the scope of how time and energy is spent in the math classroom. They do so in order that teachers focus deeply enabling students to reach strong foundational knowledge and deep conceptual understanding and are able to transfer mathematical skills and understanding across concepts and grades. Each standard is not a new event, but an extension of previous learning. The standards also expect students to have speed and accuracy with simple calculations.

Pimentel said the two consortia developing assessment systems aligned to the standards are going to address the three shifts in ELA/Literacy, and in mathematics, attend to focus and fluency.