Core Standards for English Language Arts

March 30, 2010

Background

 What are the standards trying to achieve?

 Clearer, fewer, internationally benchmarked  What has been their timing?

  College & Career Ready Fall 2009 K-12 – Draft Comments – April 2 nd  Obama Blue Print for ESEA  Title I funds  Race to the Top

Key Players

 Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers  Dane Linn of the National Governors Association

Federal Involvement in Standards

 $350 million for assessment development  Requirement of Race to the Top  Proposed Requirement of a new Title I  President Obama

Core Standards Document

     

Aligned with college and work expectations; Clear, understandable and consistent; Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills; Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards; Informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and Evidence-based.

 Core Standards

Current state of play

 48 states and District of Columbia  One state has announced their approval – Kentucky  Questions from National Conference of State Legislators and others

IRA Involvement

 Briefings Summer 2009   Comments August 2009 Meeting – IRA officers with key leaders September 2009  Discussion with leaders of writing section  IRA members on various teams  Letter to Core Standards Team November 2009  Press Release March 2010

IRA November Letter

    1. Set the standards at a level high enough to provide a national vision of the kind of readers we hope will graduate from our high schools. Our members would like the standards to be inspiring, reflecting our nation’s ambitious aspirations for students’ achievement.

2. Give this work credibility by providing a coherent conceptual framework for the standards, reaching beyond policy documents. Our members will wonder about the theories of literacy, teaching, and learning underlying the standards.

3. Establish the research base for the standards. Our members expect to see the citation of specific studies, especially those published in refereed journals such as the

Journal of Literacy Research

and the

Reading Research Quarterly

.

4. Build opportunities for input from teachers into the process. As you know, many of our members are expert teachers of reading and writing. They have a detailed understanding of the situations commonly encountered in classrooms, schools, and districts, and their insights could lead to the design of standards more likely to be effective in promoting changes in students’ literacy learning.

March 2010 Draft Positive Observations

      Positive features of the new standards include: Portrait of students who meet the college and career readiness standards Consistent structure of the standards across the grades from K through 12 Recognition of technology, reading online, and multimedia presentations Integration of literacy in history/social studies and science Focus on higher level thinking with text while still attending to lower level skills

Concerns with Standards



Assessment

 Attend to multiple formative assessments that provide feedback to students and teachers for instructional purposes, and not solely to summative assessments for purposes of accountability.  Shift the focus to incentives for improvement.

Concerns with the Standards



Professional development

 Build capacity for literacy leadership at the building level to promote and sustain standards-based change.  Frame sessions on the core standards as an opportunity for teachers to update their knowledge and collaborate on ways to improve student achievement, not as a top-down mandate.

 Build capacity of teacher education programs to support standards-based change.

Questions for consideration

 How do these standards compare to what your state/district is trying to accomplish?

 Are these standards reflective of good practice in your state?

 How will this impact how your schools are able to help ELL’s, learning disabled, or other struggling learners?

Next Steps

 Assessment Contract using $350 million of Federal Funds  Development of Pre-K standards?

 Plans for state reviews  Plans for implementations?

Among the key issues

 Do the standards reflect good instruction?

 Are they clear?

 Are teachers part of the equation  Can states expand on them

State Council Next Steps

 File comments with corestandards.org by April 2 nd  Let your state education agency know that your are interested in this issue  Join IRA Webinar on April 6 th on impacting the standards in your state