May 2012 Archives

A nationally recognized STEM school in suburban Washington is the subject of debate after changes to its entrance policies apparently led to the need to provide far more students with remediation.

An editorial in today's Washington Post highlights the situation at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and raises the thorny matter of balancing the goals of attracting a diverse range of students and helping top-achieving students thrive and become the next generation of STEM innovators.

The editorial notes that the changes to the elite magnet school's admissions policy were aimed at increasing student diversity on campus to better reflect the demographics of Fairfax County, which contains a highly diverse population (though also one of the nation's most affluent).

"Not only did the change not have the desired effect, but something equally troubling may have occurred: The wrong students may be getting accepted at the expense of students better suited to the school's rigor and mission," the editorial says. "Fairfax school officials are right to revisit this issue."

As the editorial notes, a full one-third of entering freshmen at the high school during this academic year required remedial coursework in math and science.

Thomas Jefferson is one in a long line of STEM schools in the country. However, as I noted in a recent story, a new trend is the creation of STEM-themed schools explicitly aimed at attracting students who are underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, including low-income students, African-Americans and Hispanics, and females. These schools typically do not have entrance requirements, or if they do, they are not especially high.

The push for this new generation of STEM schools appears to be driven in part by an economic imperative to cast a far wider net to develop talent that might not otherwise be tapped. In fact, a recent report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said the creation of new STEM schools should be a key strategy to reverse the STEM "interest and achievement gap."

At the same time, many experts say it's still important to save room for a cadre of highly selective schools that are explicitly intended to nurture the nation's top talent.

The Washington Post editorial notes that a teacher at Thomas Jefferson recently wrote an op-ed raising concerns about the situation at that school.

"The old Jefferson was never a route to increased STEM achievement in the general school population," wrote Thomas Jefferson teacher John Dell earlier this month. "Rather, it was created to nurture promising STEM students at just the point where such students come into their real power— where their brains are literally fired up and ready to go. The regional commitment to the old Jefferson, tenuous from the start, has finally been overwhelmed by other agendas. A genuine success has been followed by political failure to embrace and sustain it."

The Post editorial reports that the Fairfax County school board will take up the issue of TJ's admissions policy this summer. We shall see how they handle this matter.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As you've probably already heard, eight more states got waivers yesterday from the central tenets of the No Child Left Behind Act. (If you haven't already heard, read the post on our State EdWatch blog about it.)

Along with the states that won waivers in the first round, yesterday's news means that 19 states have proposed—and won the U.S. Department of Education's blessing for—new accountability systems and other changes that are meant to allow new and purportedly better ways of producing student achievement gains.

Whether the new systems will do that is, of course, still an open question. But something worth noting—a key driver behind the waiver program—is states' revised goals and extended testing timelines. In contrast to No Child Left Behind, whose looming 2013-14 deadline for 100-percent proficiency was making states and districts increasingly nervous, states that won waivers now have different kinds of proficiency deadlines, and a longer timeline to reach them.

It will be interesting to see how these extended timelines play out for states politically. On the one hand, they could offer the advantage of more time until the proverbial rubber meets the road. On the other, however, nearly every state in the country—barring any mass exodus from the common-assessment project—will have to answer for the results of the common assessments. Those tests, expected in 2014-15, are projected to be tougher than current tests. So states using them will have to deal with the political fallout of explaining to parents and everyone else why scores dropped significantly between 2014 and 2015. States are already grappling with how to manage that challenge.

It's worth noting that states, in their waiver applications, are not only giving themselves more time to reach proficiency goals, but they also are changing the goals they're striving for. By and large, it's not about 100-percent proficiency anymore. The plans of two of yesterday's winners, for instance, Maryland and Delaware, illustrate this. Maryland's plan is be held accountable for cutting the achievement gap in half within six years. Delaware will set new annual performance targets to cut in half the "percentage of non-proficient students" in six years.

Keep in mind that this framework comes from the Ed Department's own conception of the program. Note that Section 2-B of the application form allows states three options for setting new "annual measurable objectives":

• Option A: Set AMOs in annual equal increments toward a goal of reducing by half the percentage of students in the "all students" group and in each subgroup who are not proficient within six years.

• Option B: Set AMOs that increase in annual equal increments and result in 100 percent of students achieving proficiency no later than the end of the 2019-2020 school year.

• Option C: Use another method that is educationally sound and results in ambitious but achievable AMOs for all [districts], schools, and subgroups.

Technical issues prevented me from opening a few of the successful states' waiver applications. But I looked at the others, and not one, as far as I could see, had chosen Option B.

Changing the goals and/or pushing them down the road a bit gives states more time to get their students and teachers ready to produce good results. Or it eases off on some of the most valuable pressure that's come down the pike in years. Depending, of course, on your view.

Another hovering question in all this: What happens to states that don't get waivers? The Ed Department has said it would like all states to obtain them. But those that don't are still subject to NCLB's requirements (unless there is a very-unlikely ESEA reauthorization, of course). Depending on the final waiver count, we could have an indeterminate number of states still struggling toward the 100-percent-proficiency target by 2014, as well as bracing for the tougher common assessments only a year beyond that.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last month, my colleague Erik Robelen reported to you that states are increasingly adding subjects other than mathematics and English/language arts to their federal accountability systems. These plans surfaced in their applications for waivers from the central provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Of course, adding subjects to a state or federal accountability system is one way to reverse the trend of focusing so heavily on math and ELA. Another is to hold students—as opposed to schools or districts—accountable. That seems to be the tack Massachusetts and Maryland are taking in social studies.

Massachusetts plans to add science to its accountability system, as Erik reported. But it also plans to reinstate a test in U.S. history, which students would have to pass in order to graduate from high school. A recent survey taken by the Pioneer Institute found large majorities of parents, state lawmakers, and history and social studies teachers in favor of the plan. According to the state department of education's website, Massachusetts already requires students to pass a science test to graduate. It decided to do the same in U.S. history, but has put off implementing it because of cost concerns.

In Maryland, Gov. Martin O'Malley signed a law this week that will reinstate a requirement that high school seniors pass a test in U.S. government in order to graduate. That exam was dumped last year due to budget cutbacks, but it's back in play: the class of 2017 will be subject to the new requirement.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new "Dear Colleague" letter from the National Science Foundation invites input from all those concerned about mathematics education to help shape a proposed $60 million initiative from the Obama administration.

The initiative, which would be jointly administered by NSF and the U.S. Department of Education, aims to "combine the strengths" of the two federal agencies to "stimulate needed research and development in [K-16] mathematics education and the use of successful practices and innovations at scale," says a recent letter from Joan Ferrini-Mundy, who leads the NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources.

"What do you think are the highest priority issues or challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve K-16 mathematics teaching and learning in the country?" the letter asks.

You can learn more here about the Obama administration's STEM education proposals for fiscal 2013.

Responses to the NSF's Dear Colleague letter are due by July 1.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teachers struggling to help improve students' mathematical problem-solving skills have a new resource from the federal What Works Clearinghouse.

After poring over a wide range of studies, a panel of experts in math and education research compiled five core recommendations for math instruction in grades 4-8, along with suggested steps for implementation and tips to overcome potential roadblocks.

The core recommendations are:

• Prepare problems and use them in whole-class instruction;

• Assist students in monitoring and reflecting on the problem-solving process;

• Teach students how to use visual representations;

• Expose students to multiple problem-solving strategies;

• Help students recognize and articulate mathematical concepts and notation.

