Written By: Ben Boychuk
Published In: School Reform News
Publication date: 06/02/2010
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The final draft of proposed national school curriculum standards was released to the public on Wednesday. Officials, including several state governors and school superintendents, unveiled the completed Common Core State Standard Initiative frameworks during a press event at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee, Georgia.
Forty-eight states in 2009 signed on to the project of crafting a uniform set of national standards for reading and mathematics, led by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
“The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents have a roadmap for what they need to do to help them,” said West Virginia State Schools Superintendent Steve Paine, one of the speakers at Wednesday’s event. “These standards provide appropriate benchmarks for all students, regardless of where they live, and allow states to more effectively help all students to succeed.”
Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the CCSSO, explained the rationale for the standards during a webchat hosted by Education Week. “This is a call from multiple parties: parents are confused by differences across states, policymakers want greater clarify, teachers are concerned about current standards—and states overall called us to action,” Wilhoit said.
The location of Wednesday’s event—some 600 miles from Washington, DC — was deliberate, organizers said. They said they wanted to underscore how the standards project is not a creature of the federal education establishment.
Draft Drew 10,000 Comments
A first draft of the standards was released in March and drew more than 10,000 comments at the Common Core Standards Initiative’s website (http://www.corestandards.org/).
Although participation in the standards initiative is supposed to be voluntary, the Obama administration in March announced plans to make $14 billion in federal Title I grants to low-income schools contingent upon adopting the standards. Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland and West Virginia already announced they would adopt the standards, based on the first draft.
States Resist Federal Push
Officials in Texas and Alaska, however, say they will not participate in the program. And Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) said Tuesday his state would not participate in the latest round of Race to the Top due to reservations about strings that may be attached to the common core standards.
“The way they have structured this [Race to the Top] program to mandate that we adopt a common core of standards to replace the Standards of Learning is unacceptable,” McDonnell told the Washington Post. “Our standards are much superior. They're well accepted. They're validated. All the education leaders have a comfort level with those.”
Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a former U.S. Department of Education official, praised the standards at National Review Online. “The documents total a couple inches of paper, and I don’t claim to have mastered them,” Finn wrote. “But I’ve seen enough to restate with fair confidence an earlier (and better informed) Fordham Institute judgment, namely that millions of American schoolkids would be better served if their states, districts, and schools set out in a serious way to impart these skills and content to their pupils rather than the nebulous and flaccid curricular goals they’re using now.”
Early Draft ‘Pedagogically Useless’
Sandra Stotsky, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education and former state education department official, criticized the draft standards in a March memo to her colleagues on the state board. Stotsky, who helped craft the Bay State’s decade-old mathematics curriculum framework, concluded the common core standards’ first draft was “pedagogically useless.”
“I have consistently supported the goal of national standards for the English language arts but only if these standards are at least as good as, if not better than, those in Massachusetts,” Stotsky wrote.
States have until August to decide whether to adopt the Common Core Curriculum Standards.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Very helpful report. May I clarify a few points about the federal government role?
ReplyDeleteFirst, the administration proposal for Title 1 requirements is just a proposal. It won't become official until Congress votes for it, and Congress is more likely than not to make changes.
Second, the administration proposes requiring states to certify that students who meet their state standards are ready for college. Common Core isn't the only way to do that. State Departments can also work with public universities on standards unique to their own state--provided they end up with the universities agreeing that a high school senior who meets those standards is ready for college-level work.
Finally, the August deadline is worth clarifying. States that adopt the Common Core by August will get points for that on their Race to the Top application. However, states can adopt long after that, on their own timetables. Some states will definitely be influenced by that chance to win added funding--but not all. My own Kentucky committed to this effort in early 2009, before the money competition existed, and we'll stay with Common Core even if we don't get a big grant for doing so.