Posted: Sunday, August 18, 2013 5:00 am | Updated: 7:32 am, Sun Aug 18, 2013.
Posted on August 18, 2013
For the first time in U.S. history, a majority of the country’s schools will soon be teaching students based on a uniform set of national academic standards known as Common Core.But in Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett has put final approval of the new school standards on hold, in response to a wave of backlash that erupted over Common Core this past spring.Opponents cite fears that the framework for the standards could lead to a so-called federal takeover of local schools, and argue school districts don’t have the funding to implement the changes. State education officials say local districts will retain control of their curricula, and that many districts are already well on their way to full implementation.
“We’re currently in a state of limbo,” said Wythe Keever, spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “It’s created a lot of confusion for school districts that were beginning to align their curriculum and individual teachers who were working to align their specific lesson plans to the national Common Core state standards.”
While state lawmakers on education committees wrestle with the regulatory details, local school districts are moving forward. Many have been preparing to do so for two to three years.
Last week, 50 teachers attended a two-day workshop on Common Core math standards led by the Bucks County Intermediate Unit. Over the past two years, about 1,000 Bucks County educators from all 13 local school districts have attended more than 40 workshops related to Common Core, according to Michael Masko, assistant executive director of the intermediate unit. At least 10 more workshops are scheduled for the 2013-14 school year.
“We had the blessing of two years’ time to prepare for this, so we really wove it into our usual work, and I know other school districts have done the same,” Masko said. “Any good school is reviewing and revising its curriculum on some sort of cyclical basis. In some cases they’ve accelerated their review, but all of our school districts have very solid foundations in curriculum development, so this wasn’t something where they had to create a whole new infrastructure to develop a curriculum.”
Outside of Pennsylvania, 44 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt Common Core, a framework of English and math standards developed by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Common Core aims to ensure every state is meeting the same minimum levels of academic rigor, and sets the stage for national assessments that could offer states the chance to compare apples-to-apples test scores for the first time.
The Pennsylvania Board of Education first adopted the national Common Core standards in July 2010, and state education officials had been working to update Pennsylvania’s education standards since 2007.
But the full-blown controversy over Pennsylvania’s participation didn’t flare up until around April.
That’s about the time Rep. Paul Clymer, R-145, started getting a rash of phone calls, emails and visits from concerned constituents.
“Common Core standards have been sorely misinterpreted by many people, people who have the right motives I would say in wanting to make certain that the federal government was not interfering in the academics in Pennsylvania,” said Clymer, chairman of the House Education Committee. “But I don’t fault them — I would be very upset if I found that they were putting their tentacles into our system.”
Clymer urges his constituents to discuss their concerns with their local school boards and superintendents.
Opponents worry the standards will lead to a Washington top-down approach and put more testing stress on teachers, while not providing cash-strapped school districts with the necessary funding or resources to adapt to the changes.
Michael Race, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, attributes much of the criticism to conservative pundits like Glenn Beck, who blasted Common Core as “leftist indoctrination.”
“Basically there’s this notion that it’s a heavy-handed, top-down, Big Brother take-down of our public schools, and nothing could be further from the truth,” Race said. “It does not dictate curriculum, it does not tell teachers what they can and cannot teach in lesson plans day to day.”
Much of the confusion might stem from the educational jargon involved, and understanding the difference between standards and curriculum, Clymer said.
Standards define the set of skills and goals each student should achieve by the end of a grade level. Curriculum, which is up to local school districts, outlines the lessons and methods teachers will use so students reach those goals.
Common Core math standards, for instance, state that a third-grader should be able to find the perimeter of a rectangle and learn how to multiply single-digit numbers from memory. But it’s up to local educators to decide on the lesson plans they’ll use to teach those skills.
For some, like Central Bucks School District, the new standards might not amount to big differences.
“We believe Central Bucks is already exceeding any standards or expectations,” said Keith Sinn, a chemistry teacher at Central Bucks East High School and past president of the district’s education association.
