When something changes the world, do we recognize what is happening at the time?
When did you buy your first cell phone? If your purchase was ten or more years ago, on that day did you imagine a future when the entire world would be cellular? Did you envision all of the applications that could be spawned from a telephone in your pocket? Cell phones not only changed the ways in which we communicate, cell phones changed the ways we live.
Now and again we experience an event or a product or a person and that experience seems to be just a passing moment in time. Sputnik. Desk top computing. Steve Jobs. 9/11. Genetic engineering. Martin Luther King. Repeat any of these six to another person and they readily will identify the year, the event, the model and make and the life story or signature work of the individual. Spend a bit longer in the conversation and you will be into a more lengthy description of the effects of a world changer.
In the universe of public education, the adoption and implementation of the Common Core State Standards is that kind of a seminal event. On their own, the Core represents a groundbreaking list of educational standards in reading/English language arts and mathematics education. Initially, they are derived from an intriguing ménage a trois comprised of the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers (state superintendents of education), and a group of Fortune 500 executives. As an event/product, the Core will cause a reform of classroom instruction greater than New Math, phonics or whole language.
However, as a game changer, the Core is not THE reform, as in a one-trick pony. The real changes in K-12 education are blossoming everywhere as a result OF the Core. The Core is driving changes, just as the cell phone caused industrial, cultural, and political changes.
Sean Cavanaugh, assistant editor for Education Week, writes, “The market for testing products and services is booming and could continue to surge over the next few years, according to industry analysts and company officials, who say that growth is being fueled by the shift toward common-core tests across states and the use of new classroom assessments designed to provide timely and precise feedback for teachers and students.
Demand for testing resources tends to be driven by major changes in state or federal policy affecting schools, and the current environment is reflective of that connection.
Changes in testing policy with nationwide implications are invariably ‘good for any provider of testing materials,’ said Scott Marion, the associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a Dover, N.H.-based nonprofit organization that consults with states on assessments. ‘You knew the common core was going to be a big change from what [we] had before.’”
The educational assessment market is not limited to the summative tests being written by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or the Partnership for Assessment Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The greater demand will be for diagnostic, formative assessments that will help teachers to measure short term gains in student learning – what is working and what is not. These will be needed by every K-12 school district, in multiple languages, and adapted to multiple learning modalities.
One of the characteristics of a world changer is that it causes people to look more deeply into what the changer (the Core) means, how it works, and its effects upon the world. “Common-Core Rollout Ripe for Studying, Experts Say” appeared in Education Week (10/8/2013). http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/09/07core.h33.html?tkn=ONQF0ED54LaTmusvQK4lV%2BLqz6Oa0VZ%2BQqeY&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS2
“The creators of the Common Core State Standards purposely set out what students should know in mathematics and reading without laying out how teachers should meet those requirements. That creates a rare opportunity—but also requires a massive lift—for K-12 education research to fill in the blanks.
‘Standards are necessary but they aren’t sufficient to improve student learning,’ said Pascal D. “Pat” Forgione Jr., the executive director of the K-12 Center at the Educational Testing Service, during a meeting on research in the common core held here by the Center on Education Policy and George Washington University. ‘We need significant R&D work.’
‘There’s a consensus that research as a whole has to be research for improvement; it can’t just be documentation of what worked and what didn’t,’ said John Q. Easton, the IES’ director. ‘There’s ‘no grand [randomized controlled trial] that anyone will conduct that will give us yes or no in eight years.’
Janice M. Earle, a senior program director for K-12 STEM education at the NSF predicted there may be staged cycles of research to support the standards in their first years of implementation, with deeper studies and evaluations six and 10 years out. If researchers and educators begin developing partnerships to implement the standards now, they will be in a better position to collect information and understand earlier indicators of problems or success.”
There is no pedagogy related to the Core. In order for all children to successfully achieve the content, skills and processing expectations of the Core, there will be hundreds of studies of the cause and effect dynamics of instructional strategies. The Core are not aligned to a specific textbook or publisher; publishers are rushing to align their products with the Core. Every school will be examining publisher samples to find materials appropriate for grade levels and the variety of learning needs of children at every grade level.
A third arena for enlarged industry lies in the need to expand every school’s technological infrastructure. Instruction as well as assessment will require every school district and school building to beef up.
“Widespread technical failures and interruptions of recent online testing in a number of states have shaken the confidence of educators and policymakers in high-tech assessment methods and raised serious concerns about schools’ technological readiness for the coming common-core online tests.
The glitches arose as many districts in the 46 states that have signed on to the Common Core State Standards are trying to ramp up their technological infrastructure to prepare for the requirement that students take online assessments starting in 2014-15.”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/05/08/30testing-2.h32.html
“Districts need to have a punch list and make sure they have everything they need to be ready,” said Keith R. Krueger, the CEO of the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking, or COSN, a professional association for school district technology leaders. “But they also have to understand that high-stakes testing is a complicated environment. They’re not going to be able to control everything.”
“Though more breakdowns likely are inevitable given online testing’s relatively new place in schools, the ability to protect the validity, integrity, and security of the process is increasingly crucial as districts in 46 states—those that have adopted the Common Core State Standards—gear up for mandatory online assessments starting in 2014-15.”
Research, instructional material development, and technological support pale to the great demand the Core will cause for the professional development of classroom teachers.
“The implementation clock is ticking,” says a Center on Education Policy report, which was released yesterday. “If changes in instruction are to occur on schedule and if students are to be well prepared to master the standards, then teachers and principals must receive effective professional development to aid them through this transition.”
“And that doesn’t mean drive-by PD, either, according to the CEP.”
“One of the most urgent challenges is to not only provide an adequate amount of CCSS-related professional development, but also ensure these services are of high quality,” the report says.
It would be wonderful to “beam” ten years into the future to learn what educators and the public in general will be saying about the Common Core and the many peripheral changes the Core will have caused in public education across its first decade. I can only speculate that, like Sputnik or laptop computing and the cell phone, the Core will have blossomed fully from a set of standards into a powerful engine for far-reaching educational reform.