Learning English: Accountability, Common Core, and the college-for-all movement are transforming instruction

This is an interesting piece.  It considers the possible "silver lining" to Prop. 227 that eliminated bilingual education in California although it continued via an institutionalized waiver process.  That is, it allegedly eliminated a lot of low performing bilingual education programs.  Since then, particularly among the ranks of white, middle class parents wanting bilingual education for their children, dual language has gained a lot of traction.  Great graphic on "America the Multilingual" from the Migration Policy Institute within. (see below).

Angela

Learning English: Accountability, Common Core, and the college-for-all movement are transforming instruction

By Joanne Jacobs

WINTER 2016 / VOL. 16, NO. 1

Third graders at Redwood City’s Hoover Elementary School present a collaborative group project

Ocean animals was the theme in pre-kindergarten classes at a California school in early May. Some
pre-K teachers introduced “octopus” and “tentacle,” while others taught “pulpo” and “tentaculo.”
In all the pre-K classes, children acted out vocabulary words with hand movements, sang songs,
and played a guess-the-ocean creature game. Then they moved to tables, where some of them
painted paper octopuses, while others gingerly smelled, touched, and then dangled little octopuses
from a local fish market.
Down the hall, kindergartners wrote about their favorite desert animals, talked with a partner about
where cacti grow, and chanted about biomes:
Arid deserts drying
Luscious forests growing
Polar caps freezing
Green prairies growing …
First graders discussed a story their teacher had read aloud in which a grandfather remembers courting
his wife. In Common-Core style, they cited “clues” from the text of the grandfather’s feelings and
learned words to describe emotions.
“How do you know he’s happy?” asked Heidi Conti, the teacher.
“He ‘winked’ at the boy,” answered a student.
“Good,” responded Conti. “You made an inference.”
Ninety-five percent of students at Redwood City’s Hoover School, in San Mateo County, come from low-income and working-class Latino families, and nearly all start school as English language
learners (ELLs). The elementary and middle school piloted the Sobrato Early Academic Language
(SEAL) program in 2009 in hopes of raising reading and math scores and moving more students to
the college track.
Programs like SEAL offer a fresh approach to educating English language learners. The focus in
schools is shifting “from the language of instruction to the quality of instruction,” says Kenji Hakuta,
a Stanford professor who specializes in language learning. As a result, long-standing debates about
whether English learners should be taught only in English or also in their native tongue feel
increasingly obsolete.

Continue reading here.

This kind of reform is long overdue.  Evidence here in Texas that we're ready for a shift ourselves.  This piece provides some direction.
-Angela

Report urges revamping student testing

October 21, 2014 | By John Fensterwald | 12 Comments

iStockphoto.com

Report urges revamping student testing

October 21, 2014 | By John Fensterwald | 12 Comments

With a nod to California, a new report suggests overhauling how school and student success is measured in the United States.
The report, by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the National Center for Innovation in Education at the University of Kentucky, recommends alternatives to annual standardized tests. It says there should be far more emphasis on ongoing assessments of students as part of regular classroom instruction.
Schools should focus more on “formative assessments,” the curriculum-based problems and quizzes that teachers give to students throughout the school year for feedback on how students are doing, in addition to locally developed alternatives to assessments, the report argues. The latter could include science experiments, literary essays, classroom projects and, by the senior year of high school, internship experiences and portfolios that students can present to employers and colleges.
Written by Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the Stanford program, and Gene Wilhoit and Linda Pittenger from the Kentucky center, the report also calls for the replication of elements of California’s new funding and accountability system, the Local Control Funding Formula, which it praises for directing more money toward low-income students, English learners and foster children. Student achievement will falter in an era of higher learning standards without equitable funding and dramatic improvement in the preparation of teachers, the report says.
Wilhoit is the former executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the nonpartisan organization of elected and appointed state superintendents that co-produced the Common Core State Standards. Darling-Hammond is a senior research adviser for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the developer of the Common Core tests that California students will take next spring. She also chairs the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which oversees the state’s teacher preparation programs.
Wilhoit and Darling-Hammond say the adoption of Common Core, with its goal of preparing students for college and 21^st-century careers, marks a monumental shift in expectations of students. Wilhoit said the new standards “require students to do things they had not been asked to do before,” and to develop “habits of the mind” and abilities to solve problems, apply knowledge and think critically.
Multiple-choice, end-of-year tests, including higher quality and more complex versions such as the pending Smarter Balanced assessments, alone won’t lead students to reach those goals or adequately measure all that will be demanded of them, Wilhoit said. The report says it is critical to stop using annual tests as the chief gauge of school success and student achievement.
The report comes as Congress is deadlocked over whether to end or amend the 12-year-old No Child Left Behind law, which demanded that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, and partisan disagreements over the role of the federal government in education.
There also is a growing backlash against standardized tests – in states opposed to sanctions under the federal law and by teachers across the nation who resent putting in weeks of preparation for annual student tests and who oppose being evaluated based primarily on student performance on tests.

