With money available for Common Core, California districts study their options
English teacher Lisa Rothbard leads a discussion about how to write a strong thesis statement in her classroom at Skyline High in Oakland.
Credit: Pat Wingert/The Hechinger Report
Making the new national Common Core standards a reality in classrooms is a complicated and expensive business. Unusually for California, the money is there. But the tricky part is how to spend it.
“The thing about this work is that no one here has done it before, so we don’t know exactly what we’ll need” to spend for Common Core, said David Christiansen, Fresno’s associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction. “Frankly, every district is trying to figure it out. We want to make the right investment around our goals.”
Making good choices is complicated by the sheer volume of new products that claim to be aligned to the Common Core, the ambitious national goals adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia that aim to encourage critical thinking and deeper learning. A multibillion-dollar industry of competing vendors is promoting a dizzying array of new products – textbooks, curriculum, teacher-training workshops, software, laptops, iPads, nonfiction kids’ magazines,