The report was issued this week by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Seven experts served on the expert panel, including John Woodward, the dean of the school of education at the University of Puget Sound, who was the chairman.

"With the push for higher education standards in recent years, the emphasis in the curriculum has largely been on improving content," Woodward said in a press release. "But the world we live in today is all about problem solving and this aspect of learning has to have greater attention."

The report notes that students who develop proficiency solving math problems early are better prepared for advanced math and other complex problem-solving tasks.

"Unfortunately, when compared with students in other countries, students in the U.S. are less prepared to solve mathematical problems," the report says. It adds that textbooks often fail to provide students with "rich experiences" in problem-solving.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

For two years now, we've been keeping you updated on the news of common-standards adoption through our Common-Standards Watch map. We have news for you today that affects that map, but defies easy depiction graphically. Here's the news: the schools serving Department of Defense families have adopted the Common Core State Standards.

The move was officially announced to department educators and parents in two memoranda issued yesterday by Marilee Fitzgerald, the director of the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DoDEA.

It means that 87,000 students and 8,700 teachers in 194 schools in 12 countries will now be learning and teaching according to those guidelines, just like the millions of students and teachers in the District of Columbia and 46 states that have already adopted them.

The standards adoption actually took place on Dec. 15, 2011, I'm told by DoDEA officials. Joel Hansen, the agency's acting assistant associate director for education, said that is when Fitzgerald signed the papers making it official. But the discussions about the plans and procedures for implementation have been "kind of in-house" since then. The agency wanted to take time to notify staff and educators in the system before issuing a public notice, he said.

Hansen described the choice as a "logical step" for an agency whose students have a 31 percent mobility rate. The agency won't necessarily adopt new curriculum materials for the standards right away, though, Hansen said. Its six-year adoption cycle led to the introduction of new materials in math in 2009 and in English/language arts in 2010, he said, and doing that again "is an expensive process."

The agency plans to begin phasing in the common-core implementation beginning this fall, Hansen said.

What about tests? The website of the Department of Defense Education Activity says that it currently monitors student progress with standardized tests. Will it join one of the two assessment consortia that are designing tests for the new standards?

Hansen said that the DoDEA is "considering" joining one of the consortia.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you read this space regularly, you know that we've been doing our best to keep you abreast of efforts in state legislatures to question or unravel the Common Core State Standards. In that vein, we heard that the Alabama state Senate has approved a resolution encouraging the state board of education to undo its adoption of the common core.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think thank that opposes the common core, reported the progress of the resolution in its blog, The Foundry.

It seems that SJR49 passed the state Senate earlier this month. The resolution "encourage(s)" the state board of education to "take all steps it deems appropriate, including revocation of the adoption of the initiative's standards, if necessary, to retain complete control over Alabama's academic standards, curriculum, instruction, and testing system." The bill, according to the legislature's web-based bill tracker, has now made its way to the House.

You might recall that there was some deep unrest on Alabama's board of education last fall, when a pro-common-core faction battled back opposition by opponents, including the governor, who is the president of the state board.

Word of the Senate resolution was circulating on conservative blogs, which were encouraging readers to pressure their lawmakers to take action on the bill.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Shelbi Cole, a former math education consultant for the Connecticut State Department of Education, is the new mathematics director at a consortium of 27 states working to develop assessments pegged to the Common Core State Standards.

The SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium also has just named Magda Chia, a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as the director of support for under-represented students.

Cole has already been involved in the work of the SMARTER Balanced consortium. She served as the co-chair of its performance task work group and was closely involved in the development of the consortium's math content specifications issued last year, a press release says. She earned a master's degree in secondary education and a doctorate in gifted education from the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

In her new role, Cole will oversee item writing, quality, and alignment, as well as the production of formative assessment and professional development materials.

Chia, whose research addresses validity and fairness in assessments across diverse student populations, will lead the consortium's efforts to ensure the assessment system is "designed to effectively serve the needs of all students, including students with disabilities and English language learners," the press release says.

The announcement follows news last week that Barbara Kapinus, a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association, was named the consortium's English/language arts director.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You might have heard already that David Coleman, one of the main architects of the Common Core State Standards, was named the new president of the College Board. We reported that to you in a blog post as the news broke in the wee hours of yesterday morning.

Now we've got a story up on our website that goes into more detail and solicits the thoughts of a variety of folks in the field.

You can see it here.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED: (4:45 p.m.)

The International Baccalaureate program will live to see another day—and school year—in New Hampshire after a legislative attempt keep it out of schools was soundly rejected by the state Senate, the Union Leader newspaper reports. The program has come under fire recently from critics who suggest that it indoctrinates students and usurps local control of participating schools.

But New Hampshire defenders of the IB program insist that the real intrusion into local control was the attempt by state lawmakers to ban an academic program adopted by school officials and popular with families.

The House of Representatives in March approved the anti-IB bill on a largely party-line vote of 209-102, with most Republicans supporting the measure.

But since then, many local students, parents, and educators have staunchly defended the prestigious curricular program, which was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in the late 1960s. The IB program currently is offered in just two New Hampshire schools.

The House bill said a school's curriculum and instruction must promote "state and national sovereignty and is not subject to the governance of a foreign body or organization." One way to demonstrate this infringement would be for a participating school to be called a "world school," which just so happens to be a phrase used for schools that participate in the IB program.

For background on the rapid rise of the International Baccalaureate in recent years, check out this EdWeek story on the program, which includes courses of study at not only the high school level, but also middle and even elementary schools. Currently, more than 1,300 U.S. schools offer the IB program.

Supporters of the House bill said the IB program promotes an international ideology that they find distasteful, according to a recent story in the Union Leader newspaper.

"Do you want your children to be indoctrinated to be world citizens or do you want them to be residents of this state and this country?" said Republican Rep. Ralph Boehm, the main sponsor of the bill, according to a May 1 article in the Union Leader. (You can watch a video of Boehm speaking in favor of the measure here.)

Supporters of the bill also raised concerns about the IB program's connection to the United Nations. (The Union Leader story notes that according to the IB website, the program has been recognized as a nongovernmental organization of UNESCO since 1970.)

The New Hampshire Tea Party has been a strong backer of the measure. In a recent blog post, it said the bill "will bring back local control. There is no excuse for a foreign political group to be directing education in New Hampshire's schools."

But the IB programs offered in two schools, one public and one private, appear to have a lot of local support, including from students, parents, and educators.

Those backers not only dismissed the claims of global indoctrination, but made the issue one of local sovereignty, an argument that tends to appeal in New Hampshire.

"If you would want to strip and usurp the authority of a local school board, ... then we need to come up with a new motto for our license plates [other] than 'Live Free Or Die,' said Bedford High School junior Michael Courtney, at a hearing, according to the Union Leader.

In fact, Courtney, one of the main organizers of a campaign to defeat the bill, has posted a video on Youtube called Save IB in NH.

"This is much bigger than saving the IB ... curricula," he says in the video. "This is about local control. This is about Bedford deciding what is best for Bedford's citizens, not the state."

John R. White, a New Hampshire resident who testified at a May 1 hearing before the Senate education committee (and whose daughter previously studied in an IB program), offered an impassioned speech defending the program. You can watch it here.

"The opposition to IB would be hilarious were it a skit on 'Saturday Night Live' or a Stephen Colbert comic rant," he said. "But coming as it does from people elected to do the public business in the hallowed halls of Concord, it is frightening. The assertion that the IB is somehow an international plot fomented by the United Nations to undermine national loyalty and cause the disintegration of liberty in the United States is a preposterous notion."