Central Bucks School District’s acting superintendent, David Weitzel, said for the past 10 years the district has been aligning its courses with the “Understanding by Design” model, which he said closely resembles much of Common Core.
“All of our revisions used that model, so (Common Core) won’t mean a lot of changes for us,” Weitzel said.
Frank Gallagher, superintendent of the Souderton School District, said he welcomed the Common Core’s more challenging standards. He said he would not favor a national curriculum and values local control, but he does support “consistency” across the country.
“We need an even playing field,” Gallagher said.
State education officials say the decision to update Pennsylvania’s standards was triggered by the same dilemma that led to the national Common Core: Too many students were graduating high school unprepared to enter college, the workforce or military, and the higher education and business communities asked school officials to do something about it.
“We know when somebody comes to work for a company straight after school or if they go to college, they don’t necessarily have the ability to read, write and do math at the level necessary for success,” said David Patti, president of the Pennsylvania Business Council. “We see a lot of students taking remediation, spending a year taking classes they were supposedly given their junior year in high school.”
Critics don’t necessarily buy that explanation. Cheryl Boise, an education consultant who’s worked with the Pennsylvanians Against Common Core, questions the motives behind the national standards. She argued that it’s misleading to call Common Core a state-led initiative driven by legitimate input from educators, and that not enough elected leaders have been involved in its development.
“We jumped feet first into this, and only now are our legislators getting to ask questions about what’s at issue,” Boise said.
At a House Education Committee hearing earlier this month, Department of Education Executive Deputy Secretary Carolyn Dumaresq addressed some of the commonly cited fears: that the new standards would intrude into private and religious schools, require a new national test and expand student data collection.
None of those claims are true, Dumaresq said, but to be extra transparent the department folded explicit statements saying so into the updated regulations. Officials also dropped the word “common” and changed the name to “PA Core Standards.”
“This is a semantics game,” Boise said. “They got flack because of the Common Core, so now they’re going to rename it.”
The latest version of the PA Core Standards is a sort of hybrid combining the content of the national standards with some organizational elements unique to Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s standards are also tied to the new Keystone Exams — subject tests students will have to pass to graduate beginning with the Class of 2017 — and a new teacher evaluation system.
New Hope-Solebury School District Superintendent Ray Boccuti said his district is ready for the latest round of initiatives, but he stressed that compliance takes time.
“We do our best to embrace change, but it feels like quite a large amount,” he said.
At Boccuti’s direction, New Hope-Solebury’s school board agreed to allow three of its “best and brightest” teachers to become “teacher leader coaches” during half their work days, partly to help realign curriculum with the new standards. The 1,600-student district is hiring a couple of others to replace the coaches’ lost classroom time.
The Souderton Charter School Collaboration has been busy aligning its programs to meet Common Core standards, too. Administrators of the 200-student school say the new standards are something worth striving for.
“It’s raising the bar,” said Jennifer Arevalo, the K-8 charter school’s educational director.
Sen. Daylin Leach, D-17, said he likes that the Common Core standards value problem-solving over “facts to regurgitate.”
But Leach said he’s troubled by two issues: that there wasn’t more legislative input in the standards, and that schools need more time to ramp up before being held accountable for the new standards. He also doesn’t want the standards leading to more “teaching to the test.”
Both supporters and opponents of Common Core have said they’re worried about the cost imposed upon local districts to purchase new textbooks, train teachers and fund related requirements like project-based learning and more remediation.
“We’re not opposed to the implementation of Common Core, but discussing raising academic standards without including a discussion of resources is in our opinion divorced from reality,” said Keever, the spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association. “There is a school funding crisis going on in this state, and both lawmakers and the Board of Education need to address that.”
Five bills have been introduced as a package by House lawmakers opposing the swift implementation of Pennsylvania’s Common Core-based standards, including one by Rep. Will Tallman, R-193, seeking to repeal Pennsylvania’s adoption of the standards altogether.
