Bibliography: Common Core State Standards (page 082 of 130)

This annotated bibliography is reformatted and customized by the Center for Positive Practices.  Some of the authors featured on this page include Alyson Klein, Jonathan Supovitz, Michele McNeil, Jan Umphrey, Catherine Gewertz, Inc. ACT, Anderson Norton, Jessica Horton, Steven Boyce, and Andrew Ujifusa.

Shanahan, Timothy (2013). The Common Core Ate My Baby and Other Urban Legends, Educational Leadership. Urban legends are plausible stories–told as truths–that revolve around the complexities and challenges of modern life. Sociologists have not managed to pin down exactly how and why these stories get started, but they are clearly spread by word of mouth and there is usually a grain of truth in them (and sometimes, as it turns out in the case of "the dingo ate my baby" story, more than a grain of truth). It is not surprising, then, that the recent adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by 46 states and the District of Columbia has given rise to anxieties among educators that have fueled the flames of misperception, confusion, and rumor. In this article, the author explores some of those legends in the hope of slowing their spread. So far, no educators have claimed that the new standards have eaten their baby, but if someone claims that the new CCSS "assessments" have eaten someone's 3rd grader, that story just might catch on.   [More]  Descriptors: State Standards, Academic Standards, Misconceptions, Popular Culture

McNeil, Michele (2013). Rifts Deepen over Direction of Education Policy in U.S, Education Week. In statehouses and cities across the country, battles are raging over the direction of education policy–from the standards that will shape what students learn to how test results will be used to judge a teacher's performance. Students and teachers, in passive resistance, are refusing to take and give standardized tests. Protesters have marched to the White House over what they see as the privatization of the nation's schools. New advocacy groups, meanwhile, are taking their fight city to city by pouring record sums of money into school board races. Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized, observers say, for rarely before has an institution that historically is slow to change been forced to deal with so much change at once. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia are implementing the Common Core State Standards, and nearly as many are developing common tests that are expected to debut in 2014-15.   [More]  Descriptors: Educational Policy, Public Education, State Standards, Academic Standards

Alberti, Sandra (2013). Making the Shifts, Educational Leadership. Over the last two years, the author has talked with thousands of educators about the Common Core State Standards, and she has realized that one of the biggest risks they currently face is full-speed implementation without an understanding of the changes that the standards require. When a new reform initiative comes around, the instinct of teachers and education leaders is often to buy new tools to support the work. But in a time when the market is offering an enormous range of materials, educators need a secure understanding of the standards so that they can choose their resources wisely. As they put the standards into practice, it is important to focus on a few shifts that have the most significant effect on students. These shifts should guide all aspects of implementing the standards–including professional development, assessment design, and curriculum. When educators attend to three core shifts in English language arts and literacy as well as in mathematics, the expectations for teaching and learning will be clear, consistent, and tightly aligned to the goals of the standards.   [More]  Descriptors: State Standards, Educational Change, Academic Standards, Change Strategies

Supovitz, Jonathan (2013). Slowing Entropy: Instructional Policy Design in New York City, 2011-12. Research Report, Consortium for Policy Research in Education. District policy makers never have more potential influence than when they are crafting a Policy. In this paper Jonathan Supovitz argues, that the success of an instructional policy depends to some extent on the choices made in its crafting before it is let loose upon the world. The way a policy is framed and designed has important implications for the way people receive and understand it, and the extent to which they respond to it. The choices embedded within its design are essentially a set of signals that interact with a variety of influences, both real and perceptual, as it is received, interpreted, and enacted upon by its intended audience. To illustrate this idea, the focus of this paper is on the design of a 2011 New York City Department of Education policy intended to engage teachers across the City during the 2011-12 school year with the Common Core State Standards, called the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) in New York City. A close analysis of the language of the CIEs, with companion explanations from interviews with the architects of the policy about their thoughts and decisions during its construction, show a set of careful choices and knowledge-informed decisions about what they thought were the best ways to encourage teachers, school leaders, and school support providers to learn about the expectations of the CCLS and their implications in order to bring about real changes in school and teacher practices.   [More]  Descriptors: Educational Policy, Instructional Design, Policy Formation, State Standards

Klein, Alyson (2013). E-Rate Program Seen as Too Lean for a Digital Era, Education Week. As school districts strive to put more technology into schools to support 1-to-1 computing initiatives and prepare for the common-core online assessments, the federal E-rate program is in danger of becoming as outdated and insufficient as a sputtering dial-up connection in a Wi-Fi world. While the program can boast great success since its inception–just 14 percent of schools were connected to the Internet when the E-rate was launched in 1996, compared with near-universal access today–it is now at risk of buckling under the weight of districts' technological demands in the age of laptops, tablets, smartphones, and 24/7 online activity. The strains are likely to get even more acute as most states prepare to give assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Those tests, slated to debut in 2014-15, will require hefty connectivity capabilities. Recent technical difficulties with online testing in some states highlight the need for better, more reliable technologies in schools.   [More]  Descriptors: Technology Uses in Education, Internet, Telecommunications, Access to Computers