He added: "IB emphasizes critical thinking and writing skills. It insists on scholarship. It offers vibrant programs in language, history, and mathematics, hardly the stuff of subversion."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The College Board has announced a new president and chief executive officer: David Coleman, one of the lead writers of the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts.

The New York City-based organization made the announcement early this morning. Coleman will take over Oct. 15, replacing Gaston Caperton, who has served for 13 years as president of the organization best known for the SAT college-entrance exam and the Advanced Placement program.

Currently, Coleman is one of three founding partners of Student Achievement Partners, a New York City-based organization that played a leading role in crafting the academic standards that have been adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. His co-founders are Susan Pimentel, who served as a lead writer of the English/language arts standards, and Jason Zimba, a lead writer of the mathematics standards.

Coleman told Education Week that he hopes to align the SAT to reflect the common standards, a move that would help ensure, he said, that students who do well on the exam possess the skills that colleges and universities are seeking.

Student Achievement Partners recently reorganized itself as a nonprofit and won an $18 million grant from the GE Foundation to create a range of support materials for the common standards, as we reported to you in February.

The organization has stirred controversy with its "publishers' criteria," which are meant to guide publishers and teachers as they assemble materials for the new standards, but have touched off resentment in some quarters that they wade inappropriately into pedagogy. Those criteria have also fueled a debate about the role of prereading strategies in literacy instruction.

A key aim of the common standards, as you likely recall, is to make students ready for college and careers. While debate persists on precisely what constitutes college and career readiness, the standards articulate one vision of that readiness, and the U.S. Department of Education has granted $360 million to two groups of states that are designing assessments to reflect that vision.

Many colleges and universities have pledged support to the idea of allowing students who reach a "college readiness" cutoff on those "common assessments" to skip remedial work and enroll directly in credit-bearing, entrance-level courses. The tests are far from being ready, however, and that cutoff score has yet to be determined.

Aligning the SAT with the common core would touch on a piece of the college-readiness formula that higher education's support of the common assessments does not reach, and it's a highly sensitive piece: college admissions. Shifting the college-entrance exam to embody the new standards would involve the same significant shifts that mark the standards themselves.

Top education leaders—including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a big fan of the common standards—are on record in the College Board's press release as commending Coleman's selection as the organization's new leader.

Coleman's biographical details are in the College Board's press release. How his life and priorities reshape the work of the College Board in the coming years bears watching.

Photo: Courtesy Student Achievement Partners

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Okay, this is one of those posts that require a full confession: I'm a poetry freak. I can't seem to get over the idea that connecting students to poetry would be awesome. Why do I say 'would be'? Because I know people teach it; and some teachers even teach it well. But honestly, in most places it's just overlooked. And where it isn't overlooked, it's often numbingly dry and boring.

This is a crying shame, since our students are surrounded by poetry daily (the kind that's set to music), giving us about a zillion open doors to reach them and connect that cool stuff to other cool stuff from before they were born. Poetry offers us the same chance that music does to respond to rhythm and rhyme, to dig into relevant topics. But only if it's taught well.

In that spirit, I like to flak the National Poetry Out Loud contest each year. And it's tonight. You can watch the finalists compete via livestream on the National Endowment for the Arts website. The NEA partners with the Poetry Foundation to put this showcase on annually.

This isn't a poetry slam; this is about students reciting poetry from memory. In an age when folks trumpet analysis over rote memory, is this a hopelessly dated, irrelevant practice? Hardly. Knowing poetry by heart is like the muscle memory of playing an instrument or dancing. Speaking it aloud offers a dimension that reading it from the page can't do. Thank goodness for poetry slams, which bring young people's original work to the stage and showcase the performing talent that goes with it. But thank goodness, also, for this event, which brings students to life in a different way, through other poets' work.

Tonight's showcase will feature nine state finalists who will compete for the national title, which carries a $20,000 cash prize. It takes place here in Washington at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

As fabulous as the live webcast is, unfortunately it is a one-time-only broadcast. There are some videos of past winners on YouTube, but no organized archiving of the finalists' performances, something I griped about last year. For those of you who teach, the lack of full archiving is really a shame. But if you catch it, maybe it will offer instructional ideas as well as entertainment and inspiration.

You can get more information about Poetry Out Loud on the program's website, www.poetryoutloud.org, and on Twitter, at @PoetryOutLoud and @NEAarts.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Art fans visiting the nation's capital have some impressive options to get a little culture. The National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, to name a few. For the next month or so, there's another competitor offering a dose of the visual arts, and it's an unlikely suspect: the U.S. Department of Education.

A new exhibition at the department's headquarters building in downtown Washington is displaying works by K-12 students from around the country, from paintings and drawings to photography and mixed-media projects. The 45 artworks are student creations born out of partnerships between art museums and nearby schools. Participating museums include the Dallas Museum of Art, the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Phillips Collection.

"Art is a powerful tool for education, and museums provide invaluable access to arts education for students in this country," said Chris Anagnos, the executive director of the Association of American Art Museum Directors, in a press release about the effort. "More than just field trips, these museum-school partnerships result in more innovative programs than ever before, with a focus on long-term community engagement with students and teachers alike."

I chatted the other day with Suzanne Wright, the director of education at the Phillips Collection, about the exhibition and the work her museum is doing with two public schools in Washington.

"Each museum is really demonstrating how they engage their communities, and in particular, their museum-school partnerships," she said. "One thing that is exciting about the exhibition is that it represents so many different types of museums and projects."

The Phillips Collection works with two local elementary schools serving large concentrations of low-income families. As part of the partnership, museum staff come to the schools almost every week, she said, and students get repeated opportunities to visit the art gallery, which houses famous works from the French impressionists to American modernists. A key focus, Wright said, is to provide classroom teachers with help in integrating the arts across the curriculum.

"The goal is for the teachers to feel comfortable doing this on their own," she said.

"Our agenda is really that arts integration in particular is a way to engage students ... in a more meaningful way, that it deepens personalized learning and links to multiple learning styles and '21st century' skills," she said.

The new exhibition at the Education Department includes three artworks (featured in this blog post) from the Phillips partnership, including a three-dimensional montage on the theme of transportation created by a group of students with disabilities.

These school-museum partnerships call to mind a story I wrote last year about the work many science centers and museums are doing in collaboration with local schools. That article was part of a broader special report, Learning Science Outside the Classroom. In fact, I had the chance to visit Explora, a science center in Albuquerque, N.M.,that has been working with that city's public school district for many years.

The exhibition at the Education Department, which began May 11, runs through June 22.

UPDATE (5/16/12): The exhibit is located in the Department of Education building at 400 Maryland Ave. S.W., in Washington, DC. To visit the exhibit Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., contact Nicole Carinci at nicole.carinci@ed.gov or Jackye Zimmermann at jacquelyn.zimmermann@ed.gov.

Art images: All three artworks featured in this blog post, supplied by the Phillips Collection, are on display at the U.S. Department of Education. The unnamed piece at top was created by students at Tyler Elementary School in the District of Columbia. The second, titled "Ben's Chili Bowl," and the third, "The Big Chair," were created by students at Takoma Education Campus in the District of Columbia.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As the general public now gets a chance to weigh in on a first draft of common standards in science, the question arises: Who is writing these voluntary standards, anyway?

The short answer? It's complicated.

Organizers have billed the development of the so-called Next Generation Science Standards as a "state-led" process. And that includes 26 states spanning the continent, from California to Maine, and from South Dakota to Georgia. But that doesn't tell the whole story.