Wilhoit said the new standards “require students to do things they had not been asked to do before,” and to develop “habits of the mind” and abilities to solve problems, apply knowledge and think critically.

Alliance for Excellent Education webinar

Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, co-author of the report.

Last week, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of Great City Schools, which represents most of the nation’s largest urban districts, issued a set of principles on testing that called for fewer, higher quality and “meaningful” assessments.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in response, defended quality assessments, including annual tests, as “a vital part of progress in education.” But Duncan acknowledged that in some places, tests are “dominating the calendar and culture of schools and causing undue stress for students and educators.”
Earlier this year, Reps. Chris Gibson, R-N.Y, and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., introduced a bill, supported by the National Education Association, that would require testing math and reading only once in elementary, middle and high school. The Stanford/University of Kentucky report backs this approach, proposing that students take only parts of the math or reading exam. The advantage is that students can be given more complex, multi-step problems without lengthening the time of the test. The disadvantage is that such “matrix scoring” produces school- or district-wide results, rather than individual scores.

Signs of innovation

Duncan has granted 42 states waivers from the sanctions and some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Some states, such as New Hampshire and Kentucky, are experimenting with alternative forms of assessments and measurements of performance. The report highlighted the seven California districts that, in obtaining an NCLB waiver, have created an accountability index with multiple measures. They will include social and emotional learning, and difficult-to-quantify qualities, like perseverance, that affect the ability to learn.
The report doesn’t directly address the federal government’s role under the new accountability system but suggests that Congress would give states more flexibility to create strategies addressing student achievement, an equitable distribution of  resources and teacher preparation. It recommends that states establish a “School Quality Review process” in which schools will be evaluated at least every five years by teachers, administrators and outside experts who will look at the full breadth of a school’s life. California’s Local Control Funding Formula established the Collaborative for Educational Excellence, which will oversee the school improvement process, but it it has yet to meet. Kentucky, Ohio and New York have adopted elements of the inspection process.
There are multiple ways to achieve the new, high standards, Wilhoit said in a webinar last week. But for that to happen, the federal government, which “ created the mess we’re in,” must step aside to allow states to innovate.

John Fensterwald covers education policy. Email him or Follow him on Twitter. Sign up here for a no-cost online subscription to EdSource Today for reports from the largest education reporting team in California.

Finding Common Ground: The Controversy Over Common Core Standards

Finding Common Ground: The Controversy Over Common Core Standards

 

I am happy to share this info graphic on the controversy over Common Core.  This is a very helpful visual. 


Thanks to Jakayla Mullin for sharing. 

-Angela

Caught In the Middle: Local schools seek relief from No Child Left Behind

Neal Morton | The Monitor
October 07, 2011

Local educators likely will have to continue living with the widely criticized federal No Child Left Behind education law, which flunked nearly one-third of all Hidalgo County schools this year.

Last month, President Barack Obama detailed several education reforms that states must fulfill before he grants waivers to the bill’s stringent requirement that 100 percent of students reach math and reading proficiency by 2014.

But Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott recently hinted the White House has not convinced him the state needs to apply for a waiver.

“He is leaning toward not applying, but he hasn’t decided,” said TEA spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe.

Local superintendents criticized the controversial No Child Left Behind bill, or NCLB, this summer when it failed 104 local campuses – a staggering 39 percent – for not keeping up with its rising standards toward 100 percent proficiency.

However, they may face further frustration and more disappointing ratings next year since Scott has expressed concerns with the president’s list of reforms. Specifically, Ratcliffe said, the requirement that a state’s best teachers serve in the most challenging or struggling schools worried the commissioner.