Clymer said he doesn’t think those bills will clear the House floor, and he anticipates the state moving forward with the standards later this fall.
The Senate Education Committee has scheduled its next hearing on Common Core for Aug. 29. The regulations will need to clear both the House and Senate education committees and the Independent Regulatory Review Commission for final approval.
“We’re currently in a state of limbo,” said Wythe Keever, spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “It’s created a lot of confusion for school districts that were beginning to align their curriculum and individual teachers who were working to align their specific lesson plans to the national Common Core state standards.”
While state lawmakers on education committees wrestle with the regulatory details, local school districts are moving forward. Many have been preparing to do so for two to three years.
Last week, 50 teachers attended a two-day workshop on Common Core math standards led by the Bucks County Intermediate Unit. Over the past two years, about 1,000 Bucks County educators from all 13 local school districts have attended more than 40 workshops related to Common Core, according to Michael Masko, assistant executive director of the intermediate unit. At least 10 more workshops are scheduled for the 2013-14 school year.
“We had the blessing of two years’ time to prepare for this, so we really wove it into our usual work, and I know other school districts have done the same,” Masko said. “Any good school is reviewing and revising its curriculum on some sort of cyclical basis. In some cases they’ve accelerated their review, but all of our school districts have very solid foundations in curriculum development, so this wasn’t something where they had to create a whole new infrastructure to develop a curriculum.”
Outside of Pennsylvania, 44 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt Common Core, a framework of English and math standards developed by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Common Core aims to ensure every state is meeting the same minimum levels of academic rigor, and sets the stage for national assessments that could offer states the chance to compare apples-to-apples test scores for the first time.
The Pennsylvania Board of Education first adopted the national Common Core standards in July 2010, and state education officials had been working to update Pennsylvania’s education standards since 2007.
But the full-blown controversy over Pennsylvania’s participation didn’t flare up until around April.
That’s about the time Rep. Paul Clymer, R-145, started getting a rash of phone calls, emails and visits from concerned constituents.
“Common Core standards have been sorely misinterpreted by many people, people who have the right motives I would say in wanting to make certain that the federal government was not interfering in the academics in Pennsylvania,” said Clymer, chairman of the House Education Committee. “But I don’t fault them — I would be very upset if I found that they were putting their tentacles into our system.”
Clymer urges his constituents to discuss their concerns with their local school boards and superintendents.
Opponents worry the standards will lead to a Washington top-down approach and put more testing stress on teachers, while not providing cash-strapped school districts with the necessary funding or resources to adapt to the changes.
Michael Race, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, attributes much of the criticism to conservative pundits like Glenn Beck, who blasted Common Core as “leftist indoctrination.”
“Basically there’s this notion that it’s a heavy-handed, top-down, Big Brother take-down of our public schools, and nothing could be further from the truth,” Race said. “It does not dictate curriculum, it does not tell teachers what they can and cannot teach in lesson plans day to day.”
Much of the confusion might stem from the educational jargon involved, and understanding the difference between standards and curriculum, Clymer said.
Standards define the set of skills and goals each student should achieve by the end of a grade level. Curriculum, which is up to local school districts, outlines the lessons and methods teachers will use so students reach those goals.
Common Core math standards, for instance, state that a third-grader should be able to find the perimeter of a rectangle and learn how to multiply single-digit numbers from memory. But it’s up to local educators to decide on the lesson plans they’ll use to teach those skills.
For some, like Central Bucks School District, the new standards might not amount to big differences.
“We believe Central Bucks is already exceeding any standards or expectations,” said Keith Sinn, a chemistry teacher at Central Bucks East High School and past president of the district’s education association.
Central Bucks School District’s acting superintendent, David Weitzel, said for the past 10 years the district has been aligning its courses with the “Understanding by Design” model, which he said closely resembles much of Common Core.
“All of our revisions used that model, so (Common Core) won’t mean a lot of changes for us,” Weitzel said.