First, those same organizers—by whom I mean state officials involved, as well as leaders at Achieve, a Washington-based nonprofit managing the process—emphasize that the standards are guided by a conceptual framework developed by the National Research Council. Basically, the NRC appointed an 18-member panel of experts in science and science education to craft that document. In fact, when I asked organizers a few questions related to the handling of some scientific topics in the draft (especially evolution and climate change), I was told that the standards draw on and defer to the consensus of that panel.

To give you a flavor of the membership of the NRC panel, here's a sampling:

• Helen Quinn: chair of the panel and professor emeritus of physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University;

• Wyatt Anderson: professor of genetics at the University of Georgia, Athens;

• Philip Bell: associate professor of the learning sciences, University of Washington, Seattle;

• John Mather: senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center;

• Rebecca Richards-Kortum: professor of bioengineering, Rice University.

One additional member I'll highlight here is Stephen Pruitt, a former official at the Georgia department of education. Why him? Because last year, he was hired by Achieve to manage the standards-development process.

The NRC panel, as you might imagine, consulted dozens of additional experts in science and science education, as well as groups such as the National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And the framework itself went out for public comment. I'm also told that the standards will be reviewed once again by the NRC panel before being finalized.

The actual line-by-line writing of the standards is being handled by a 41-member team. Who is on that writing team? A lot of K-12 educators, plus science education professors and others. Here are a few of its members:

• Peter McLaren, a science and technology specialist at the Rhode Island department of education and the president of the Council of State Science Supervisors;

• Chris Embry Mohr: a high school science teacher at Olympia High School in rural Stanford, Ill.

• Ramon Lopez, a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington;

• Bob Friend, chief engineer at Boeing Co.'s small-satellite programs;

• Lynn Hommeyer, an elementary science resource teacher at Bruce Monroe Parkview School in the District of Columbia.

Beyond the writing team, additional "partners" in developing the standards are the NSTA and the AAAS.

Another key participant is Achieve, a nonprofit group created in 1996 by governors and business leaders that is managing the process. It's worth noting that Achieve played a similar role in developing the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics. However, I want to emphasize that the development of common science standards is totally separate from that process.

And then, of course, there are the 26 "lead state partners." Each state has already reviewed and provided detailed feedback on two earlier drafts of the standards. In fact, that feedback is not simply from the state department of education. To participate, each state was required to form a broad-based group to review the standards, including representatives of K-12 education and higher education, as well as of the science and business communities.

Pruitt told me last week that the feedback from states has been taken very seriously, and many changes have been made to the draft document based upon it, even as he said the standards must remain true to the NRC framework.

"It is genuinely state led," he said of the process.

With the public release of the first draft last week, the broader public will have an opportunity to offer comments on the standards. Once the standards are updated to take into account that feedback, they will be put out once again for a second round of comment.

When the final version of the standards is complete, it's up to each state to decide whether or not to adopt the science standards. And to be clear, the 26 lead states have not committed to adopt them; they have agreed only to give "serious consideration" to doing so.

So, there you have it. Who is writing the science standards? Suffice to say, there are a lot of fingerprints on them already. And now it's your chance, Dear Reader, to weigh in.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Science education is likely to be the topic of plenty of discussion— and probably some heated rhetoric—in coming days, as the first public draft of a set of "next generation" science standards was released today.

The ambitious effort—involving 26 states, plus a variety of educators and experts—seeks to refocus K-12 science instruction across the nation with a special focus on ensuring that students apply their knowledge of key concepts through scientific inquiry and engineering design to deepen their understanding.

You can check out the EdWeek story here.

I'll be sure to provide updates and further analysis as feedback on the draft standards rolls in. In a document that calls for promoting depth over breadth in studying science, you can bet there will be some lively debate about what is included and what's left out. Meanwhile, as my story notes, don't be surprised if the treatment of issues such as evolution and climate change spark heated debate in some circles.

You can read the draft standards and submit comments here.

I'll close with a few comments from Stephen Pruitt, a vice president at Achieve, a Washington-based group that is managing the standards-development process (and is himself a former state science education official in Georgia.)

First off, like others involved in the effort, Pruitt emphasized that the draft standards are based on a framework produced by the National Research Council through a panel of experts in science and science education. (For a close look at that document, see this EdWeek story from last summer.)

In addition, he emphasized that the document is a work in progress. In fact, there will be a second public draft available for comment next fall.

"First, it is a draft, a draft based on the [NRC] framework," he said. "And the framework is really the foundation for all of this."

He added: "It's very much a draft for people to tell us the issues they see, ... and to really give us some robust feedback to make these truly world-class standards."

I'll look forward to seeing some of that "robust feedback"—and blogging about it—in the coming days and weeks.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Not every blog post has to be all serious, or even directly related to curriculum, right? Good! In that case, let me offer you a bit of fun for Friday: Bill Cosby's hilarious commencement address yesterday to the 2012 graduates of his alma mater, Temple University.

If most commencement addresses make you cringe, you will find Cosby's 12 minutes at the mic refreshingly unsentimental. I was lucky enough to be in the audience for this, and it was received with roars of laughter and applause, especially from us parents in the balconies.

Cosby's bottom line: Your parents are broke. They don't want you moving back home. Dreams are great, but for crying out loud, get a job.

Take a listen.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the influential voices in shaping the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts was Barbara Kapinus, a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association. She retired from that post early last month. But now she's taking a lead role in guiding the creation of the tests being designed for the new standards.

Kapinus has been named the English/language arts director of the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, officials disclosed today. Announcement of a parallel director in mathematics is expected to come soon.

SMARTER Balanced isn't the only consortium to be drawing on Kapinus' expertise. The other state group designing assessments, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, also lists her as one of the members of its content technical working group on ELA.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today, we got a dose of good news/bad news on U.S. achievement in science. The positive development was that average scores inched up for 8th graders, and the achievement gap narrowed for Hispanic and African American students. The downside? Most 8th graders still failed to reach the "proficient" level on the nation's report card.

Since my colleague Sarah D. Sparks did a great job with the big picture on the NAEP science results, I'm going to dive into one slice of the findings that probably will get little, if any, attention. And that is how few U.S. students scored at the highest level, "advanced," on the science exam.

How few? Just 2 percent of the 8th graders tested reached that level. (That figure is unchanged from 2009.) This is presumably worrisome for a country concerned about remaining competitive on the global stage. The numbers are especially striking for some states. In Mississippi and the District of Columbia the advanced figure rounds to zero. Another 28 states had a meager 1 percent reach the advanced level.

The high-flyer of the bunch was Massachusetts (surprise, surprise), which still had just 4 percent of students scoring advanced. Even if that figure doesn't sound very high, it's certainly a strong contrast to "round to zero" or 1 percent. Colorado, meanwhile, was the sole state to have 3 percent score at the advanced level.

I had hoped to provide an historical perspective going back a decade or so. Unfortunately, the results are not considered comparable because of changes to the science NAEP starting in 2009. Even so, with all appropriate caveats assumed, twice as many U.S. 8th graders—4 percent—reached the advanced level on the 2000 science exam.

So, what does advanced mean, anyway?

The short answer is that it represents "superior performance," according to the new NAEP report. The longer answer depends on what dimension is assessed. Here's an excerpt of the definition for "science practices:"

Students performing at the advanced level should be able to demonstrate relationships among different representations of science principles. They should be able to explain and predict observations of phenomena at multiple scales, from microscopic to macroscopic and local to global, and develop alternative explanations of observations, using evidence to support their thinking...

It goes on a bit longer, but you get the idea.