“Currently staffing is left up to our local school districts to decide, and so he was very uncomfortable with having the U.S. Department of Education tell him to tell schools who to staff and where to staff in each school,” Ratcliffe said. “He felt that was quite an overreach.”

She added that Scott also skeptically viewed the president’s reliance on so-called Common Core standards, a nationwide framework for school curriculum that all but six states, including Texas, have adopted.

Republican presidential hopeful and Texas Gov. Rick Perry has lambasted the Common Core initiative as an “irresponsible” attempt to give bureaucrats and special interest groups power over local educational decisions.

Obama said states filing for waivers do not need to adopt Common Core standards, yet Ratcliffe said some worry remained about a “roundabout way” the president devised to implement them.

“You can get the waiver without having the Common Core standards, but you had multiple extra steps to go through to verify everything,” said Ratcliffe, who added those steps were “definitely designed” to still push the standards.



UNREALISTIC AND FRUSTRATING

The state’s reluctance to apply for the waivers and grant educators relief has frustrated local school officials.

Scott Owings, Sharyland schools superintendent, suggested Perry cared more about his presidential campaign than the future of his state’s schools.

“The children of Texas should not be held hostage to campaign tactics,” Owings said in an email. “The waivers are a good idea since the split (U.S.) Congress has not been able to act” on NCLB.

“I do not believe the TEA commissioner and the governor will allow Texas to apply,” he added, though he said he was encouraged by U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan’s “comments that individual districts may be able to apply if their state will not.”

The Sharyland district as a whole missed the NCLB mark this year, though only because of the bill’s convoluted rules governing alternative testing for special education students.

Currently, only 3 percent of students who qualify to take a modified exam can. And the federal accountability system automatically counts as failing any student above that 3 percent cap who takes an alternative test.

“This aspect of the system is totally contradictory to the original intent of (NCLB),” Owings said when the ratings came out last August.

“We will continue to do what is appropriate educationally for our special education students. We want to challenge them,” he added, “but (we) will not test them at a level that is unrealistic and frustrating to their level of ability.”

Several Hidalgo County district heads echoed his complaints, and in Edinburg, Superintendent Rene Gutierrez said he and his colleagues would begin writing to the commissioner to plead for him to apply for an NCLB waiver.



‘THE DOLLARS DO HELP’

Ratcliffe said Scott could make a decision within the next couple of weeks, prior to a November application deadline, or wait before another in February.

If, as many predict, he and Perry thumb their noses at Obama’s reform agenda, local districts must still comply with NCLB’s ever-rising standards. However, they may have some help.

Under the federal law, the state releases “school improvement program,” or SIP, grants to provide extra tutoring, improved curriculum and more faculty at struggling schools.

Last year, the La Joya school district and its Ann Richards Middle School escaped NCLB sanctions because Superintendent Alda Benavides effectively used SIP funds to post great improvement.

The “key is responding to intervention, providing the right strategy for each student and building the capacity of teachers,” Benavides wrote in a letter.

She drew from her own district’s experience to offer advice to frustrated neighbors.

Benavides said additional money should go toward staff development, research-based evaluations and more if schools must live with NCLB and its “tougher standards.”

“Monitor the implementation of all supplemental programs so that they are implemented with fidelity and constant, constant evaluation of each students’ progress,” she advised. “The extra tutoring and support that we can provide to schools as they work diligently…take time and money, so the dollars do help.”

Will Common Core Standards Make Students College-Ready?

Huffington Post
04/27/11

UPDATE: Since this story was first published, it has been clarified that 44 states and U.S. territories, not 48, have stated an intention to adopt the standards. The article has been updated to reflect the change.

--------------

Storytime isn't what it used to be. In classrooms across the country, kindergartners aren't just having books read to them -- they're comparing and contrasting characters. And second-graders aren't reciting rhymes -- they're analyzing poetry.

These examples are the Common Core Standards in action. From kindergarten to 12th grade, 15 districts nationwide are currently participating in trial runs of the standards, which urge critical thinking in students and also provide uniform benchmarks for all states to follow.

But the standards also allow schools some flexibility. In Florida, district officals are meeting now to discuss exactly what their standards will look like. Melissa Erickson, president of the Hillsborough County Council of PTA/PTSA, tells Tampa Bay Online she thinks common standards will benefits the entire education community:

This is the biggest thing right now in education.

