Common Core: A Puzzle to Public

By Lesli A. Maxwell

In a pair of new national polls aiming to capture the American public's view of the state of K-12 education, one finding is clear: Most of those surveyed are clueless about the Common Core State Standards.

Sixty-two percent of all respondents in a poll from Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup had never heard of the common core, and awareness among public school parents was not much better, at 55 percent. In a separate survey from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which polled parents of K-12 students, 52 percent said they knew little or nothing about the common core, even though educators have begun putting the more rigorous standards in English/language arts and math into practice in classrooms in the vast majority of states and school districts.

But in trying to glean what the public and parents think about another marquee issue in public schooling—standardized testing—the polls paint a much murkier picture. Depending on how the question is worded, respondents are either fed up with testing, as found in the PDK/Gallup survey, or believe it's essential for knowing how well students are stacking up, as found in the AP survey.

"People's views are just much more complex than an answer to a single question," said Jean Johnson, a senior fellow at Public Agenda, a New York City-based opinion-research organization that studies a range of public policy issues including education. "Having these polls out together actually provides a lot of information, and in some ways, suggests issues that need some attention. Clearly, common core is one of those."

Skeptics Abound

In trying to better understand what those who had heard of the common core know and think about the standards—adopted in nearly every state—the surveys had somewhat similar results.

The PDK/Gallup survey found that just 41 percent of respondents who had heard of the standards believe they will make the United States more competitive in the world. Forty-seven percent of respondents in the Associated Press poll said they believe the standards will improve the quality of education.

Of those in the PDK/Gallup poll who had heard of the common core, many were confused by, or misunderstood, the standards and their genesis. At the same time, 95 percent of poll respondents said they think schools should teach critical-thinking skills, one of the main goals of the common standards.

In a third, wide-ranging national poll also published last week, this one by the journal Education Next, 65 percent of respondents said they support to some degree states' adoption of the common standards, up slightly from the journal's 2012 survey. But the new survey of 1,138 adults also found a near doubling of opposition to the standards' adoption from last year, with 13 percent now saying they were opposed.

"Whether you are a supporter or an opponent of the common core, you'll find things that support your point of view in all of these polls," said Michael Brickman, the director of national policy for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is one of Education Next's sponsoring institutions. "The standards will remain an unsettled issue until we start to see the actual widespread practice of using them and testing for them at the school and classroom level."

Turbulent Time

The PDK/Gallup poll—the 45th annual survey on public attitudes toward public schools from the professional educators' group and the giant polling organization—was conducted by telephone in May. The national survey of 1,001 respondents 18 and older has a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.

The poll also found strong support for charter schools and opposition to tuition vouchers, broad confidence in the safety of schools, and mixed opinions on hiring armed guards for schools. (Education Week partners with Gallup on a separate survey project, known as the Gallup-Education Week Superintendents Panel.)

Such findings come at a particularly turbulent time in public education, as the new standards and the tests being designed to measure how well students are mastering them have become the latest focus of battles over the future direction of U.S. schooling.

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards, which were developed through an initiative led by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. (One of the 46, Minnesota, has adopted the English standards only.)

Almost as many states have signed on for the common tests being devised to replace their old assessments. Already, educators are warning that those tests—expected to be much harder—will cause student scores to drop initially.

Nearly 40 states are also working on redesigning teacher and principal evaluations to include student test scores.

Reacting to the low level of public awareness shown in the polling, Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University who favors the common core, said: "This underscores the real challenge we are likely going to see, which is major pushback from the public and parents because they don't fully understand what the standards are, and they are going to be very upset about their kids' lower scores on the new tests."

Deborah A. Gist, the commissioner of education in Rhode Island, said her biggest worry is the abundance of misinformation about the standards. Many of the PDK/Gallup respondents who had heard of the common core said, erroneously, that the federal government had forced states to adopt the standards, that the standards would cover all academic-content areas, and that they were an amalgamation of existing state standards.

"That's what we particularly need to address," Ms. Gist said. "There is so much misinformation out there that it could be problematic for us to carry this through. I think these results are a message to us that we need to engage our families much more in this transition," she said.

