Common Core Cliff Notes:
I don’t believe there has been a more confusing or chaotic
time in public education than the past few years- at least in New York! It
becomes difficult for those of us who are not professional educators to
navigate the challenges coming at us in the midst of all this change, so here
is my cheat sheet:
Common Core:
A set of National Education standards adopted by 45 states,
not a curriculum but a set of expectations.
This came from the CCSS website:
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a
state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards
for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and
mathematics. The standards are designed
to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter
credit bearing entry courses in two or four year college programs or enter the
workforce. The standards provide a clear understanding of the expectations in
reading, writing, speaking and listening, language and mathematics in school.
The nation’s governors and education commissioners,
through their representative organizations the National Governors Association
(NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) led the
development of the Common Core State Standards and continue to lead the
initiative. Teachers, parents, school administrators and experts from across
the country together with state leaders provided input into the development of
the standards.
APPR
Annual Professional Performance Review- the framework within
which teachers and administrators are evaluated.
RTTT
Race to the Top- a federal grant for which New York State
applied. Acceptance of the grant required that certain initiatives be in place
to be eligible. The short list is that states who won RTTT grants were awarded
points for satisfying certain educational policies, such as performance-based
standards (often referred to as an Annual professional performance review-
APPR) for teachers and principals, complying with the Common Core standards,
lifting caps on charter schools, turning around the lowest-performing schools,
and building data systems.
This is how RTTT has been operationalized in New York
State via the Regents Reform Agenda:
1. Implementing
Common Core standards and developing curriculum and assessments aligned to
these standards to prepare students for success in college and the workplace
2. Building
instructional data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and
principals how they can improve their practice in real time.
3. Recruiting,
developing, retaining, and rewarding effective teachers and principals.
4. Turning
around the lowest-achieving schools.
Complaints have been made about the developmental
appropriateness of the standards in the early years- I have heard many teachers,
on the other hand, tend to agree that the standards themselves support higher
order thinking skills and shift from a broad coverage of content to a narrower
but deeper understanding of material at each grade level. Not necessarily a bad
thing.
Most of the pushback to these changes comes from the pace at
which they are being implemented, which is certainly ahead of the states ability
to provide support to local districts. All districts have had to provide (and
pay for) Common Core training for their staff as well as training on the new
APPR model- also paid for by each district. In Warwick, these initiatives have
cost us approximately $600,000 over the past two years.
For districts that chose to rely on the State developed
modules to deliver curriculum aligned to the common core, the past year has
been frustrating to say the least. The modules that the state developed to
support the Common Core Standards have been months behind in their rollout, in
some cases modules were published in the spring for material that had already
covered in the previous fall. Here in Warwick our teachers selected our own
common core aligned resources and materials which are not dependent on the
state’s supporting materials. However,
teachers are using the modules as supplemental resources.
In addition, the state decided to test students against the
common core standards before there had been time to fully integrate them into
curriculum, hence the drop in last years test scores across the state. This has
created enormous frustration for students and teachers, so parents and
educators have been voicing their concerns across the state. However, the increase
in testing is actually connected more to APPR than the Common Core Standards themselves. Implementation
of the new APPR plan requires additional testing in order to evaluate teachers
and administrators. It’s important to recognize what the three components are
(Common Core Standards, APPR and RTTT) on their own and how they are tied
together for student outcomes.
For an excellent outline of these issues read the New York Council of School Superintendents report on State Education policy.