Forty-four states and U.S. territories have stated an intention to adopt the standards, introduced last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The measure was endorsed by the Obama administration, and most states quickly jumped on board last year in an attempt to get federal funding through Race to the Top. States that agreed to adopt the standards won points for a share of the $3.4 billion.

The new standards give specific goals -- from kindergarten to 12th grade -- that prepare students for college. The New York Times cites examples of English and history students who are required to go beyond summarizing information by reading media such as long-form magazine articles and synthesizing them with other sources. Students aren't just exposed to different viewpoints, but are also required to analyze the beliefs and biases present in a piece of reading, according to the Times.

But Shael Polakow-Suransky, New York's chief academic officer, says big changes within students won't happen overnight.

"This isn't one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different," he said.

And some are simply not pleased with the new standards.

Texas, which has resisted the new standards completely, has now written its own. The standards are founded upon Massachusetts' former benchmarks, according to Boston.com.

Though Massachusetts is one of the states that adopted the standards last year, the Tantasqua Regional school board has petitioned the legislature to now opt out, Education Week reports.

The state's initial adoption of the standards came amid controversy, as Massachusetts leads the country in education scores and was hesitant to forgo its own standards:

We have some of the most exacting standards in the United States," said James A. Cooke, the Tantasqua Regional school board say member who initiated discussion of the issue. "Why should we use someone else's standards?

As an example, the national standards make little room for the state's strong commitment to literature, Boston.com reports. The Common Core Standards require that by 12th grade, 30 percent of students' readings should be literary and 70 percent should be informational.

The Tantasqua Regional board says the state was too quick to embrace the new standards, excited by the idea of potentially winning Race to the Top dollars. But a state education department spokesman released a statement last year saying Massachusetts believes in a nationwide unified front:

That said, in today's economy, it makes little sense for 50 states to have 50 separate set [sic] of standards, and for students to be tested using 50 separate assessments. In addition, while we have strong standards now, we would be naïve to assume they cannot be improved, and that we have nothing left to learn from others.

Gates and Pearson Foundations Team For Common Core Curricula

The Foundations have undertaken an ambitious project to create 24 courses in math and English from kindergarten through grade 12.

May 5, 2011

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is joining with the Pearson Foundation to write a set of math and English curricula that will be built around the recently introduced Common Core Standards, Education Week reports. The curricula will include 11 courses in math for grades K-10 and 13 in English and language arts for grades K-12. Of the 24 courses, four will be available online for free and the remainder will be purchasable through the Pearson Foundation. In addition to the course plans, the full program will also include tools for teacher assessment and professional development.

Each course will serve as a 150-day curriculum and will harness technological advances such as social networking, animation, and gaming to better engage and motivate students, Judy B. Codding, the managing director of the Pearson Foundation, told reporters.

The effort will be funded by a $3 million grant from the Gates Foundation. It is part of a recently announced $20 million project by the foundation that will use new technologies to craft teaching and learning tools for the Common Core Standards.

The first set of courses for secondary-level math and elementary school English is scheduled to be available for the 2013-14 school year, while the full 24-course set will be released in time for 2014-15. Officials from Gates and Pearson have said that they are working with experts both inside and outside the U.S and consulting with professionals from countries like Japan, Singapore, and Israel.

The effort has drawn both supporters and critics. Kent Williamson, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, said that many previous attempts at a comprehensive curriculum failed because they didn’t have enough flexibility to account for local conditions. He added that NCTE has never written a model curriculum because it feels the best approach is for districts and schools to develop their own, only using comprehensive ones as a guide.

Grover J. Whitehurst, former director for the U.S. Department of Education and currently working for the Brookings Institution, was happy to see an attempt at a curriculum that covers so many grades with the new material smoothly building on the previously covered work. He was, however, unsure if the deadline the project organizers set for themselves was entirely realistic:

They’ve set out some ambitious goals if they expect [the curricula] to be truly innovative and groundbreaking. It’s easier to have good-sounding rhetoric about new materials, thinking, approaches, technology, than it is to do it. Ultimately, we have to see what it looks like.

Full Standards System in States Several Years Away

By Catherine Gewertz | Ed Week
January 6, 2011

Most states plan to revise professional development for teachers by next year to help them teach to the new common standards, but it will take two or more years to complete anticipated changes in curriculum, assessment, and other elements of the K-12 system to adapt to the new learning goals, according to a survey released today.