Views on Testing

The PDK/Gallup findings on standardized testing—that fewer than one in four of those responding believe that more student testing has led to better public schools—stand in sharp contrast to the results in the Associated Press poll. But the questions posed in the two surveys were quite different.

The PDK/Gallup poll prefaced its question by saying there had been "a significant increase in testing," before asking those being surveyed whether they thought more testing had helped, hurt, or made no difference in the performance of public schools. Forty-one per

cent said that more testing had made no difference, 36 percent said it had hurt, and 22 percent said it had helped.

The AP survey—which polled 1,025 parents and guardians with children in grades K-12—posed a different question. It asked parents how important it is for schools to regularly assess students, and found that 74 per

cent said it was either extremely or very important to use tests to gauge how their children are doing.

In the same poll, 61 percent of parents said their own children are given about the right number of standardized tests; 26 percent said their children are overtested. Sixty percent also said students' scores on state tests should be included in teacher evaluations.

The Education Next poll, meanwhile, found that just about half of all respondents favored, to some extent, linking teachers' salaries in part to how well students perform on state tests.

The PDK/Gallup survey found that 58 percent of respondents oppose requiring that teacher evaluations include student scores from standardized tests. That's a big jump in negative opinion from last year, when 47 percent of PDK/Gallup respondents opposed using test scores in evaluations.

Terry Holliday, the commissioner of education in Kentucky, said that the PDK/Gallup poll's one-year change in the public's view in using scores in job evaluations is an important data point to weigh.

"For Kentucky, where we have been slow and deliberate about how we are doing our evaluations, this tells me that we need to be even more cautious," he said.

William J. Bushaw, the executive director of Phi Delta Kappa International and co-director of the poll, said the public and parents are likely being influenced by the teachers and principals in their local schools, for whom they have high regard.

"I think parents are listening to their children's teachers and are hearing their concerns about these new evaluation systems

that are untested and deciding that maybe it's not fair," Mr. Bushaw said.

As has been true for decades, confidence in teachers who work in local schools is high. In the new PDK/Gallup survey, 70 percent of respondents said they have trust and confidence in those who teach in public schools, while 65 percent said the same of principals.

Range of Issues

Besides the common core, testing, and teacher and principal quality, the PDK/Gallup survey delves into the public's views on school safety, school choice, home schooling, funding, and overall school quality.

Most public school parents surveyed—88 percent—said they do not worry about their children's physical safety at school. Eighty percent said they are more concerned about the actions of other students, rather than the threat of outside intruders in the school.

While 59 percent of respondents favor increasing mental-health services as the best approach to promoting school safety, 33 percent of those polled said hiring more security officers would be the most effective tactic. On the question of a need to hire armed security guards, especially in elementary schools, those polled were split, while a clear majority rejected the idea of arming teachers and administrators.

On school choice issues, respondents to the PDK/Gallup poll continued to hold charter schools in high regard, with 68 percent saying they support those independent public schools and 67 percent reporting they would support the opening of new charter schools in their communities. Fifty-two percent also said that they think students receive a better education at public charter schools than at traditional public schools. But there was also a sharp rise in opposition to using public money to pay for private school expenses. Seventy percent said they oppose allowing families to attend a private school at public expense, compared with 55 percent last year.

Communication Dilemma

The major takeaway from this year's survey, said Mr. Bushaw of PDK, is that educators have their work cut out for them to mount an effective communications campaign about the common-core standards.

"The best ambassadors to tell the public about what is happening with the standards and the new assessments as well are teachers and principals," he said. "But I think because some of these same people have very real concerns about how the results will be used, that may be causing them to hold back."

Vol. 33, Issue 02, Pages 1,20-21

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Treating Common-Core Syndrome

COMMENTARY

By Linda Diamond

A new disorder seems to have swept the nation: Common Core State Standards Syndrome. This malady is characterized by sharply polarized positions—worshiping the common core as schools' salvation, or condemning it as on the path to Armageddon.

