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Draft Common Standards Elicit Kudos and Criticism

By Catherine Gewertz

The first public draft of grade-by-grade common standards, released this morning, is being greeted with a mix of praise and skepticism, illustrating both the mounting consensus that the country needs to set higher expectations for all students and the many problems that complicate their adoption.

An earlier standards document, released last fall, outlined a set of “college and career readiness” skills that students should master by graduation. The document released Wednesday, from the same common-standards initiative, completes the picture by specifying the competencies students must have in each grade if they are to reach those goals. Merged now into one draft, the standards represent a sweeping—and controversial—attempt to describe the skills and knowledge every American student should have in English/language arts and mathematics to thrive in college or careers.

In 62 pages, the English/language arts standards aim to “lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21st century,” able to tackle complex works of literature and nonfiction, sift critically through the masses of information available online, and marshal evidence to build compelling arguments. The draft document describes how the standards break down into skills in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and language usage. It also details specific literacy skills students need to help them understand coursework in science and in history/social studies.

Three hundred pages of appendices offer examples of student work that shows “at least adequate” performance in the standards at various grade levels, and examples of texts that illustrate the complexity, quality, and range appropriate to various grade levels. They also set forth the research basis for the standards.

The 71-page mathematics standards attempt to avoid the charge of “mile-wide, inch-deep” treatment of the subject by carving out key ideas and emphasizing conceptual understanding of them, and placing a premium on students’ ability to explain math problems, not simply compute them. A 60-page appendix is a guide to designing high school courses that capture the content standards.

But the draft also states the limitations of the standards. The English/language arts document says, for instance, that it makes no attempt to tell teachers how to teach, or describe everything that should be taught.

Teacher Input Requested

Drafted behind closed doors by teams of academics, state education officials, and policymaking groups, and then circulated repeatedly and confidentially to scores of leaders and education advocates for feedback and revision, the standards are now open for public comment through April 2. They are posted at www.corestandards.org, a Web site created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the two groups leading the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which has the support of 48 states and President Barack Obama’s administration. Once public feedback is incorporated into this draft, a final version will be posted in late spring, NGA and CCSSO officials said.

Some teachers have participated in drafting the standards, but the organizers said they want many more to offer feedback during the public-comment period.

Chris Minnich, who is leading the common-standards work for the CCSSO, said he wants to know whether teachers find the standards “teachable,” and whether the grade-by-grade progressions of skills outlined in them make sense. Dane Linn, who leads the work for the NGA, said he would also like teachers’ ideas on curriculum materials and assessments that could be developed to reflect the standards.

Addressing one area of controversy about the standards, Mr. Linn said that the two groups do not plan to craft a national curriculum or assessments for the standards. Instead, he said, the groups might play “a catalyzing role” by helping coordinate the efforts of publishers, education organizations, school districts, or groups of teachers, for instance, to do that work.

“The last thing we want is a one-size-fits-all [curriculum or assessment],” Mr. Linn said.

But that is exactly what some see in the common-standards draft. Paul E. Barton, a senior associate at the Educational Testing Service’s Policy Information Center, said the standards reinforce the flawed idea that one shared set of goals suits all students.

“It conflates the idea of higher standards at the high school level with standardization of high school curriculum,” he said. “We need curriculum opportunities that recognize the diversity of students, how different they are when they enter high school, their different goals, learning modes, and ambitions.”

A better approach, Mr. Barton said, would be building a more varied menu of options for students by having educators and organizations develop a broad array of rigorous courses with matching exams for districts or states to adopt.

Skills Debate Resurfaces

The completion of the public draft sparked a repeat of earlier criticism from some quarters that the common standards demand skills such as critical thinking without the underlying subject-matter knowledge required to learn those skills.

Jim Stergios, the executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based research and advocacy group, said the common standards are “skills-based standards without any real content to speak of.” He said he is worried that Massachusetts’ own standards will be “dumbed down” if the state adopts the common standards.

But Richard Long, the director of government relations for the International Reading Association, commended the draft for its potential to serve as a “cornerstone” of improvement in U.S. education. Too much focus on subject-matter knowledge in standards, he said, risks turning schooling into a mechanical use of facts, rather than a process of learning how to apply key skills to varying sets of facts.

The standards aim to prepare students for good jobs. But experts disagree on the extent of overlap in the skills and knowledge required by various kinds of careers.