Horton, Jessica; Golden, Barry; Parmly, Jilynn (2013). Advocating through Argumentation: Supporting Claims with Evidence Helps Students Develop an Understanding of the Impact of Extinction, Science and Children. Through the construction of arguments, students are invited to make sense of the concept of a species and its connection to both extinction and local biomes. Scientific argumentation is the process by which scientists engage in discourse aimed at developing common knowledge about the natural world (Driver et al. 1994). This article describes a 5E lesson that includes details for each stage of the inquiry-based experience as well as references to "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" and relevant Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The objectives of this lesson were for students to learn about endangered species native to their region, to analyze and interpret empirical data (Scientific Practice #4, NRC 2012 pp.61-63), to construct an explanation asserting that the species they selected is the most important to the overall health of the ecosystem (Scientific Practice #6 NRC 2012, pp. 67-71), then to communicate their arguments to their peers (Scientific and Engineering Practices #s 7 and 8, NRC 2012, pp.71-77).   [More]  Descriptors: Advocacy, Persuasive Discourse, Evidence, Sustainable Development

Maxwell, Lesli A. (2013). Access to Common Exams Probed, Education Week. A patchwork of testing accommodations is used in the nation's public schools to help students with disabilities and those still learning English show their command of academic content, just as their general education peers do. The list of accommodations–providing extra time, allowing the use of dictionaries, and reading test directions aloud, to name a few–has ballooned in the No Child Left Behind Act era. Some researchers estimate as many as 100 different accommodations are used for students with disabilities and English-language learners in states and local districts. But that may be changing as two groups of states labor to design new assessments for the Common Core State Standards to replace the wide variety of standardized reading and mathematics tests used now. With a rollout of the new assessments expected in 2014-15, test developers are aiming not only to streamline the types of testing supports offered to special education students and English-language learners, but also to make sure the tests are designed to be as broadly accessible as possible to all students, regardless of their profiles.   [More]  Descriptors: Testing Accommodations, State Standards, English Language Learners, Accessibility (for Disabled)

Hirsch, E. D., Jr.; Hansel, Lisa (2013). Why Content Is King, Educational Leadership. "If you want to be able to read with comprehension, you must become knowledgeable about the topic. The more relevant knowledge you have, the less it matters whether the text is complex or not," write Hirsch and Hansel in this article. Research has shown that a student who has extensive background knowledge of a topic will find it easy to comprehend a text on that topic, no matter how complex the writing. On the other hand, even a skillful reader will have trouble comprehending a text on a topic that he or she knows nothing about. The Common Core State Standards in Language Arts and Literacy have acknowledged the importance of content knowledge to reading comprehension by recommending that schools implement a carefully sequenced, domain-based curriculum that expands and deepens students' knowledge as they progress through school. The authors describe how the K-3 curriculum developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation (available for free download) can help schools achieve this goal and transition to the new Common Core standards.   [More]  Descriptors: Reading Comprehension, Knowledge Level, State Standards, Language Arts

ACT, Inc. (2013). The Reality of College Readiness 2013: National. Annually, ACT provides each state with "The Condition of College & Career Readiness," a report that details the college readiness of students who took the ACT¬Æ test. Based on extensive empirical research, ACT has defined "college and career readiness" as the acquisition of knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll and succeed in credit-bearing first-year college courses at a postsecondary institution without the need for remediation. This definition has been adopted by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. This report is a companion to "The Condition of College & Career Readiness." The report traces the college enrollment, retention, re-enrollment, and migration patterns of the 2011 ACT-tested high school graduates across the country. It also provides a snapshot of the impact that benchmark-meeting behavior has on those patterns and, ultimately, on success in college. This report is intended to raise awareness of the fact that the path to college success is not a linear one for many students. There are significant numbers of qualified students who move through (or in and out of) multiple postsecondary experiences as they pursue their educational goals. [For related report, "The Condition of College & Career Readiness, 2013, see ED546779.]   [More]  Descriptors: College Readiness, Colleges, Enrollment, Academic Persistence

Ujifusa, Andrew (2013). Standards Supporters Firing Back, Education Week. Supporters of the Common Core State Standards are moving to confront increasingly high-profile opposition to the standards at the state and national levels by rallying the private sector and initiating coordinated public relations and advertising campaigns as schools continue implementation. In states such as Michigan and Tennessee, where common-core opponents feel momentum is with them, state education officials, the business community, and allied advocacy groups are ramping up efforts to define and buttress support for the standards–and to counter what they say is misinformation. Supporters assert that the common core remains on track in the bulk of the states that have adopted it, all but four at last count. The pressure is on, however, for common-core champions to make sure their message gets through. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington last month that the private sector had to snap out of what he portrayed as its lethargy and to prevent states from reverting to inferior standards, as he contended states did a decade ago under the No Child Left Behind Act.   [More]  Descriptors: State Standards, Academic Standards, Public Relations, Advertising

