Blog Posts
Common Core and Classroom Instruction: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This post continues a series begun in 2014 on implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The first installment introduced an analytical scheme investigating CCSS implementation along four dimensions: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability. Three posts focused on curriculum. This post turns to instruction. Although the impact of CCSS on how teachers teach is discussed, the post is also concerned with the inverse relationship, how decisions that teachers make about instruction shape the implementation of CCSS.
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The Gender Gap in Reading
This week marks the release of the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education , the fourteenth issue of the series. One of the three studies in the report, “Girls, Boys, and Reading,” examines the gender gap in reading. Girls consistently outscore boys on reading assessments. They have for a long time. A 1942 study in Iowa discovered that girls were superior to boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills.[i]Girls have outscored boys on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessments since the first NAEP was administered in 1971.
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High Achievers, Tracking, and the Common Core
A curriculum controversy is roiling schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past few months, parents in the San Mateo-Foster City School District, located just south of San Francisco International Airport, voiced concerns over changes to the middle school math program. The changes were brought about by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Under previous policies, most eighth graders in the district took algebra I. Some very sharp math students, who had already completed algebra I in seventh grade, took geometry in eighth grade. The new CCSS-aligned math program will reduce eighth grade enrollments in algebra I and eliminate geometry altogether as a middle school course.
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The Perils of Edutourism
Edutourism is not new. For American education professors in the 1920s, nothing certified one’s progressive credentials like a trip to the Soviet Union. Diane Ravitch presents a vivid account in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. She describes how John Dewey, the most famous progressive educator of the era, visited Soviet schools in 1928 and returned full of admiration. He appreciated the emphasis on collectivism over individualism and the ease with which schools integrated curricula with the goals of society. One activity that he singled out for praise was sending students into the community to educate and help “ignorant adults to understand the policies of local soviets.” William Heard Kilpatrick, father of the project method, toured Russian schools in 1929. He applauded the ubiquitous use of project-based learning in Soviet classrooms, noting that “down to the smallest detail in the school curriculum, every item is planned to further the Soviet plan of society.” Educator and political activist George Counts shipped a Ford sedan to Leningrad and set out on a three-month tour, extolling the role Soviet schools played in “the greatest social experiment in history.”[i]
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Implementing Common Core: Curriculum Part 3
This post is the third and final segment on implementing curriculum aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). It focuses on how curriculum is shaped in schools and classrooms. Previous posts described curriculum implementation at the national, state, and district levels. Future posts in this series will examine the role of instruction, assessment, and accountability in implementing the Common Core.
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