The clinical manifestation is similar: op-eds in newspapers ("Common Core Education Is Uncommonly Inadequate," The Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2013) or editorials ("Moving Ahead With Common Core," The New York Times, April 20, 2013), impassioned blogs, and spirited tweets.

Entire states exhibit symptoms as well, embracing the standards one year and threatening to dump them the next.

Nonetheless, the attention being trained on the standards has the potential to transform our education system if the focus shifts to the more difficult challenge—implementation. Neither side in the debate believes that the standards alone will be sufficient, but the heavy lifting required may be beyond the capacity of many districts and schools.

"Are states really focusing on the crucial details of implementation and allotting enough time and resources to get the job done?"

As a nation, we do not have a history of thoroughly implementing or sustaining education reforms, which is troubling.

State standards are not new. We have always had a de facto set of them, driven by textbook publishers that produced national series used across states. As states developed their own standards, they often built them upon the standards written by others. But even with this history, education quality and student achievement have remained stagnant at best. Why?

Rigorous standards alone will not improve student achievement, and if we focus too much on the common-core standards themselves, we may limit the more urgent discussion about implementation. Are states really focusing on the crucial details of implementation and allotting enough time and resources to get the job done?

What is needed is a consensus on critical implementation requirements. These include specifying the details of the curriculum and how instruction should look so that students master the standards and struggling students receive the supports they need; planning a comprehensive assessment system that starts in kindergarten and is designed to identify or predict reading problems; providing continuous professional learning opportunities for teachers; selecting strong curriculum materials; communicating to all stakeholders; and developing knowledgeable educators.

The standards are not a curriculum. Because this is true, educators are busy "unpacking" them. What does this really mean?

State education departments should guide districts by spelling out specific frameworks. These frameworks should include sequences based on careful task analyses that lead to articulated and robust curriculum. What specific content will be taught, for how long, at what grades, and in what order? This is no easy task. In some districts this has devolved to teachers writing their own lessons without adequate preparation. Is this really time well spent?

Figuring out the right amount of practice for a new skill or concept, the correct order of introduction, when to provide more guided instruction, and when to provide more fluid structure is difficult.

The common-core mathematics standards provide a more overt progression than do the English/language arts, or ELA, standards. While the appendix to the ELA standards provides a progression for phonemic awareness and language skills, no such progression exists for writing. The standards themselves contain a phonics progression, but details on teaching are left up to schools.

Unlike the mathematics standards, the ELA standards are pedagogically neutral, except for their focus on close reading. Textbook publishers, if they do the job right and thoroughly, can bolster the implementation of strong curriculum to support achievement.

New math and ELA texts and resources are essential to implementing the common core successfully. If left to schools and districts alone, articulation and coherence may be elusive.

Amnesia also seems to afflict some educators when it comes to the National Reading Panel findings from April 2000, which recommended that systematic phonics be a routine part of reading instruction for all elementary students. The reading-foundational-skills standards in the common core show that their authors recognized the importance of these skills.

—iStockphoto.com/CSA_Images

What is not clearly evident, however, is how much time and practice needs to be devoted to mastering these skills.

Despite the evidence, we appear to be drifting away from systematic instruction in these skills. In part, this is the result of the placement of the reading foundational skills after the text-based standards in the common core, thus potentially minimizing their importance.

It also stems from a testing plan that starts in 3rd grade, with fewer states attending to the importance of preventive screening and early diagnosis of reading problems in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Continued vigilance in the primary grades and systematic reading instruction are imperative. Because of the emphasis placed on literary and informational text work, it is important to remember that children must be able to decipher words and read fluently, especially if they are going to meet increasingly rigorous textual demands.

Designing curriculum of sufficient depth to effectively address foundational skills while also meeting the common core's demands regarding text will be challenging. Will the new basal readers or anthologies meet these dual challenges?

Without a strong and continued commitment to effective research-based early-literacy instruction along side rich content, we may be doomed to high rates of failure in the upper grades by students who still don't read well.