The survey is the first national snapshot of where states stand in their plans to implement the new standards. It shows that more than 30 states plan changes in the curriculum they teach, how they train and evaluate teachers, and how they size up students’ learning. But few of those changes will be fully realized before 2013.

State feedback was gathered by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and policy group. Survey responses came from K-12 education officials in 42 states and the District of Columbia in October and November. Thirty-six of the responding states had fully or provisionally adopted the common standards then; as of this week, 44 have done so. Survey respondents also included 11 of the 12 states that won grants under the federal government’s Race to the Top program.

The survey results illustrate “the immensity of the task” of implementing the common standards, said CEP President Jack Jennings.

“It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to be very complicated to make these standards mean anything,” he said. “Yet if states don’t do everything, then they won’t mean what they should mean.”

Change on the Way

Most states plan key changes in their education systems to respond the common-core state standards, but timelines vary.

SOURCE: Center on Education Policy


Read on...

States Receive a Reading List: New Standards for Education

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
Published: June 2, 2010

The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.

The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.

The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.

Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”

The Obama administration hopes that states will quickly adopt the new standards in place of the hodgepodge of current state benchmarks, which vary so significantly that it is impossible to compare test scores from different states. The United States is one of the few developed countries that lacks national standards for its public schools.

Students whose families move from New York to Georgia or California, for example, often have difficulty adjusting to new schools because classroom work is organized around different standards. The problem has become worse, since many states have weakened standards in recent years to make it easier for schools to avoid sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The new standards were written by English and math experts convened last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They are laid out in two documents: Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, and Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects. With three appendices, the English standards run to nearly 600 pages.

Under the new math standards, eighth graders would be expected to use the Pythagorean theorem to find distances between points on the coordinate plane and to analyze polygons. Under the English standards, sixth-grade students would be expected to describe how a story’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes and how an author develops the narrator’s point of view.

“The standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach,” the introduction to the new English standards says. “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.”

In keeping with those principles, the English standards do not prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short stories, novels and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of texts that students should be able to master. On the list of exemplary read-aloud books for second and third graders, for instance, is James Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks.” One play cited as appropriate for high school students is “Oedipus Rex,” by Sophocles.

Five English texts are required reading. High school juniors and seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Also, said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who was lead writer on the English standards, “Students have to read one Shakespeare play — that’s a requirement.”

In a joint letter, Joel I. Klein, the New York Schools chancellor, and 54 other big-city superintendents who are members of the Council of the Great City Schools urged adoption of the standards.

Just how many states will adopt them remains unclear. Texas and Alaska declined to participate in the standards-writing effort. In the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition, states that adopt by Aug. 2 will stand a higher chance at a piece of the $4 billion in federal grant money to be divided among winning states in September.

“I’m hopeful that a bunch of states with crummy standards will end up with better ones this way,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has long called for national standards. But the Obama administration is pressing states to adopt them too fast, he said. His recommendation to states: “Don’t rush to judgment.”

States Receive a Reading List: New Standards for Education

Check out the official website for an overview of the NGA and CCSSO's standards.

-Patricia

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
June 2, 2010

The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.

The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.

The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.

Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”

The Obama administration hopes that states will quickly adopt the new standards in place of the hodgepodge of current state benchmarks, which vary so significantly that it is impossible to compare test scores from different states. The United States is one of the few developed countries that lacks national standards for its public schools.

Students whose families move from New York to Georgia or California, for example, often have difficulty adjusting to new schools because classroom work is organized around different standards. The problem has become worse, since many states have weakened standards in recent years to make it easier for schools to avoid sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The new standards were written by English and math experts convened last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They are laid out in two documents: Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, and Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects. With three appendices, the English standards run to nearly 600 pages.

Under the new math standards, eighth graders would be expected to use the Pythagorean theorem to find distances between points on the coordinate plane and to analyze polygons. Under the English standards, sixth-grade students would be expected to describe how a story’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes and how an author develops the narrator’s point of view.

“The standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach,” the introduction to the new English standards says. “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.”

In keeping with those principles, the English standards do not prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short stories, novels and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of texts that students should be able to master. On the list of exemplary read-aloud books for second and third graders, for instance, is James Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks.” One play cited as appropriate for high school students is “Oedipus Rex,” by Sophocles.