In reviewing the results for high-achievers I'm reminded of a 2010 report from the National Science Board. It sounded an alarm about the need to better identify and develop the next generation of "STEM innovators" in the United States, and included a call to cast a wider net to seize on all types of talent and reach underrepresented minorities and students from low-income families.

"Currently, far too many of America's best and brightest young men and women go unrecognized and underdeveloped, and, thus fail to reach their full potential," said the 2010 report from the board, which sets policy for the National Science Foundation and serves as an advisory body to the White House and Congress. "This represents a loss for both the individual and society."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Amid the flurry of activity around implementing the Common Core State Standards, a notable development came this week targeting the math teacher pipeline. A collection of universities, community colleges, and school districts spanning 30 states announced plans to collaborate in redesigning preparation programs for secondary math teachers to align with the new standards.

You can get the full scoop from my colleague Stephen Sawchuk over at Teacher Beat.

As he explains, the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership has already won a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Coordinated by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the effort involves 68 universities, nine community colleges, and 87 school systems.

Key goals for the partnership include building consensus on guiding principles for preparing math teachers, promoting better partnerships between K-12 and higher education, and developing a research agenda.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the things I hear most frequently on my beat, reporting on common standards and assessments, is frustration with the lack of instructional resources available at the moment. (See one of my stories about this here.) So it's worth noting the progress of significant efforts to create those resources.

As you know, the two assessment consortia are working on a range of resources. Yesterday, I sat in on one of the twice-monthly teleconferences of states who belong to the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, and a key topic of discussion was finalizing the master work plan for the online bank of formative resources it will create for teachers. The work plan is in late draft stages; governing states in the consortium are scheduled to vote on its approval between today and May 15.

Before I tell you more about the formative plan, it's worth clarifying here that we are not talking about the consortium's master plan for development of the summative test system. That is a different animal; it covers all the pieces of work necessary to build a very complex assessment system. You can find the most current version of that work plan, along with a full procurement schedule for pieces of that work, and a briefer update to that schedule, here.

The master work plan for the development of formative-assessment resources, on the other hand, isn't online yet. It's been circulating among member states and SBAC leadership as it is discussed and revised. The last call for input drew over 100 comments from member states, officials said during yesterday's telephone meeting.

A new element that's been added to the plan for formative resources is the creation of a team that will craft quality criteria policies that will shape what does—and doesn't—get into this bank of resources. In their feedback on the draft plan, states indicated that they wanted teachers involved early on in helping develop and curate the things that will be included in the bank of resources. While such teacher involvement has always been envisioned, the consortium made a point of moving it earlier in the process in response to that feedback.

As a result, the consortium's "state networks of educators"—a projected 90 teachers from each member state—will be in on the ground level, along with state leadership teams and a national advisory panel of experts on formative assessment, according to the current draft of the master work plan.

The library of resources will include materials designed to improve "assessment literacy," which means understanding of assessment more broadly (including definitions of omnipresent terms such as formative, interim and summative assessment), and understanding of the SMARTER Balanced assessment system specifically. Some trainings will be online; others will be face-to-face sessions, according to the draft plan.

But the piece of the digital library that is perhaps most widely anticipated is the sample instructional modules that will be housed there.

In addition to a current plan for 52 of those modules, the work plan calls for "lesson plans, templates, curriculum resources, evidence collection tools, teacher analysis, descriptive feedback strategies and follow-up planning." There will also be training materials on how to use the exemplar modules.

Each module will include guidance for teachers on how to scaffold material for students, as well as links to informational texts that might prove useful, and protocols on how to analyze student work. They will be designed to help teachers understand "the full cycle of formative assessment practices—identifying learning targets, using tools/strategies to gather evidence of student understanding, analyzing the evidence, providing feedback, making adjustments, and helping students reassess, in a recursive process," according to the draft work plan.

Tony Alpert, SBAC's chief operating officer, noted during the meeting that while some of the resources in the library will be created by member states, others might well be existing materials that would be adapted or used as is.

The site will allow users of all these tools to comment on them, and for the tools to be revised according to feedback. According to the plan, work on the modules is scheduled to begin next March and conclude in May 2014.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Experts who work on technology-enhanced assessment have a few ideas to replace those tiresome multiple-choice tests that so many people complain about. Take this one, for instance:

A middle school student sits down at a computer and watches an animation of a spring that powers a racecar in a pinball machine. Prompts lead her to think about what gives the spring its power: Is it the thickness of the wire? The number of coils? She has to choose a hypothesis and explain what leads her to think it could be correct. She designs an experiment to test her hypothesis, inquiring into how the thickness of the wire and the number of coils affect the spring's ability to propel the racecar.

From this, she generates a table of outcomes. She explains how the different variables shed light on her hypothesis, discusses whether it was correct. She reflects on how the experiment could be changed to produce more enlightening data, and then she reworks it and discusses her conclusions: Given everything she's learned, which spring will make the pinball racecar go faster, and why?

This assessment task was just one of those showcased yesterday at a conference on technology-enhanced assessment in Oxon Hill, Md., during a session on ways to measure skills that have traditionally been tricky to assess. The pinball car task was designed by a team from SRI International. They were showing it off not only to demonstrate the potential depth and engagement that such tasks offer, but to show how they can be designed from the bottom up—not adapted—according to the principles of Universal Design for Learning and evidence-centered design.

The gathering was organized by the Center for K-12 Assessment and Performance Management at ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which helps its state members sort through assessment issues through its SCASS system, a network of collaboratives on various standards and testing issues. It was sponsored by some of the biggest names in the testing industry. All the papers from the conference can be found on a special page of the center's website.

While the SRI team presented the prototype task in science, a team from ETS displayed a mathematics task that it has been piloting in New Jersey as part of its CBAL initiative, which envisions testing as a form of instruction. They presented a task called "proportional punch," which leads students through exercises in ratio and proportions as they figure out how to make cherry punch of varying concentrations. As they try various recipes of water and punch mix, they can watch a "sweetness meter" change. Developing tables of data, students have to theorize about how different ratios will influence the punch, and must explain their answers. Which will be sweeter: a punch made with 7 scoops of mix and 9 cups of water or one made with 10 scoops and 13 cups of water? Why? The task also offers special-needs adaptations such as text-to-speech and haptic, or vibrating, sensations to aid students with visual impairments.

An English/language arts task, showcased by a team from CTB/McGraw-Hill, had students read an article, conduct research and write a series of extended and brief responses to prompts. They must evaluate the credibility of their research sources. They can take notes on a yellow pad on the screen, can have what they write read back to them, and can respond orally if they choose. The students' performance creates data feedback for the teacher, and the task includes tailored suggestions about instructional next steps.

One theme that kept arising during the presentations and accompanying discussions was how technology offers the possibility of making tests more of a learning experience for students. Juan D'Brot, West Virginia's assessment director, noted after the presentations that he was struck by their potential to be "a blend of instruction and assessment."

"We're really blending this summative-formative-interim continuum," he said.

Sue Rigney, an assessment expert with the U.S. Department of Education who co-moderated the morning's presentations, noted the blurring of those lines, as well.

"We are seeing a narrowing of the distance between summative assessment and instruction," she said. "I don't know where it will end."

The excitement about the potential of technology-enhanced tests, however, was tempered throughout the discussions with a sense of how far there is to go before such tests are refined and available, and the challenges they pose when they are ready.