As a profession, we seem to avoid discussions of teaching methods. Once we have defined a specific curriculum, how we teach it does make a difference. A strong body of research points to instructional methods that have a high likelihood of raising achievement. In a recent essay for the Education Week Teacher online site, Mike Schmoker argued for "soundly structured lessons" based on research dating back nearly 50 years but largely ignored. He said the research recommended:

• Articulating a purpose statement or opening with a provocative question;

• Modeling or demonstrating the carefully calibrated steps in learning a new skill;

• Guided and active practice of each individual small step the teacher modeled while checking for understanding; and

• Repeating the cycle based on student feedback and to support those who need further instruction.

Curriculum and instruction must be the levers by which the common-core standards become reality and firmly take root. State departments of education must play a vital role in ensuring this focus.

Setting rigorous expectations for what students should know and be able to do is an essential step that will bring a degree of consistency to our national education system. However, the common-core standards represent neither salvation nor Armageddon. Rather, it is time to shift national intensity from the standards to their implementation, with a focus on curriculum and instruction. Without this shift, the common core may end up as just one more failed reform.

Linda Diamond is the chief executive officer of the Consortium on Reaching Excellence in Education, in Berkeley, Calif. She is a former public school teacher, principal, director of K-12 instruction and professional development, and senior policy analyst for an education think tank. She is also a co-author of Teaching Reading Sourcebook, 2nd Edition (Arena, 2008); Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures, 2nd Edition (Academic Therapy Publications, 2008); andVocabulary Handbook (Paul H. Brookes, 2007). She can be reached at ldiamond@corelearn.com.

Vol. 33, Issue 02, Pages 26-27, 29

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Learning Resources Quizzillion

For Rural Teachers, Support Is a Click Away

By Stephen Sawchuk

Though located hundreds of miles apart, only one thing separated Kansas teacher Linda Dixon from the six novice special educators she advised last year: bandwidth.

Day and night, the veteran teacher offered personalized advice and support to her junior colleagues in all corners of the Sunflower State, as well as stimulate discussions among them and point the group toward resources through the online platform that kept them all connected.

“The whole purpose is to try to get them engaged,” Ms. Dixon said. “It’s like our own little family, our own little community.”

Online mentoring—or E-Mentoring for Student Success, as it’s called by the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based New Teacher Center, which facilitates the Kansas initiative—is beginning to catch on as states seek ways to support new teachers that aren’t limited by geography or time. Those two factors have been particularly challenging for teachers in rural locales, where the nearest physics, calculus, or special education teacher might be in a school or district hours away.

“We are not a unique state, in that we have a large land mass and that we have districts that are small with great distances between them,” said Colleen Riley, the director of early childhood, special education, and title services for federal programs at the Kansas education department.

Program History

Kansas’ program began last year, but the roots of the E-Mentoring for Student Success initiative go back a decade.

The New Teacher Center, the National Science Teachers Association, and the Science Math Resource Center at Montana State University, in 2002, with support from the National Science Foundation, came together to create an online platform for math and science teachers.

The goal: to learn how technology could support teachers during the tumultuous first years in the classroom.

Gaining a classroom footing can be particularly tough for teachers of specialized content areas when they are isolated by geography or stretched by local needs. That was the case with the last cohort advised by Catherine Stierman, a mentor in the life sciences.

“Most of them were in small schools or had more than three courses to prep,” said Ms. Stierman, an instructor at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa, who is now writing her doctoral dissertation on the program. “If you’re one of only a couple of science teachers, it’s hard to get the help you need. You know the other person is really bogged down, too.”

The New Teacher Center matches each teacher with an experienced peer in his or her field, selected through a competitive application process. (About five people apply for each mentoring spot.) It trains the mentors on how to build trust with the novices and how to probe in the online discussion among their cohort members.

Mentors are compensated up to $3,000 annually depending on how many teachers they support.

Each mentor is expected to interact with the members of his or her group at least twice a week, through private messaging or a conversation by phone or Skype. The mentor also poses questions for the group each week for reflection, leads weekly online conversations, or leads an “exploration” of a particular instructional problem over several weeks. The Web portal that helps the new teachers connect also gives them access to other content experts and training opportunities.

Over the decade, the program has grown and evolved. The science teachers’ group continues to use it as part of its New Science Teacher Academy, which supports teachers in their second to fifth years in the classroom.