Gary Hoachlander, the president of ConnectEd, a Berkeley, Calif.-based group that supports integrated career and technical education in that state, said that while the draft common standards are “an impressive piece of work” that defines desirable skills and knowledge, they contain little articulation of skills applicable to the marketplace.

“It’s difficult to see how career readiness significantly influenced the content here,” he said. “There is little attention or mention of examples that link more directly to the world of work, to the kinds of problems students will encounter out there, like examples of good technical writing. It’s a glass half full.”

Douglas B. Reeves, a widely recognized expert on standards and curriculum, who is based in Boston, called the public draft “a first-rate piece of work” with laudable rigor and clarity. He praised it for making explicit connections between grade levels and subjects, bringing “rare levels of rigor” to middle school, and placing more emphasis on nonfiction reading and writing in elementary school.

The “great gift” of the standards, he said, is their potential to bring focus to K-12 learning. But that could be squandered if states view the common standards as simply another layer on top of their own standards, curriculum, and assessments, he said.

Mr. Reeves urged the standards-writers to embrace and clarify an important message about teaching that the document itself contradicts.

“The draft says it doesn’t tell teachers how to teach, but it really does, and that’s a good thing,” he said in an interview. He explained in an e-mail: “Teaching methods that fail to support reading and writing at challenging levels are not matters of personal taste. The politically saccharine implication to teachers and administrators that ‘you can still do whatever you want to do, in your own professional judgment’ is disingenuous,” he said.

Embracing Pieces

The draft standards are coming in for mixed reviews from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Henry S. Kepner Jr., its president, said he likes the draft’s stated support for problem-solving, reasoning, and communication in math, but he feels those are not evident enough throughout the document. In some places, math concepts are introduced earlier than the NCTM would like to see, and in some places later, he said.

But overall, Mr. Kepner said, he thinks the draft is “on the right track.”

State education officials had varied reactions as well.

Karen Klinzing, who oversees standards development in Minnesota as the assistant education commissioner, said the common standards for English/language arts are at least as rigorous as Minnesota’s own highly regarded standards, but those for math “are not there yet.”

While the current math draft is a great improvement over earlier drafts, it still falls short in supplying enough algebraic reasoning in grades K-7 to enable all students to be ready for Algebra 1 in 8th grade, as Minnesota’s standards do, Ms. Klinzing said.

“We would have to go backwards to implement the standards as they are now,” she said of the math draft.

Martha R. Reichrath, Georgia’s deputy state superintendent of education, said that her review team found “significant gaps and holes” in the math section of earlier drafts, but saw that their feedback was heeded in subsequent versions, erasing those concerns.

Adopting the common standards “won’t significantly raise the bar for students in Georgia, not because [they] are weak, but because ours are so strong,” Ms. Reichrath said, since Georgia has been infusing more rigor into its own standards in the past seven years. Adopting the common standards would provide a stamp of approval that the state has “been on the right path all along,” she said.

Trecina Green, the director of curriculum and instruction for Mississippi, said she had heard “mixed reviews” of the common standards from her online conversations with education officials in other states. “Some people feel the common-core standards are just as rigorous as their own, and that’s the way to go, but some other states are feeling that the standards may be too rigorous,” she said.

Many of those conclusions could be refined by a detailed analysis of how the common standards compare with states’ own standards, she said. Mississippi will be able to determine how feasible the common standards are to adopt and implement once it does such an analysis, Ms. Green said. Her chief concern at the moment, though, is what changes, if any, adoption of those standards would require in the state’s assessments, she said.

Wholesale Restructuring

Some of those charged with translating the common standards into curricula are expressing interest, optimism, and yet caution about the new draft.

Kathy Augustine, Atlanta’s deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said she likes the draft document’s attention to adaptations needed for English-learners and special education students and its emphasis on students’ understanding ideas across disciplines and applying them in projects. But ensuring that all staff members understand the standards and how to implement them represents, she said, “a huge lift” that will take several years and likely require “restructuring from the classroom level all the way through central office.” Difficult though the task may be, Ms. Augustine said, she is “totally excited” to get started.

Penny E. MacCormack, who oversees curriculum development as the chief academic officer for the Hartford, Conn., schools, praised the standards draft for clearly articulating what students need to master in each grade to reach each college- and career-readiness goal, though she found that lineup clearer in English/language arts than in math.

And while she is “impressed” with the document, she said her team will have to see whether its agenda is too ambitious to fit into an academic year. The expectations for kindergarten, too, “beg questions” about what children must learn before they even arrive at school, she said.

