CREDIT: ALISON YIN FOR EDSOURCE
The Common Core State Standards require non-fiction books in subjects such as history and science, as seen in this Oakland, Calif., classroom.
Report urges more active state role in Common Core
July 9, 2014 | By John Fensterwald | 1 Comment
The move to local control under the state’s new funding and accountability system has given school districts much leeway in adopting the Common Core State Standards, the challenging math and English language arts standards that California and 41 other states and Washington, D.C., have adopted. And that flexibility, concludes a new report by researchers from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, has the potential to create disparities in implementation the state should reduce.
“In California’s newly decentralized policy system the main responsibility for addressing many of these issues falls to local educators, but our research makes it clear that the capacity to address them successfully is sorely lacking in many parts of the state,” the report states. Local control, it says, cannot take the place of a stronger state role.
The 16-page report, “Implementing Common Core State Standards in California: A Report from the Field,” was based on discussions with educators in three dozen districts and county offices of education, four charter school organizations and two education organizations. Its principal author is Milbrey McLaughlin, the founding director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities and an education policy professor at Stanford.
With the administration of the first official tests in the new standards less than a year away, the authors found that most districts lacked a comprehensive, coherent plan for the Common Core and that most didn’t have a unifying curriculum tying grades together. There have been promising regional collaborations among districts, but most of the work has been lesson planning by teachers at the school level. While teachers felt energized by the ability to shape what they’ll teach, they universally complained about the lack of time to prepare for the new standards, an overwhelming array of materials and textbooks to choose from and inconsistent quality of professional development, especially for English learners. The new standards are, as one teacher told researchers, “liberating in so many ways but also overwhelming and frightening.”
“If I stacked up the 25 largest districts, about half of them are capable of and conditioned to thinking ahead in putting together plans and mobilizing people. Others are not unwilling to do that – they are not capable of doing it for a variety of reasons,” said David Gordon, superintendent of the Sacramento County Office of Education.
Principals and administrators, who are supposed to lead school and district efforts, feel equally anxious. “Many have no experience with Report urges more active state role in Common Core | EdSource:
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