The New Teacher Center has expanded the e-mentoring program to other content areas such as math. And in 2010, with help from the U.S. Department of Education’s office of special education programs and several state education departments, it tailored the program for special educators. They are matched with mentors who specialize in exceptionalities, such as behavior or autism spectrum disorders.

In all, some 1,500 teachers across all 50 states now participate in the center’s e-mentoring program. Sources of funding differ: Districts and states usually pick up the tab, but even some businesses, such as Boeing, have chipped in to support educators in their communities.

A Special Need

Kansas’ involvement was born out of a specific desire to curb “churn” among special educators. The state requires mentoring for new teachers, but the vagaries of local control and budgeting mean that district implementation varies from the well-thought-out to the haphazard.

State data show that, in recent years, more than 800 special educators in Kansas have turned over annually, according to Julie Wilson, the coordinator of statewide recruitment and retention for the Greenbush Education Service Center, in Girard.

And a significant number of special education hires have held nonstandard qualifications. About 14 percent of special educators in 2011-12 did not hold qualified licenses, far higher than the 2 percent in math and 4 percent in science, Ms. Wilson said.

Improving beginning support for such teachers seemed an attractive solution, but it posed logistical obstacles.

“We knew if we tried to do face-to-face mentoring, it would be challenging,” Ms. Wilson said. “We couldn’t get matches in our rural areas because there weren’t enough experienced teachers to go out and serve as mentors. And it would be shooting ourselves in the foot because we’d be taking an experienced educator out of their position.”

The solution was to help practicing classroom teachers like Ms. Dixon spread their expertise further through e-mentoring.

Kindra Rowley, in rural Lyons, Kan., was one of six teachers Ms. Dixon mentored last year. With only limited exposure during her teacher-preparation program to individualized education programs, or IEPs, Ms. Rowley sought extra help navigating the complex documents, which set out goals and supports for each special education student.

She usually was able to receive help in less than 24 hours, either from Ms. Dixon, who checks her messages several times a day, or from other special educators in her cohort.

Ms. Rowley believes e-mentoring has a distinct advantage over more traditional types: the ability to seek instructional guidance without the discomfort of inquiring from a supervisor.

“I save my questions for Linda,” she said.

Ms. Stierman, the Iowa-based life-sciences mentor, believes the layer of anonymity can help novices build resilience.

“You see that there are other people out there that are having the same struggles, and it’s OK to ask for help,” she said. “It’s a confidence builder for them.”

Designs Evolving

Research linking the effects of online professional development to student learning remains relatively thin, but a few newer studies support the notion that teacher coaching done remotely can be effective at changing practice in ways that benefit students.

A 2011 study conducted by University of Virginia researchers linked student gains to changes in teacher instruction that occurred after the teachers received support keyed to a teaching framework from an online mentor.

“There are advantages from the standpoint of ensuring intensity, focus, alignment with teacher goals, and time, all of which make the intervention more effective, I think,” said Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the university and one of the authors of the study.

That online program has expanded to train Native American teachers in rural Head Start programs, he added.

More recently, University of Michigan researchers found that professional development on an inquiry-based environmental-sciences curriculum was equally effective delivered online or in person. The primary author of that study, Barry J. Fishman, said the findings suggest that the design of professional development may be the most important question for other scholars to probe.

“The research focus should not be on comparing one thing to another. It should be on trying to understand which designs are more effective than others at accomplishing your goals,” said Mr. Fishman, an associate professor of learning technologies.

Video Analysis

The New Teacher Center’s program isn’t resting on its laurels. In an echo of Mr. Pianta’s work, it has been piloting the use of cameras in e-mentoring. New teachers in Kansas participating in the program this fall will begin uploading taped portions of their lessons to a secure website, where mentors can access them.

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The mentors will be able to annotate time stamps on the videos, so they can discuss with the teachers specific pieces of instruction or interactions with students.

It’s an important evolution, Ms. Stierman said, that will provide more insight into the questions new teachers have and make the mentoring more relevant.

“It’s getting to know them and the context of their teaching,” she said. “In my experience, they’re way harder on themselves and they see things on the videotapes that bother them that I might never notice.”

Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, atwww.joycefdn.org/Programs/Education. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

Vol. 33, Issue 2, Pages 8-9

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Single-Sex Schools: The Persistence of an Idea

By Peter Gow on August 22, 2013 8:58 AM | 2 Comments

While the debate goes on about the legitimacy of single-sex classes and schools in the public sector, private and independent schools keep taking the concept to whole new levels.

Once upon a time coeducation was unthinkable. Boys were beastly enough without the distraction of girls, and the educational needs of girls were thought to diverge from those of boys even before puberty brought its complications. Early advocates of coeducation like Bronson Alcott were thought to be batty.

Plenty of progressive educators and theorists have since laid to rest most of the traditional concerns and fears of coeducation skeptics. Public schools have been coed for a long time, and old schoolhouses with separate "Boys" and "Girls" entrances are quaint in a way that makes us shake our heads.

As a kid I experienced both single-sex and coeducational schools. My public elementary school was coed, of course, and then I had six years of boys-only junior and senior high school. Then followed a couple of years of all-male university, until we were happily rolled over by the tidal wave of vintage 1970 coeducation, leaving the president to figure out how to keep his promise that we'd produce "a thousand male leaders" every year; so was born the cramped room students call a "forced triple."

As at many all-male institutions, the arrival of women didn't make a huge dent in the culture right away, and so it when I found myself the lone male at a girls' summer camp (the maintenance guy, often reeking slightly of rotting garbage) I experienced culture shock. I had never really thought what it might be like to work in an all-female environment, stuck firmly at the bottom of a ladder, and so my summers there were a revelation.

Not the least part of the revelation involved my discovery that the young leaders of the camp, members of the first generation of late-20th-century feminists, were pretty serious about using the camp experience--sailing, biking, swimming, and lots of group activities--as leadership development. I also learned the hard way not to step into problem-solving roles until I was asked to, and I saw that younger campers idolized the competence of their counselors as much as they loved their warmth and enthusiasm.

The task of female role models and mentors was changing, and the staff was up to the work. I also discovered what "collaborative leadership" meant, as the administrative staff--led by a superb director not long out of college herself--talked things over and made decisions in ways that sounded way more like what Chris Argyris had been talking about in his myth-shattering Organizational Behavior course that year than the autocratic, just-follow-me style I had imbibed from television, movies, and high school.

If summers found me in a land of strong and independent women, my first three teaching jobs (my fourth has been in a decidedly coed environment) were back in a man's world. I think many of my generation of male teachers, with varying experiences navigating the waters of what the news magazines assured us was a Feminist Revolution, had been chastened more than a little on the meaning of masculinity and manhood, and so we did our best to tame our little corners of school environments that occasionally evoked Lord of the Flies; gently mocked as Sensitive New Age Guys, we tried to help our male students exchange bluster and boisterousness for an occasional listen and maybe even the occasional tear. I don't know how well it worked, but we felt we were doing our small part to win obscure battles in the most remote fields of that revolution.

In 2013, the world is decidedly different, and the battles are far less obscure. Colleges wrestle explicitly with how to combat "rape culture," and events like the Steubenville trial generate national conversations around how our society fosters gender-role development. We celebrate the suddenly disproportionate success of girls in the conventional academic realm (they do so much better in high school that they disadvantage one another when it comes to competitive college admission) while we wonder whether one of our unending culture wars is on boys .

Most boys' schools have long since stopped selling themselves as bastions of male hegemony and cut-it-with-a-knife testosterone culture. Curricula increasingly include diverse viewpoints, and access to self and creativity are as much a part of boys' school programs as lacrosse and basketball; schools work hard to imbue students with more beneficent ideas of what it means to be male, with responsibilities and difference equal parts of the equation. Education for boys and young men is changing, and it's heartening, for example, to note that old-fashioned expressions of stereotypical maleness, like those caught on tape when Rutgers coach Mike Rice went off on his players, excite general shock and outrage.