And the question of how common standards will interact with states’ current assessments looms.

“No doubt my team will use [the common standards] to improve our work,” Ms. MacCormack said. “But we are being measured on state assessments. It isn’t possible to use them solely without keeping an eye to state assessments.”

LINKS:

Common Core State Standards (PDFs)

Introduction

English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science

• Appendix A: Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards
• Appendix B: Illustrative Texts
• Appendix C: Samples of Student Writing

Mathematics

• Appendix A: Designing High School Mathematics Courses

SOURCE: Common Core State Standards Initiative

A follow-up article from the New York Times...

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Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools

By SAM DILLON

A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers and solutions for linear equations.

The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical mass of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely. But there could be opposition in some states, like Massachusetts, which already has high standards that advocates may want to keep.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for nearly two decades. “Now we have the possibility that for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”

In recent years, many states moved in the opposite direction, lowering standards to make it easier for students to pass tests and for schools to avoid penalties under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

After educators, business executives and others criticized the corrosive impact of a race to the bottom, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers set the common-standards initiative in motion last year. They convened panels of English and math experts from the College Board and A.C.T., and from Achieve Inc., a group with years of experience working to upgrade graduation standards.

Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the standards-writing effort. In keeping his state out, Gov. Rick Perry argued that only Texans should decide what children there learn.

The Obama administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states are competing for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money, states can earn 40 points of the possible 500 for participating in the common effort and adopting the new standards. Under current law, there is no penalty for states that choose not to participate.

The standards are open for public comment through April 2, before final versions are published later in the spring.

Kentucky, working with a draft, last month became the first state to formally adopt the standards. The state said it would train teachers to the standards this summer and begin teaching them this fall. Officials in Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and other states have begun laying the groundwork for adoption, said Dane Linn, the education division director at the National Governors Association.

The adoption process varies greatly from state to state. In some, the state schools superintendent has considerable power to move forward in as little as three months. But other states, including California, have complicated procedures, involving the state board of education and other bodies that could prolong the process for a year or more, Mr. Linn said.

Educators and officials involved in the writing process pointed to what they considered to be strengths in the proposed standards, including that they are concise.

“Many states have too many expectations in their academic standards that force teachers to cover too much in a superficial way,” said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We said: ‘Let’s keep these very understandable and at a number that is manageable. Let’s not put on teachers more requirements than they can deliver.’ ”

Another improvement over current state benchmarks, people involved in the initiative said, is that the proposed standards are what educators call vertically aligned, meaning that material students are to learn in early years builds a foundation for what is to come in the next grade.

“Students are asked to do progressively more challenging things, and although that may sound obvious, it’s a real breakthrough,” said Michael Cohen, an Education Department official in the Clinton administration who is president of Achieve.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic.

“We’re not at all satisfied,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston nonprofit group that helped Massachusetts revise its state benchmarks in the 1990s. “Ours in Massachusetts are much higher, so why should we adopt these?” Mr. Stergios also criticized the three-week public comment period.

“When was the last time you saw a national effort that was rammed through in three weeks?” he asked.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of State Boards of Education, and a string of other business and education groups immediately endorsed the draft standards. The Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest urban public school systems, called the standards “high quality grade-by-grade standards that the nation can be proud of.”

They outline concepts to be learned, but do not lay down a specific curriculum.

In English, for instance, they do not prescribe individual works of literature, but instead suggest texts illustrating the quality and complexity of student reading appropriate for various grades. The middle school list includes “Little Women” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” as well as works of nonfiction like “Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad,” by Ann Petry. The 11th-grade nonfiction list includes Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Because the standards cover only English and math, their writers did not include proposals related to evolution, a cause of controversy in some states, or to any other specific science concepts.

Since the late 1980s, many educators and policy makers have considered the current system of state standards a weak link in American education. Because the standards vary so widely, standardized tests keyed to them are not comparable from state to state, nor to national tests. Eighty-seven percent of Tennessee students scored at or above the proficiency level in math on state tests in 2005, for instance, while 21 percent did so on the federal math test.

Efforts to draft voluntary national standards during the first Bush and Clinton administrations foundered after conservatives attacked them as federal meddling in classroom teaching. Because of that tumultuous history, leaders of the latest effort have defended its state-led nature, despite frequent endorsements by the Obama administration.

Also, they enlisted considerable help from education groups, including the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and others.

Writers who participated said they had sought to build on the best of what is already in some states’ standards, while clarifying and simplifying.