Frank Gallagher, superintendent of the Souderton School District, said he welcomed the Common Core’s more challenging standards. He said he would not favor a national curriculum and values local control, but he does support “consistency” across the country.
“We need an even playing field,” Gallagher said.
State education officials say the decision to update Pennsylvania’s standards was triggered by the same dilemma that led to the national Common Core: Too many students were graduating high school unprepared to enter college, the workforce or military, and the higher education and business communities asked school officials to do something about it.
“We know when somebody comes to work for a company straight after school or if they go to college, they don’t necessarily have the ability to read, write and do math at the level necessary for success,” said David Patti, president of the Pennsylvania Business Council. “We see a lot of students taking remediation, spending a year taking classes they were supposedly given their junior year in high school.”
Critics don’t necessarily buy that explanation. Cheryl Boise, an education consultant who’s worked with the Pennsylvanians Against Common Core, questions the motives behind the national standards. She argued that it’s misleading to call Common Core a state-led initiative driven by legitimate input from educators, and that not enough elected leaders have been involved in its development.
“We jumped feet first into this, and only now are our legislators getting to ask questions about what’s at issue,” Boise said.
At a House Education Committee hearing earlier this month, Department of Education Executive Deputy Secretary Carolyn Dumaresq addressed some of the commonly cited fears: that the new standards would intrude into private and religious schools, require a new national test and expand student data collection.
None of those claims are true, Dumaresq said, but to be extra transparent the department folded explicit statements saying so into the updated regulations. Officials also dropped the word “common” and changed the name to “PA Core Standards.”
“This is a semantics game,” Boise said. “They got flack because of the Common Core, so now they’re going to rename it.”
The latest version of the PA Core Standards is a sort of hybrid combining the content of the national standards with some organizational elements unique to Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s standards are also tied to the new Keystone Exams — subject tests students will have to pass to graduate beginning with the Class of 2017 — and a new teacher evaluation system.
New Hope-Solebury School District Superintendent Ray Boccuti said his district is ready for the latest round of initiatives, but he stressed that compliance takes time.
“We do our best to embrace change, but it feels like quite a large amount,” he said.
At Boccuti’s direction, New Hope-Solebury’s school board agreed to allow three of its “best and brightest” teachers to become “teacher leader coaches” during half their work days, partly to help realign curriculum with the new standards. The 1,600-student district is hiring a couple of others to replace the coaches’ lost classroom time.
The Souderton Charter School Collaboration has been busy aligning its programs to meet Common Core standards, too. Administrators of the 200-student school say the new standards are something worth striving for.
“It’s raising the bar,” said Jennifer Arevalo, the K-8 charter school’s educational director.
Sen. Daylin Leach, D-17, said he likes that the Common Core standards value problem-solving over “facts to regurgitate.”
But Leach said he’s troubled by two issues: that there wasn’t more legislative input in the standards, and that schools need more time to ramp up before being held accountable for the new standards. He also doesn’t want the standards leading to more “teaching to the test.”
Both supporters and opponents of Common Core have said they’re worried about the cost imposed upon local districts to purchase new textbooks, train teachers and fund related requirements like project-based learning and more remediation.
“We’re not opposed to the implementation of Common Core, but discussing raising academic standards without including a discussion of resources is in our opinion divorced from reality,” said Keever, the spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association. “There is a school funding crisis going on in this state, and both lawmakers and the Board of Education need to address that.”
Five bills have been introduced as a package by House lawmakers opposing the swift implementation of Pennsylvania’s Common Core-based standards, including one by Rep. Will Tallman, R-193, seeking to repeal Pennsylvania’s adoption of the standards altogether.
Clymer said he doesn’t think those bills will clear the House floor, and he anticipates the state moving forward with the standards later this fall.
The Senate Education Committee has scheduled its next hearing on Common Core for Aug. 29. The regulations will need to clear both the House and Senate education committees and the Independent Regulatory Review Commission for final approval.
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