I just spent the better part of a day with the faculty of the all-girls Ellis School in Pittsburgh, where I was reminded of all the best aspects of my own education around gender and gender roles. Intentionally and explicitly working to turn out strong, capable, assertive women, Ellis--its heritage, its excellent teachers, and its visionary leadership--is all about helping girls find and build on their strengths and passions. Ellis makes no apologies for its commitment to the growth of girls and young women as a single-sex school, and its palpable ethos had me wishing I had a daughter to send there.

The survival of excellent girls' and boys' schools in just about every large community I can think of strikes me as testimony not to the enduring idea of separation of the sexes but rather to some very sophisticated evolving ideas of what it means to be a young woman or man. For a critical mass families and kids, some period of single-sex education is part of a path toward an adulthood informed in positive ways by an understanding of both the differences between the sexes and the ways in which we are all bound by our shared and very human anxieties, aspirations, and capacities.

Engage with Peter on Twitter: @pgow

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Number Balance

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Deal Puts Philadelphia Schools on Track to Open

By Jaclyn Zubrzycki

The promise of a $50 million bailout from the city has allowed district officials in Philadelphia to begin preparing for an event they had warned would not come on time: the opening of school.

The district is rehiring hall aides, assistant principals, and guidance counselors for many—but not all—of Philadelphia’s public schools. The district laid off some 4,000 employees this year, and it plans to hire back some 1,600 of those now that a deal has been cut for the city to provide the emergency aid.

But Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. also says that while the money will permit the district to open doors safely, it’s still not enough to fully staff and support the schools in the long term.

After a week of tense negotiations by city officials, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat, announced Aug. 15 that the city would provide the $50 million Mr. Hite said was necessary to open schools on time.

Philadelphia officials disagree about where those funds are coming from. Mr. Nutter supports a plan proposed by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, that involves using anticipated revenues from the extension of a 1 percent increase to a citywide sales tax, while Philadelphia City Council President Darrell L. Clarke is hoping to use funds from the sale of school buildings.

A firm plan is to be set out this fall, but both the mayor and the council president say the district can count on the money.

Also on Aug. 15, the School Reform Commission, the school system’s state- and mayorally-appointed governing body, voted to suspend portions of the state’s school code in order to let the district rehire staff members without considering seniority and exert more control over charter schools.

Though the immediate crisis has been averted and schools are on track to open Sept. 9, as planned, Mr. Hite said the district needed longer-term solutions. The superintendent was optimistic about the potential of a permanent extension of the $120 million sales tax, for instance, or about more money from collection of delinquent real estate taxes.

“That gives us different levels of capacity going forward,” he said in an interview. “The challenge is getting from here to there so we have some predictability about what revenue we have.”

Budget Hole

The district announced a $304 million budget gap out of a $2.7 billion budget this past spring.

In response, the state has approved an extension of a 1 percent increase to the citywide sales tax that would bring in $120 million a year, beginning July 1, 2014, and committed $2 million in basic education subsidy and $45 million in one-time aid. So far, only that $2 million is in the district’s coffers.

The city has pledged $15 million in delinquent real-estate-tax collection in addition to the $50 million.

The district identified $16 million in additional savings, which means it has made up $83 million of the initial $304 million gap.

The district is asking for $133 million in concessions from its three unions, whose contracts expire at the end of this month. The outcome of those negotiations will also determine whether the district receives the state’s pledged $45 million in one-time funds, which is contingent on unspecified changes to the teachers’ contract.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the city and the district would continue to search for additional funding sources to make up the remainder of the budget gap.

Weighing the Deal

Moody’s Investors Service, a global credit-ratings agency, released a statement last week saying that the city’s plan to borrow $50 million to support the schools would bolster the beleaguered district’s credit.

Moody’s said the funds, ideally, would help stem a further decline in the district’s enrollment. More than 60,000 students in the district will attend charter schools this fall, leaving some 136,000 students in the regular public schools.

“If we continue to lose students at the pace we’re losing them now, we will turn into a district that is not able to fiscally do anything but reimburse charters, pay debt service, and manage every other student who has either been refused, sent back, or is not interested in attending a charter school,” Mr. Hite said.