Experts in the room repeatedly cautioned one another to avoid being seduced by the "coolness factor" of technology, and stay focused on the instructional and measurement rationale behind each design feature. Additionally, many questions still hover over the work on technology-enhanced tests: how do educators manage and understand the flood of new kinds of data they will produce? How do that data dovetail with states' accountability systems? Not every possible set of skills can be assessed, so which ones are most important to assess? And what process will guide educators and policymakers as they decide which tests to use for classroom-based instruction and which to use for large-scale settings like state and federal accountability?

The ship, as CTB/McGraw-Hill's Karen Barton said, is not quite ready to launch.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The first draft of common standards in science will be released for public comment this Friday.

Twenty-six states are playing a lead role in developing the Next Generation Science Standards, which organizers of the effort hope will eventually be adopted by all—or at least most—states.

I just checked with Texas and Virginia, two of the holdouts on the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics, about their plans. Education officials in both states say they are not planning to adopt the science standards, though in Virginia, the education department spokesman said that when the Old Dominion next revises its science standards in 2017, the common standards would be "reviewed" and "taken into account."

For their part, the 26 states leading the effort are not bound to adopt the standards, but as lead states, they have committed to give "serious consideration" to doing so.

Top priorities in developing the standards are to promote greater emphasis on depth over breadth in understanding science, as well as more coherence in instruction across topics and grade levels. In addition, there will be a strong push for young people to continually engage in the practices of both scientific inquiry and engineering design. Organizers also promise that the standards will be "internationally benchmarked."

The deadline for submitting comments is June 1, though there will be at least one additional round of public comment later on. The effort is being facilitated by Achieve, a Washington-based nonprofit that also was involved in developing the common-core math and ELA standards.

You can find answers to a set of frequently asked questions about the standards here.

The states spearheading the science standards span the country, from California and Arizona to South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Tennessee, Maine, and Georgia.

The states are working in partnership with the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to develop the new standards. Last summer, an NRC panel of experts wrapped up work on a framework to guide the development of the standards. The framework identifies the core ideas and practices in the natural sciences and engineering that all students should know by the time they graduate from high school.

(Meanwhile, the NRC also is starting work on a related effort to develop a framework for new science assessments.)

The target for finalizing the standards is the end of 2012, though organizers have already hinted that this date might slip well into 2013.

Stay tuned for an analysis of the draft standards.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

About 100 U.S. high schools will soon find out how their students measure up compared with their peers across the globe.

The schools are taking part in a new pilot program to test the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science on an exam based on PISA, the high-profile international assessment, as I explain in a new EdWeek story.

Each participating school will get a report with a variety of information about its performance, plus comparative tables to put student achievement in context. Organizers and participants say the pilot offers a chance for individual schools to compare their achievement levels globally on an assessment intended to measure higher-order thinking skills. They also emphasize that the pilot is intended to help schools take away valuable lessons to improve instruction.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

You might have heard that Utah has been surfing the waves of common-standards controversy lately. Now it appears that the standards aren't the only thing the state is uneasy about. It's also uneasy about the tests being designed for them.

We are getting word that Utah plans to downgrade its membership in one of the assessment consortia from "governing" to "advisory." Governing states have voting power on key policy and design questions. They also are committed to using the tests when they are ready in 2014-15. Advisory states can sit in on discussions, but have no voting power and do not have to promise to use the tests.

Officials at the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium tell us that Utah has indicated that it will submit a request to move from governing to advisory status in that group. It does not belong to the other assessment group, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

Upon getting the news, SMARTER Balanced Executive Director Joe Willhoft issued a statement, on behalf of its executive committee, saying that the group is grateful for Utah's contributions to the development of the testing system. Judy W. Park, Utah's associate superintendent for federal programs and student services, has served as co-chair of the executive committee.

Willhoft noted that Utah's change in status is "consistent with the consortium's state-led governance policy, which brings states together on a voluntary basis" to build the tests.

Colorado, too, has been struggling with its own internal conflicts about the assessments. As we told you recently, its state board voted to resist state lawmakers' pressure to become a governing state in one of the consortia.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is scheduled to meet with a top official in the GED Testing Service to discuss its concerns that a major redesign of the exam could raise its cost and make it unaffordable for the people most in need of taking it.

In an April 13 letter to Nicole M. Chestang, the executive director of the GED Testing Service, the two highest officials of the civil-rights coalition, President Wade Henderson and Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president for policy, expressed their concerns about cost and affordability and requested a meeting to discuss the issue. That meeting is set for May 11.

As we reported to you last fall, the GED is undergoing its biggest overhaul in seven decades. There will be two performance levels on the new one: one connoting high school equivalency and another connoting college and career readiness.

There is plenty of debate, as my story reports, about the value of the current GED. But the fact is that millions still use it as a pathway to jobs and college. So the LCCR is concerned that the ambitious redesign will inevitably raise the cost of the exam and make it impossible for states to offer it as widely as they have in the past.

In an interview, Zirkin said she doesn't have confirmation that the test will be more expensive or less accessible. But the expense of the project, combined with the fact that it's being undertaken by a for-profit entity—a joint venture of the American Council on Education, which created the GED, and educational publisher Pearson—prompted concerns at the LCCR, she said. (We have heard concerns about this business arrangement, as well.)

"We don't have hard evidence that it's going to cost more," Zirkin told me. "That's what we want to talk to them about. If we find that they are going to do things that will ensure that it's available to everyone, as was the case before, then that's fine."

The redesign itself is something that LCCR "applauds," Zirkin said, because it will drive higher levels of preparedness for jobs and college. But at the same time, the group is concerned about the possibility that a tougher test will demand more preparation. If that preparation costs more than prep has in the past, low-income and low-skilled people could find themselves at a disadvantage, she said.

The concern about price doesn't come out of nowhere. Tight fiscal times have prompted some states to cut back on how much of the cost they can subsidize. Additionally, the GED did change its pricing structure, even before it announced the revamp of the test. See my blog post from last May about both of these things. This piece from Tennessee, and this one from Minnesota, quote education officials saying the price of the GED was going to rise dramatically in 2014.

I rang up Nicole Chestang to run these price and accessibility concerns by her. She said she looks forward to the May 11 meeting so she can reassure the LCCR that the GED Testing Service is "committed to keeping cost as lean as possible."

The GED has revised its initial projected cost to states for the computer-based version of the test, which is rolling out now. The price will be $24 for each section of the test, or $120 total, regardless of whether test-takers sit for all five sections at once or take them on different days, she said.

The original projected price to states, as we reported, was estimated at $140 to take all five sections at once, and $200 to take them in stages. The price states will pay for computer-based testing includes some costs that states currently shoulder themselves, Chestang said, such as scheduling and scoring tests.

Quick refresher: The way the GED works is that states pay to lease the test battery, and then set their own prices for test-takers. Some states subsidize more of the cost than others. Test-takers pay zero in states such as New York and West Virginia, but typically states charge in the $80 to $150 range, Chestang said.

When the GED announced the initial projected $140/$200 price structure for computer-based tests, states weren't happy. So GED went back to the drawing board and reworked things to offer the across-the-board price of $120, Chestang said.

There are no plans to change the price of the paper-and-pencil version of the test, which will be available until the end of 2013, Chestang said.

As for the price of the computer version, "We are doing everything we can to keep it at similar levels in 2014." The GED Testing Service is working on a plan to keep costs down, and anticipates an announcement later this month about the steps it will take to do that, she said.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new research paper offers what amounts to a spirited defense of the Common Core State Standards in mathematics, making the case that the standards are, in fact, consistent with those in high-achieving countries and suggesting their faithful implementation holds considerable promise to improve student learning.

