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On Wednesday, I published a new report, Common Core State Standards: The way forward. In this week’s CommenTerry, I provide an excerpt from that study.
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CommenTerry
Standards: Beyond Common Core
To move beyond the current Common Core Standards, the state must choose one of four options.
1. The state could jettison Common Core immediately and charge NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to begin the process of developing an alternative set of English language arts and mathematics standards from scratch.
Unfortunately, the process of finding an alternative would likely require North Carolina’s public schools to go without standards, and therefore accountability, for multiple school years. As mentioned above, many of the same people and organizations that called for immediately scrapping Common Core have also railed against the mediocrity of their state’s standards, curricula, and tests. For states like North Carolina, for example, Common Core is an improvement over standards formulated previously by NC DPI. Resuscitating the state’s former educational program would be a step in the wrong direction.
2. The state could also add 15 percent to the Standards as permitted by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.
While it is tempting to think of the "15 percent rule" as a way to reclaim ownership of the Standards, the costs of modifying such a small share may outweigh any benefits.
3. The third option is to ignore the Standards.
Given that educational standards establish expectations for all North Carolina students, it is not feasible to simply pretend that they do not exist.
4. The final alternative is to keep the Common Core Standards in place temporarily and create an independent review commission that either modifies Common Core or adopts an alternative.
Although not ideal, the proposal outlined here recommends that the state retain the Common Core State Standards until the commission makes a choice to either
a. modify the Common Core State Standards based on the recommendations of appointees, public school personnel, and the public; or
b. adopt a superior, "off the shelf" alternative, such as Sandra Stotsky’s "An English Language Arts Curriculum Framework for American Public Schools." Stotsky’s used Massachusetts’s celebrated English standards as a basis for her "curriculum framework."
By keeping the Common Core until a determination is made, the commission would avoid the problem of lacking standards and accountability during the standards review and/or development process. In addition, it would smooth the transition to new standards for North Carolina’s teachers and administrators.
After completing a review of the standards, stakeholders from across North Carolina would develop The North Carolina Foundations of Achievement (NCFA), a content-rich curriculum that would align with the new standards and provide the foundation for classroom instruction and testing.
Why is this step necessary? One of the main problems with relying heavily on standards to dictate curriculum and instruction is that the standards may be misinterpreted or misapplied by those implementing them. For this reason, we believe that the NCFA should also include a content component developed by North Carolinians.
Facts and Stats
The Instructional Process
Education Acronym of the Week
CCSS — Common Core State Standards
Quote of the Week
"The content of instruction is so important that any responsible community should be willing to do the hard work of specifying and agreeing to what students need to know and be able to do by the end of each grade."
– Lisa Hansel quoted in Common Core State Standards: The way forward, p. 8
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