Among other state-level cuts, Pennsylvania eliminated reimbursement to districts for expenses associated with charter schools starting in 2011. The suspension of the school code allows the district to limit charter schools’ enrollment and close low-performing charter schools.

Contract negotiations continue, though the changes in the school code have exacerbated an already-antagonistic dynamic between district and union leaders.

“Somewhere along the line, we have to reconstruct trust [between employees and the district], because none exists,” said Robert McGrogan, the president of the principals’ union in the district.

Staff Writer Benjamin Herold contributed to this story.

Vol. 33, Issue 2

Learning Resources Write & Wipe Answer Boards

Defending the Common Core

By Catherine Gewertz on August 21, 2013 3:01 PM
Will the Common Core State Standards eliminate cursive writing? Will they create a national warehouse of student data? Those are a couple of the questions that have created hot spots in the debate about the common core. Common-core supporters offer their answers in a paper released today.

"Common Core State Standards 101," issued by the Alliance for Excellent Education here in Washington, takes on six of the questions that have fueled ongoing skepticism of the new standards.

On the question of whether the standards eliminate cursive writing, the Alliance says no. But it also says the standards are "silent" on cursive, focusing instead on what students write, and language conventions like grammar and spelling. Students are expected to use technology in writing, but the standards do not "preclude or discourage" the retention of cursive writing, the paper says. States can also use the "15 percent rule"—which allows them to add more standards to the common core—to ensure that cursive writing gets continued attention, the paper says.

Another question tackled here is whether the standards eliminate Shakespeare. It's a curious one, since works by Shakespeare are actually among the tiny handful of texts required by the standards. Most of the controversy, to the extent I've seen it, revolves not around Shakespeare, but whether the standards displace important fiction with nonfiction (something I've written about). For the record, the Alliance reiterates that the standards expect half of the reading students do in elementary school across all subjects to be fiction and half nonfiction, a tilt that increases to 70 percent nonfiction—again, across all subject areas combined—by high school.

The paper takes on the question of what algebra is required by the common standards. But it poses it this way: Will students be able to take algebra in 8th grade? The answer supplied here is yes, since the standards leave various math pathways open to districts. The more controversial question, as we've heard the debate out there, is whether the standards expect students to study algebra in 8th grade. It's a point of contention, since some districts aim for that mark. But although students could study algebra in 8th grade under the standards, it's not the only way they can go.

A myth-versus-fact section of the common core website says that the standards "accommodate and prepare students for Algebra 1 in 8th grade, by including the prerequisites for this course in grades K‐7. Students who master the K‐7 material will be able to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade. At the same time, grade 8 standards are also included; these include rigorous algebra and will transition students effectively into a full Algebra 1 course."

Another hot point in the standards debate concerns the use of student data. The Alliance paper asks if the common core will create a national database on students. It answers no, explaining that states can continue to use their current privacy procedures for student data. The two assessment consortia will collect background information on students, such as their race and whether they're special education students, but that will be used only to report the achievement performance of subgroups. "They will not collect data that will enable anyone to identify individual students," the paper says.

The bulk of the Alliance paper recounts the history of the common standards, clearly from an advocate's point of view. When it gets to the federal Race to the Top competition—a key flash point in the opposition to the standards—the Alliance says that the "states were eager to support the standards, and the federal government, which had no role in the development of the standards, was eager to back the states," so it gave state applicants for Race to the Top points (40 out of 500 possible) if they had adopted the standards. It also cites a Center on Education Policy survey that found that while Race to the Top might have hastened states' adoption of the common standards, it didn't influence whether or not they would adopt them.

The paper casts an optimistic light on the work being done in many quarters to help implement the common core, touching on the instructional resources being created by the two national teachers' unions, the two state assessment consortia, and by states themselves. It notes that "commercial publishers are redoing their textbooks and digital materials to align to the standards," a line that will doubtless prompt snickers in some quarters, where publishers' claims of "alignment" to the common core are being met with skepticism, to put it mildly. We've written, in fact, about the dubious levels of alignment in such materials.

Categories: Standards , Testing
Tags: Alliance for Excellent Education , common standards