The paper bases that optimism about the new standards' potential on a look at the achievement of states whose prior math standards most closely aligned to the common core.

"The simple translation is that those states with standards that are closest to the Common Core ... did better," based on national test data from 2009, said William Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University who coauthored the study.

That said, Schmidt emphasized (repeatedly) that this particular finding is merely suggestive, and does not establish causation.

"I want to be very clear about this," he told me. "This does not prove anything. ... It's a reasonable approximation of what might be possible."

The study was set to be publicly released at a press conference this afternoon co-sponsored by Achieve, a Washington-based group that helped to develop the standards, as well as Chiefs for Change and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education. Here is a link to a slide presentation derived from the new research.

The new research also finds that prior state math standards reveal a wide degree of variation from the common core, and that while the new standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia have a lot in common with certain states, they reflect a big change for others.

On the question of quality, the standards deserve recognition, Schmidt contends.

"It's pretty clear that these standards are world class and very coherent, focused, and rigorous," he said in an interview.

(Although not part of the team that developed the common-core standards, Schmidt's prior research was considered influential in its development, and he served on a validation committee that reviewed and approved the final standards.)

For the new study, Schmidt and his colleague at Michigan State Richard Houang developed a statistical measure of "congruence" among standards. They compared the common core in several ways to the standards of the highest-achieving countries as measured by performance on TIMSS, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. (Drawing from an earlier study from Schmidt, this list includes Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.) Basically, mathematicians developed what is called the "A+ profile," a composite of the standards of those countries.

The new paper concludes that the common core is closely aligned with the A+ standards, with about a 90 percent degree of similarity when it comes to focus and coherence. Also, the report finds a high degree of consistency in math topic coverage between the A+ standards and the Common Core, a point it uses to make the case that the common standards are "rigorous" and "implying that [they] are internationally competitive."

For a contrarian view on the standards, check out this 2010 paper published by the Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. In it, Ze'ev Wurman, a former education official in the George W. Bush administration, argues that the common standards fall short of prior standards for California and Massachusetts, as well as "our international competitors." The paper suggests that the final standards "miss chunks of content" recommended by a national math panel and "leave large holes" in high school math curriculum.

[UPDATE (5/8/12) Two days ago, Wurman published a blog post that offers a sharp critique of the Schmidt/Houang analysis, calling it "just another piece of misleading advocacy."]

Meanwhile, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has defended the math standards, giving them a grade of A- and suggesting they are "clearly superior" to pre-existing standards in 39 states (and not identifying any state standards it deems clearly superior to them).

[UPDATE (5/8/12) Kathleen Porter-Magee from Fordham also has blogged about the Schmidt/Houang research since I first wrote this post, suggesting it makes an "important" contribution. However, echoing Schmidt's own caveats about the potential of the common standards, she cautions common-core advocates to "keep the champagne on ice," given the heavy lift ahead in implementing the standards.]

The Michigan State researchers also examined the level of congruence between prior state math standards and the Common Core, looking at both coherence and focus.

"The results show that many states have a long road to travel in order to implement the CCSS, but some have had standards which are quite similar to the CCSS," the report says. Among the eight states most closely aligned were California, Florida, Michigan, and Washington State.

Schmidt, by the way, recently released preliminary findings from separate research suggesting some mismatch between current math instruction and the common core. It finds, based on educator surveys, that many math teachers currently teach key concepts at higher or lower grade levels—and for more years—than is called for in the common core.

Schmidt said the new research was aimed in part at pushing back against those who suggest that high-quality standards bear no connection to improved student achievement. On this point, we blogged earlier this year about a report from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Schmidt and Houang looked at state math achievement on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. They find a "statistically significant positive relationship between the degree of congruence between a state's standards and the CCSS ... and achievement as defined by the 2009 NAEP assessment."

(The Brookings paper looked at growth in NAEP scores over time, and found no connection between the quality of state standards and improved learning.)

Ultimately, the research paper argues that the new standards merit a big push from states to realize their potential. (Or, to paraphrase John Lennon, "All we are saying, is give [them] a chance...")

"What is clear to us is that the new Common Core State Standards for Mathematics deserve to be seriously implemented," the report says.

Or, as they put it earlier: "Standards are not self-executing, and states could easily have strong academic goals that are never seriously pursued—standards that exist only on paper."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

While 45 states adopted both sets of the Common Core State Standards—mathematics and English/language arts—Minnesota adopted only one, in English/language arts. But that one set has sparked legislation that suggests unease among state lawmakers.

Both houses of the state legislature there have passed S.F. 1656, a measure that allows the state commissioner of education to approve academic standards only if the legislature votes to allow it.

That would represent a key change for Minnesota. As we told you when it adopted the ELA standards in September 2010, Minnesota is one of the few states in which standards adoption is up to the commissioner. (Minnesota has no state board of education, which is where standards decisionmaking power lies in most states.)

As you can see from state legislative records, the state senate passed the bill on March 1, and the house approved it on Monday. Now it's before the governor.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

High school students rarely, if ever, learn anything about the federal budget and how taxes are collected and spent, an oversight that doesn't serve their development as informed, engaged citizens. That's the argument that Teachers College is advancing as it announces that it has developed a curriculum to fill that gap.

The "Understanding Fiscal Responsibility" curriculum consists of 24 lesson plans that cover, among other things, information about taxation, debt, and deficit, and aims to help students explore the questions raised by their country's fiscal policies. It will be available for free to all high schools.

Tonight's announcement at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, is to include a panel discussion featuring former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag and Teachers College President Susan H. Fuhrman, among others. Teachers from a Bronx high school that piloted the curriculum are slated to share videos from their classroom work. The curriculum also has been piloted in Texas.

"Despite fiercely partisan debates in Washington about the federal budget over the past four years, most Americans do not have a thorough understanding of how the federal government raises and spends money," says a release from Teachers College. "The new curriculum was created after research by Teachers College found that, although the federal budget is mentioned in the core curriculum adopted by most states, it gets little or no attention in most high schools across the country."

Teachers College has arranged for the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching to conduct an evaluation of the curriculum.

The first 10 lessons are available in hard copy and will be mailed to every high school in the country, according to the college. Digital versions of those, and an online glossary of terms used in the curriculum, are available at the project's website, www.understandingfiscalresponsibility.org. The rest of the lessons will follow in the coming weeks.

The lessons fall into five topic areas. Some examples: "What costs and trade-offs are we willing to accept to ensure the benefits of income security to Social Security recipients?"(economics); "What responsibility does the federal government have to ensure the elderly a secure and stable standard of living?" (civics); "Social Security Act of 1935: Did the creation of federally administered old-age pension program support or threaten American values and traditions?" (U.S. History); "Should developing nations accept loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)?" (world history); and "Should we raise income taxes to reduce the budget deficit and pay down the national debt?" (mathematics).

The website also has a list of those who advised the shaping of the curriculum and the research findings that led to its creation.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new fundraising initiative is looking to bring in $5 million to support theater education in 19 U.S. cities. It comes as a recent federal report suggests that access to drama and theater instruction in elementary schools has sharply declined over the past decade, and at the secondary level, it's harder to come by in high-poverty schools than those serving more-affluent populations.

The new campaign, dubbed Impact Creativity, was launched this week with a $200,000 gift from accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP and its partners and principals. It's being orchestrated by the National Corporate Theatre Fund, based in New York City.