Llewellyn, Douglas (2013). Making and Defending Scientific Arguments, Science Teacher. Since 1996, science education has been guided by the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996). But now there's a "new sheriff in town" as the "Common Core State Standards" and "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" together become the 21st century's torch bearer for curricula reform in science and other subject areas. A supposition runs through both documents: that for the United States to become scientifically literate, high school students must become proficient in: (a) investigating phenomena; (b) collecting and analyzing data; (c) making claims from the findings; and (d) supporting such claims and explanations with evidence to justify and defend their assertions. In light of this new direction in science teaching, this article will address three questions: (1) What is scientific argumentation?; (2) What do the "Common Core" and the "Framework" say about argumentation?; and (3) How can science teachers effectively scaffold and prepare students to make and defend arguments? Fostering scientific argumentation can be challenging. Nonetheless, by scaffolding activities from simple to complex, students can attain the communication skills embraced by the "Common Core," "Framework", and "Next Generation Science Standards." Adjusting to this reform requires science teachers to shed "old skins" and tweak the emphasis of their time-honored labs.   [More]  Descriptors: Scientific Concepts, Scientific Literacy, Persuasive Discourse, Rhetorical Invention

Gewertz, Catherine (2013). District Bets Big on Standards, Education Week. The big clock in Dowan McNair-Lee's 8th grade classroom in the Stuart-Hobson Middle School is silent, but she can hear the minutes ticking away nonetheless. On this day, like any other, the clock is a constant reminder of how little time she has to prepare her students–for spring tests, and for high school and all that lies beyond it. The District of Columbia, where she's taught for 11 years, was quick to adopt the Common Core State Standards. Putting them into practice, however, demands a heavy lift. With their emphasis on mastery of complex text, the standards require far stronger literacy skills than most students here–and many in the 46 states that also adopted the common core in English–currently possess. Serving mostly disadvantaged children, the school system in the nation's capital faces an especially steep climb as it implements the new standards. This article describes the steps this school district has taken to reorganize in light of the new standards.   [More]  Descriptors: State Standards, Academic Standards, Urban Schools, School Districts

Tucker, Catlin; Umphrey, Jan (2013). Blended Learning, Principal Leadership. Catlin Tucker, author of "Blended Learning in Grades 4-12," is an English language arts teacher at Windsor High School in Sonoma County, CA. In this conversation with "Principal Leadership," she defines blended learning as a formal education program in which a student is engaged in active learning in part online where they have some control over the time, place, and pace, and in part at a brick-and-mortar location away from home. In the course of this discussion, Tucker shares her views on how blended learning can engage students in meaningful ways and expand the classroom experience, how the teacher's role changes when a blended learning approach is used, important things to keep in mind when creating online components, and blended learning's compatibility with the Common Core State Standards. Her best bit of advice to school leaders and teachers who have reservations is to include teachers in conversations about blended learning, saying that "teachers will be more creative, energized, and motivated to embrace a blended model if they have the freedom to help decide what that change will look like for them and their students."   [More]  Descriptors: Blended Learning, Learner Engagement, Teacher Role, Instructional Design

Norton, Anderson; Boyce, Steven (2013). A Cognitive Core for Common State Standards, Journal of Mathematical Behavior. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate cognitive challenges introduced by Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (2010) with regard to conceptualizing fractions. We focus on a strand of standards that appear across grades three through five, which is best represented in grade four, by standard 4.NF.4a: "[Students should] understand a fraction a/b as a multiple of 1/b. For example, use a visual fraction model to represent 5/4 as the product 5 x (1/4), recording the conclusion by the equation 5/4 = 5 x (1/4)." We argue that supporting such conceptualizations is a critical challenge for teachers and researchers to address in US education, but one fraught with conceptual hurdles for students. We adopt a scheme theoretic perspective and share the case study of a sixth-grade student, to illustrate the ways of operating students need to develop for meaningful attainment of the new standards.   [More]  Descriptors: State Standards, Mathematics Skills, Mathematics Achievement, Grade 6

Gewertz, Catherine (2013). Teachers Differ over Meeting Nonfiction Rule, Education Week. As the common core is brought to life in classrooms this year, some English/language arts teachers are finding themselves caught in a swirl of debate about whether the new standards require them to cut back on prized pieces of the literary canon to make room for nonfiction. A recent spate of news reports has ignited a new wave of anxiety about the Common Core State Standards' emphasis on "informational text." In some states and districts, little or no guidance is being offered on the issue for teachers, leaving them to grapple with achieving the right balance of fiction and nonfiction on their own. Even where guidance is offered, teachers are carrying away varying messages, resulting in some cases in bitter disagreements over who is misinterpreting the standards. The resulting landscape is pockmarked with debates about how much the standards require English/language arts teachers to change the literature they've long taught, whether that change is positive or negative, and how teachers across the curriculum should be sharing the new expectations.   [More]  Descriptors: State Standards, Nonfiction, Guidance, Language Arts

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