Five English texts are required reading. High school juniors and seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Also, said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who was lead writer on the English standards, “Students have to read one Shakespeare play — that’s a requirement.”

In a joint letter, Joel I. Klein, the New York Schools chancellor, and 54 other big-city superintendents who are members of the Council of the Great City Schools urged adoption of the standards.

Just how many states will adopt them remains unclear. Texas and Alaska declined to participate in the standards-writing effort. In the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition, states that adopt by Aug. 2 will stand a higher chance at a piece of the $4 billion in federal grant money to be divided among winning states in September.

“I’m hopeful that a bunch of states with crummy standards will end up with better ones this way,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has long called for national standards. But the Obama administration is pressing states to adopt them too fast, he said. His recommendation to states: “Don’t rush to judgment.”

Common-Standards Draft Excludes ELL Proficiency

Once again we see how our fastest growing subgroup (ELLs) are an afterthought in policy making. We need to really make a shift in the way we conceptualize these students together with college readiness. This is an area that select policy makers in Texas are beginning to make a priority but more work is certainly needed.

Check out UCLA's Policy Brief.

-Patricia

By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
May 20, 2010

The writing teams for common standards have sought the advice of researchers on English-language learners, but the organizations that are coordinating the venture don’t plan to produce a set of English-language-proficiency standards to go with the common standards.

Instead, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association intend to leave that up to the states.

“As far as developing [the English-proficiency standards] ourselves, I don’t see that happening,” said Keith Gayler, the director of standards for the CCSSO. At the same time, he added, the organization might help some states work together to craft English-proficiency standards.

Meanwhile, the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, or WIDA, consortium, whose English-language-proficiency standards have been adopted by 23 states and the District of Columbia, is already revising them to align with the common standards.

“We do feel a need to look at [our] standards and make sure we are in sync with what is happening nationally with the common core,” said Timothy Boals, the executive director of WIDA. He said the consortium has formed a national panel of experts to redo the existing proficiency standards.

For the first time under the No Child Left Behind Act, states were required to devise English-language-proficiency standards, which spell out what students who are new to English should know and be able to do in their journey toward acquiring the language. States also had to produce tests aligned with those standards that assess ELLs each year in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Read on...

States Embrace Student-Data Tracking, With Prodding From White House

By Paul Basken | The Chronicle of Higher Education
Washington
January 3, 2010

The Bush administration spent years, without much success, trying to win support for a national database to track the academic progress of individual college students. The Obama administration may now be making progress by emphasizing action at the state level.

At least 31 states are operating student databases with at least some college participation, up from just 12 in 2005, according to a November survey by the Data Quality Campaign, an association of state-government officials and education-policy groups. Another survey, scheduled to be released early this year by the State Higher Education Executive Officers organization, counts at least 45 states keeping some individual records on college students.

"It is clear that this agenda is moving forward, despite opposition from the private colleges," says Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, which specializes in data-driven consulting. "The accountability push is such that these numbers are just simply going to be produced, whether anyone likes it or not."

Read on

Common Core standards undermine California's gains

Some good points made in this article on the disconnect between the CCSSO's development of college-ready standards and the expectations and requirements of higher education.

-Patricia

Ze'ev Wurman | SF Gate
Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Academic content standards are lists of the topics that K-12 students are expected to master in each grade. This past summer, organizations of governors and of state school superintendents launched a new effort (the Common Core State Standards Initiative) to create common academic standards across all states, effectively national content standards. The federal government has promised $350 million stimulus money to promote these standards, and states that compete for a slice of the $4 billion available from the federal "Race to the Top" program would be required to adopt them.

States, like California, endeavor to align their whole education system around content standards - curriculum, teacher training, textbooks and testing. Thus, vague and low standards can have a destructive effect. National standards will affect our children and our economic future for years to come.

The Common Core Initiative published its first draft for College Readiness in September, and these standards are hardly clear or high. The math standards, for example, make two explicit promises: that the standards are measurable and that students meeting them will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics. They offer more than 100 examples of the mathematics skills expected of students. Here is one: If everyone in the world went swimming in Lake Michigan, what would happen to the water level? Would Chicago be flooded?

An interesting but mostly non-mathematical problem. The math skills measured are estimation and division at the fifth-grade level, but how accurate is measuring even those low-level math skills when the answer depends mostly on non-mathematical knowledge: the Earth's population; Lake Michigan's surface area; Chicago's elevation above the water level; or whether the water will spill over to Lake Huron before flooding Chicago. Out of the published 105 examples, almost two-thirds have flaws of one type or another, making them inappropriate as reliable measures of math knowledge. This is deeply troubling, given these standards may shortly be imposed on the whole nation.

Even worse, the standards do not meet their second promise. Admission to an overwhelming majority of state universities around the country, including our own California State University and University of California systems, requires three years of high-school math including, Algebra 1 and 2 and Geometry . The Common Core standards removed large portions of this content, including geometry of circles, logarithms, and study of combinations and permutations. Students meeting these standards would be ineligible even for CSU and, if accepted, will likely be placed in remedial classes.

California has clear and high content standards that have been highly praised by virtually all experts. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell were wise when they conditioned our acceptance of Common Core standards on their being on par with our own. So far Common Core standards fall far short of that goal.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/22/ED951B7LLP.DTL&type=education#ixzz0b6zEayRc

Texas education head warns of 'federal takeover'

Embrace of 'common standards' by Obama administration is first step to losing local control, Scott says.

By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
December 03, 2009

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said Wednesday that the Obama administration is marching toward a federal takeover of the nation's public schools — and Texas should fight it.

The first step, he said, is an effort to develop common math and English curriculum standards that is being led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Participation in the ongoing common standards effort is part of the criteria for a $4 billion federal grant program called Race to the Top.

Texas and Alaska are the only states not participating in the common standards effort. Scott said Texas is already ahead of the other states in developing tough standards.

The U.S. Education Department appears to be "placing its desire for a federal takeover of public education above the interests of the 4.7 million schoolchildren in the state of Texas by setting two different starting lines — one for nearly every other state in the country and one for Texas," Scott wrote last week in a letter to the state's congressional delegation.

"Because Texas has chosen to preserve its sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools," said Scott, "the state is now placed at a serious disadvantage in competing for its share of (the grant money)."

That is coercion, Scott said in an interview Wednesday, adding that he could see future federal education dollars being tied to participation in the common standards.

Coercion, no; bribery, yes, said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington.

"They are bribing states to participate. That is very different than mandating," said Petrilli, a former education official under President George W. Bush.

He said there has been no discussion of requiring states to participate to get future federal dollars.

"I can't foresee that happening. I don't think anybody would support making this mandatory," Petrilli said.

But the Race to the Top is a discretionary, competitive grant program, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made the common standards a key — though not defining — part of it.

"This is not money that is earmarked for Texas," Petrilli said.

Texas still has a chance to win as much as $700 million because the state has a pretty good school reform story to tell and is otherwise well aligned with the federal government's goals in this grant program, Petrilli said.

Scott's letter to the delegation was sent a day after Gov. Rick Perry issued a news release decrying the inclusion of the common standards criteria in the grant competition.

Perry is embroiled in a Republican primary battle with U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and has cast her as a Washington insider.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, said Texas' refusal to work with the other states on the common standards initiative does a disservice to the state's students.

"Other states want to race to the top, but Gov. Perry remains determined to pursue an ideologically driven race to the bottom," Doggett said.

States Slow Standards Work Amid 'Common Core' Push

By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
November 11, 2009

As they wait to see how the latest push for common national standards plays out, some states are putting off or slowing the revision of their own academic standards to avoid wasted effort and spending.

At least four states—Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania—have halted revision of their standards for mathematics or English/language arts, the subjects that standards writers for the national initiative are turning to first. At least three other states have throttled back similar efforts until the grade-by-grade, K-12 common standards are made final in the coming months.

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Draft Content Standards Elicit Mixed Reviews

Here are the documents mentioned in the article:

Preamble
ELA standards
Math standards

-Patricia

By Sean Cavanagh and Catherine Gewertz | Ed Week
July 28, 2009

A draft of common academic standards, meant to bring greater coherence to the nation’s English and mathematics lessons, is drawing a mix of enthusiastic, ambivalent, and barbed responses from those who have seen it.

The working document, which was unexpectedly put out for public consumption yesterday, is meant to serve as the first step of a standards-writing process, led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The crafting and review of those academic guidelines is expected to play out at least through the end of the year.

The draft that was circulated on the Web yesterday attempts to set “college- and career-readiness” standards for English and math—the skills students need to succeed in credit-bearing postsecondary courses and workforce-training programs.

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