The new campaign aims to "motivate corporations, foundations, and individuals to help shape a more intelligent, diverse, confident, and creative 21st-century workforce by investing in arts and theater education as essential learning," said Bruce Whitacre, the executive director of the National Corporate Theatre Fund, in a press release. The organization's 19 member-theaters serve an estimated 500,000 children, most from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, through their theater education programs, the press release says.

The news gives me a chance to highlight the theater dimension of a recent National Center for Education Statistics report on access to arts education. First, the NCES study found that in the 2009-10 academic year, just 4 percent of U.S. public elementary schools offered instruction designated specifically for drama/theater during regular school hours. That figure represents a huge drop from the 20 percent figure for 1999-2000, the last time the NCES data were collected.

That said, this doesn't tell the whole story. About half of elementary schools, 53 percent, reported that drama/theater was incorporated into other subject areas, up slightly from 50 percent a decade earlier.

At the secondary level, the NCES data point to a sharp disparity in access to drama based on income level. In essence, a low-poverty school was twice as likely to offer instruction in theater/drama than a high-poverty school during the 2008-09 year. In wonkier terms, 56 percent of schools with a poverty rate of 0 to 25 percent provided such instruction, compared with only 28 percent of schools in which at least three-quarters of students live in poverty.

You can read the full report here.

Jim Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young, tied the value of arts education to the workforce.

"Tomorrow's workforce must act confidently, communicate effectively, and think creatively—all qualities that can be enhanced through arts and theater education," he said in the press release.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

With a first draft of common science standards expected out soon, the National Research Council is gearing up to help states figure out the best way to assess the scientific knowledge and skills to be expected of students.

A panel of experts in science, science education, and assessment will develop a report over the next year that provides a conceptual framework for the K-12 assessments and makes recommendations on the steps needed to develop valid, reliable, and fair assessments pegged to the standards.

"This is at the very early stages," said Martin Storksdieck, the director of the NRC's Board on Science Education, which is jointly spearheading the effort with the council's Board on Testing and Assessment. "We're not providing assessments per se. ... We're creating a broad intellectual framework."

Storksdieck told me that the members of the panel will be announced within about a month. And the goal is to have the report completed by the spring or early summer of 2013.

The work from the congressionally chartered NRC is being supported by about $1 million in grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr., Foundation. (Disclaimer: Both the Carnegie and Hewlett foundations also provide financial support for Education Week's news coverage.)

If this idea of an NRC framework for science education sounds familiar to any readers, that's probably because last summer the council issued such a framework to guide the development of the "next generation" science standards themselves. The actual writing of those standards is being led by 26 states working in collaboration with Achieve—a Washington-based nonprofit group that also helped with the development of the Common Core State Standards in mathematics and English/language arts—and a variety of experts in science education.

Top priorities in developing the forthcoming standards include promoting a greater emphasis on depth over breadth in understanding science and getting young people to continually engage in the practices of both scientific inquiry and engineering design as part of the learning process. Another goal is to promote greater coherence in the teaching of science as students progress through school, with the core scientific concepts revisited at multiple grade levels to build on prior learning and help facilitate a deeper understanding.

With the standards still being developed, the NRC's standards framework will no doubt prove a key guide for the assessment document produced.

Storksdieck said a key goal is to promote more "authentic" assessments that are able to measure not simply knowledge but also students' ability to apply that learning through the scientific practices identified. The panel will seek out and examine existing assessments that may serve as models. In addition, he said the NRC will be mindful of what is feasible given constraints on time and funding.

Indeed, he suggested that one issue that will "loom large is the role of technology and computer-based assessments."

The NRC panel, he said, will "really think through what a more dynamic assessment delivery system can do to create more authentic ways for assessment."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you are following the Common Core State Standards, you might have heard a little something about a set of "publishers' criteria" that was designed to guide the development of curricular and instructional materials. The criteria caused a bit of a stir when they first came out last summer.

Written by the two lead writers of the standards, the guidelines immediately drew fire for wandering into pedagogy, with advice on matters as specific as reading aloud to young students rather than using recordings, and as broad as radically cutting back the prereading activities that have become so widespread in literacy instruction.

The publishers' criteria are a flashpoint, of course, because of their potential influence, since publishers are indeed taking them to heart as they design—and redesign—their materials. Educators, too, are scrutinizing them in a bid to stay true to the standards, which now guide instruction in 45 states and the District of Columbia. What you think about all that would have a whole lot to do with whether you like the standards themselves, and the way the criteria interpret them. (See my story about how the criteria are helping drive a debate about the role of prereading.)

So it's worth noting that the publishers' criteria have been undergoing cycles of revision. The most recent version came out a couple weeks ago. You can find them on the website of Student Achievement Partners, the nonprofit run by the lead writers of the English and math standards. The criteria are a set of two documents, one covering grades K-2 and another covering grades 3-12.

I looked them over to see what might have changed and chatted by email with David Coleman, the CEO of Student Achievement Partners and co-lead writer of the standards and the publishers' criteria, about the changes.

Some specifics have disappeared. For instance, in the original version of the 3-12 criteria, the writers advised that "80 to 90 percent" of curriculum materials for literacy instruction across the subjects should require "text-dependent analysis" in order to accurately reflect the reading standards. In the newest version, those percentages have disappeared in favor of a general description of what text-dependent analysis means and how important it is that students build these skills to master the reading standards.

Other specifics remain unchanged in the new version. The grade 3-12 guidelines, for instance, are quite specific in the relative proportions of student-writing types they seek: 30 percent argumentative, 35 percent explanatory/informational, and 35 percent narrative in elementary school, with a stronger tilt toward argumentative writing and away from narrative writing as students get older: 40 percent each of argumentative and explanatory writing in high school, with 20 percent narrative writing.

Unsurprisingly, original key messages are intact. In some cases, they've even sharpened. The K-2 criteria, for instance, reiterate the first version's reference to the importance of having "a majority" of questions to students be based directly on the text they are reading. But the new version goes a step further, noting that materials (and by implication, teachers' questions) "should not over rely on "cookie-cutter questions that could be asked of any text, such as 'What is the main idea? Provide three supporting details.' "

All the revisions can't be captured here, but I wanted to note at least a few. I also chatted with Coleman about the changes, and wanted to share what he and his writing partner, Susan Pimentel, highlighted as changes in the most recent version. They:

• Removed sections of the criteria where they felt the document went "beyond the standards and intruded too much into instructional details."
• "More explicitly emphasized the important role teacher judgment plays in choosing materials."
• Made clearer that the standards require wide-ranging reading/research and reading of full novels, drama, and poems, as well as close reading of shorter texts.
• "Worked closely with the [English-language-learner] community to ensure that the work on scaffolding responded to the needs of all students to gain access to high-quality complex text.
• Made a point of stating that "high-quality questions are usually text specific as well as text-dependent; that is, that good questions are not typically generic for any text but address the specific text or texts being examined.
• "Noted the vibrant role of conversation between students in developing literacy," in recognition of the speaking and listening standards.
• Sought to "leave room for a wide range of instructional approaches, while setting some basic parameters based on the standards; for example, the standards require that scaffolds do not pre-empt or replace the need to read the text, but there are many ways open for teachers to engage students in reading."
• "More clearly articulated the central importance of the foundational skills in K-2 and the need for systematic attention to the foundations of reading."
• "Emphasized the central role of academic vocabulary—higher-level words that appear commonly in many different types of text—in reading, writing, listening, and speaking."
• Clarified sections that people found confusing or idiosyncratic.

So I challenge you to a side-by-side analysis. Read the original version (linked in our story about them, for which I gave you a link above) and the new one and decide for yourself: How have they changed, and do those changes represent improvements in your view?

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend