Carol Thomas is a career educator and former high-level urban district administrator who is now working with private schools that participate in Florida's tax credit scholarship, and she tells a remarkable on-the-ground story about Common Core State Standards today in Education Week.
Thomas, who is vice president for student learning at Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, is working with about 140 private schools in a pilot project focused on a learning compact for low-income scholarship students. The intent is to build meaningful engagement between parents and teachers and, to guide the relationship, she offers an online tool to help both parties mutually track the academic progress of each student. That tool relies on the standards enumerated in Common Core, which is where this plot thickens. These are private schools for whom educational independence is in their DNA, after all. But what she is finding is that these schools are all in for Common Core.
"Our target for the state pilot was to find 100 scholarship schools that would volunteer to participate," she wrote. "We already have more than 140, and my phone is still ringing. These principals aren't calling to lecture me on state sovereignty or intrusive regulation. They are calling because they think the common standards will help them guide the learning plans in their schools."
Thomas relates the impressions of Suzette Dean, principal at Bible Truth Ministries Academy, a small mission-driven school in Tampa that serves mostly African-American students. Dean told her: "Finally, we are all on the same page (with the standards), our teachers know what to teach, and the parents know what their children should be doing in school. Sure, it is a change, but it is real change that is needed if we are going to prepare our students for college and a successful future."
The project has caused Thomas to reflect on the national debate of late, and to suggest that those who see the standards as a federal government plot might want to ask these private-school principals why they would volunteer for Common Core. The answer, apparently, is that these educators think the standards might help students. Go figure.
The next few years are critical for education reform, with the implementation of higher standards likely to put tremendous pressure on political leaders to abandon course, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday.
“The idea of implementing higher standards, the adoption in 46 states of higher standards, is clearly a huge step in the right direction. (But) that’s the easy part,” Duncan, referring to Common Core standards, said at a national education summit organized by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. “Will our political leaders have the courage when test scores drop 20, 30, 40, 50 percent? … Will they have the courage not to backpedal and dummy down standards like political leaders did under No Child Left Behind?”
Despite the challenges, Duncan said he was optimistic that state and local leaders would rise to meet them, and in bipartisan fashion. He pointed to recent reforms as proof.
“I’m actually extraordinarily hopeful,” he said in response to a question from moderator Andy Rotherham. “When I look at what states did, local legislative leaders, chief state officers, what they have done over the past couple of years, no one predicted that would happen. No one predicted that 46 states would adopt higher standards. No one predicted that three dozen states have taken teacher evaluations and principal support to a very different level. No one predicted that we would have 44 states working on the next generation of assessments. Frankly, we’ve had almost no rollback. And honestly, if a couple states choose to roll back, that would not be the end of the world.”
Duncan was a keynote speaker at the fifth annual summit, which drew about 800 participants from nearly every state. He made a pitch for continued investment in early childhood education and stressed teacher quality and teacher equity. He said the fact that not a single district has methodically moved to align its best teachers with its most struggling students is a sign of how far reformers have yet to go. (more…)
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush opened his national education conference in San Francisco today with an impassioned plea for national Common Core Standards, reminding us of both their relevance and broad political acceptance.
Bush’s conference, the National Summit on Education Reform, has become one of the country’s top venues for education reform and a place where ideas are increasingly attracting bipartisan attention. His support of national standards is hardly new, of course, and reflects the foundation on which he built his A+ Education Plan in Florida. There, he employed “Sunshine State Standards” to drive a plan that then used tests not only to assure the progress of students but also to grade the performance of public schools. “What gets measured,” he often says, “gets done.”
Among the examples Bush used was that of writing. Most states now teach and test writing in strikingly superficial ways. They ask students to write about personal experiences, their family, their travel, their likes and dislikes. But the Common Core Standards, now adopted by 46 states, aspire to do much more. Even fifth-graders are required to “support a point of view with reasons and information, to introduce a topic or text clearly …. to provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details.” By high school, a student is expected to “introduce a topic and organize complex ideas, concepts and information so that each new element builds on that which precedes it to create a unified whole” and to use “relevant facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations or other information and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic.”
These are skills that will help a student succeed not only in college but also in a work world that increasingly depends on people who can synthesize and communicate complex information. Bush certainly knows that.
These standards give some federalists heartburn, of course, which is why it is so important to see a prominent Republican conservative make the case so forcefully. Bush also makes the distinction in how standards are implemented that should provide common ground for common standards. “It is good for our nation to embrace these kinds of standards,” he said. “But for the solutions we need to let states determine their own path.”
Politicos may call that threading the needle, but educators should embrace it for its practicality.
