The Common Core State Standards: An Opportunity We Cannot Afford to Miss

By Gina D. Dalma

POsition Paper on the CCSS

by Gina Dalma
274.60sc on December 13, 2012

The Common Core Standards + not a name or title that attracts passionate readership, but the standards have the potential to dramatically improve the education of our children. We should care. California's legislature signed on to the Common Core State Standards in 2010 (http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/cc)

By the end of the 2014-15 school year, all our public school students will be assessed on a completely different set of standards than they have now in mathematics and English Language Arts.

Although not without their critics, these standards are really good. They focus on building students' higher-order thinking skills - less content, deeper thinking. Making connections: They are designed to spark curiosity and further exploration; make relevant real-world connections; articulate learning in one subject matter to another; use technology intentionally; increase literacy skills and knowledge; and, most importantly, assure that all students - all students- have high quality learning opportunities that prepare them for college and a career. Also, the assessments will take many forms and they should be used to inform instruction and learning. Imagine that + assessments that serve the purpose of improving instruction- a gift to our talented educators.

Simply and hopefully, the standards will create an environment where the most common sentence in a classroom will be "explain why...."

At the classroom level, these rigorous standards will challenge teachers' content knowledge and also their ability to deliver effective instruction that meets the intent of both the content standards as well as the standards for teaching practices. Supporting teachers will require new and intensive approaches to professional learning and, new uses of technologies, programs, and productivity tools. School leaders will also have to be trained as there will need to be alignment in strategies and practices at all levels of management to make this happen.

These standards and the associated assessments currently under development http://www.smarterbalanced.org, present an extraordinary opportunity for districts across the country to move toward higher levels of achievement for all students. California has fallen so far behind that we consider it a success that we are scoring on par with Kazakhstan. Thoughtful and effective implementation of these standards is an opportunity that we cannot let pass. Without adequate investment in real professional development for our teachers and school leaders, instructional material that reflects the intent and content of the standards (foregoing the traditional textbooks with a brand new sticker that states alignment to the common core standards) and investment in technology, we will fail.