Common Core state standards are coming

The nationwide program to establish baseline standards for all public school students is coming to Oregon. Forty-eight of the fifty states have adopted the Common Core approach to both teaching and testing, including Oregon.

Oregon's own standardized testing, the OAKS tests, have been in place since 2009, with some form of "high-stakes" testing in place for over 20 years. The standards have frequently been tightened, making year-to-year comparisons difficult, but overall, Oregon public school students have shown yearly improvement against these standards. The 2013-2014 school year is the last time that the OAKS will be administered. Starting in the 2014-2015 school year, Common Core State Standards (CCSS) will be put in place.

Sisters schools have been getting oriented to the CCSS since their adoption by the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) in October 2010. Many of the local teachers have already done extensive work to be ready to convert to these new standards and testing.

Existing textbooks will work fine to inform the new standards, but implementing CCSS requires a significant adjustment in the curriculum developed from the current texts. Students also need to be prepared to answer CCSS test questions much differently than they would past test questions.

The CCSS were developed by the states' governors (National Governors Association) and chief education officers in each state (Council of Chief State School Officials) in response to the international test results that continue to show United States students lagging far behind when compared to what are recognized as the top 34 most highly developed countries in the world.

PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) for 2009 showed U.S. students ranked 14th out of 34 in reading proficiency, and 25th out of 34 in math proficiency. Data collected from major U.S. universities shows that students are graduating from high school unprepared for college and career. Large numbers of students are having to take remedial classes in their first year of college.

The standards attempt to define "what is most essential" at each grade level. The focus is on what a student can do at the end of each grade year, rather than what a student has memorized. This approach significantly changes how a student approaches a problem. Since the standards focus on the ability to perform, as CCSS is implemented "report cards" will also change from an A, B, C grade to a report card that indicates what standards a child has or has not mastered.

This promises to be a challenging transition for both teacher and parent.

Since poor performance in college readiness was the trigger for this effort, the first thing the governors worked on was developing standards based on what the expectations should be for the end of high school.

With these high school exit standards in place, the developers then did a "set back" to ensure that incoming juniors were on track to meet the high school exit requirements; they then designed standards to ensure that sophomores were on track to meet the junior requirements and so on all the way down to kindergarten.

The CCSS guidelines do not define everything that needs to be taught at each grade level; neither do they define how each subject should be taught. The CCSS guidelines set a minimum level of ability to perform across the nation. Despite the wide cultural and regional differences across the U.S., with CCSS in place a student should able to move between districts or between states and still be able to perform at grade level.

While the CCSS standards are rigorous and cross-disciplinary (e.g. English in math class and math in English class) they do not define the nature of intervention material on one end of the spectrum, or the nature of advanced work on the other end. That is left to the local district as is curriculum for English Language Learners (ELL).

The CCSS standards are research-based and internationally normed, so as brain research evolves and the international community continues to improve, so will the CCSS standards.

Adoption of Common Core has not been without controversy, with some seeing it as the imposition of centralized planning upon local districts and families. However, the arguments for and against the new standards appear to have had little impact on public opinion so far because, according to a Gallup survey on public schools cited last September, 62 percent of Americans have never heard of the Common Core.

Locally, the Sisters School District has charged Becky Stoughton, the district's new Director of Special Projects, with the task of training the local teaching staff, and the challenge of bringing local parents up to speed on what CCSS will mean to their kids (see www.nuggetnews.com 10/22/2013 "Stoughton takes on special projects in school district" for more details).

Visit http://www.nuggetnews.com for links to the national website (www.corestandards.org), Oregon Department of Ed district resources, or ODE's parents' resources site.