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The Real Story About Common Core

Written on: February 17th, 2014 in Education

This is a pivotal moment for the Common Core State Standards.

Although 45 states quickly adopted the higher standards created by governors and state education officials, the effort has begun to lose momentum. Some are now wavering in the face of misinformation campaigns from people who misrepresent the initiative as a federal program and from those who support the status quo. Legislation has been introduced in at least 12 states to prohibit implementation and states have dropped out of the two major Common Core assessment consortia. Opposition voices are growing louder as new assessments show students aren’t performing as well as they had on easier state tests offered previously.

The debate about the standards must be changed to ensure politics and mythology don’t derail a vital effort to improve opportunities for our kids as they are falling further behind their international peers. Too often, supporters of raising expectations for our students are refuting broad claims that have nothing do with why we brought together teachers, education experts and employers to develop the Common Core initiative. Instead, we must emphasize the real impact of this initiative in our classrooms.

Contrary to claims by opponents who say we’re taking away local control of curriculum, how educators teach the standards is entirely up to them. We have clear illustrations of teachers and administrators across the country developing innovative ways to help their students meet the new benchmarks.

In Delaware, elementary instructors have come together to teach basic physics concepts such as force and motion. They developed a creative hands-on lesson in which the students build and refine toy sail cars. As one teacher in the program said, the hands-on practice students “are getting now is teaching them way better than any worksheet or textbook.”

In a Michigan elementary school, the shift to the new standards led educators to develop methods for teaching concepts at greater depth and in ways that allow students to apply those concepts to many scenarios, rather than through memorization. A second-grade math class is now using “bar models,” a technique that has proved effective in some of the highest-performing schools in the world. The district’s math specialist says they’ve “seen a lot of positive feedback from teachers because they’re able to take their students a lot further this year.”

And English teachers at South Middle School in Grand Forks, North Dakota, are aligning lessons with Common Core by incorporating a discussion model that leads to a deeper understanding of texts. For example, they ask students to think critically about the values of a narrator, asking questions such as: “What evidence is there in this excerpt that [the narrator] doesn’t care about what she did?”

All of these efforts represent precisely what we hoped Common Core would encourage when we worked with our colleagues at the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to create the program. They are the reason that unlikely coalitions of Democrats and Republicans, as well as business leaders and union presidents, are urging states to resist political pressures and stay focused on implementing the standards.

According to Gallup’s World Poll, there are 3 billion people looking for work and only 1.2 billion potential jobs available. The jobs will go where the skilled workforce is, and we are in danger of falling behind if we don’t raise the bar for our students. The most recent Program for International Student Assessment shows that even once-struggling nations, such as Estonia, Poland and Vietnam, are surpassing the U.S. This has serious consequences for individual economic opportunity and national economic growth.

In the coming months, elected officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Governors’ Council will team up to publicize the facts about Common Core and challenge misinformation about what the standards mean.

We will help fill the leadership vacuum that has existed among even Common Core’s strongest proponents by providing states with materials to inform the public and assistance in applying best practices. We will share models of how states can successfully teach the standards -– such as ways to bring together the best teachers across districts to share strategies, curriculum and lesson plans.

And we will help advocates find the most effective ways to communicate about the Common Core — such as the back-to-school nights held in Delaware, where community leaders were shown Common Core lessons. Those leaders saw that, in practice, the standards set goals that make sense to parents and teachers, including ensuring fourth-graders can multiply large numbers and write an essay.

If we put the focus on the great work being done to implement Common Core in classrooms across the U.S., instead of debating abstract political rhetoric, we will give our students the opportunities they deserve.

(This piece was co-written by Governor Markell and former Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia, who were co-chairmen of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It was originally published by Bloomberg.com.)

Tags: common core, Delaware, education, educators, responsible government, teachers

Investing in Delaware’s Future

Written on: February 1st, 2014 in Effective & Efficient Government

This week I unveiled a budget proposal that matches the message from my State of the State address: Every Delawarean has something to contribute if given the chance. We need to make sure they have that chance, for their sake, and also because we all stand to gain when everyone gets a fair shot.

The balanced budget my administration presented this week holds firm to the value of fiscal responsibility:

• Continues an approach that has earned our triple-A credit rating;
• Uses only 98 percent of available revenues; and
• Fully funds our rainy day fund.

At the same time we must invest in areas we know are critical to creating economic opportunity now and for generations to come:

• Innovative education and job training to strengthen our workforce, including $1 million to increase collaboration between Delaware businesses and educational institutions.
• Research that spurs innovation, including $3 million to launch the Delaware Cyber Initiative targeting a field with hundreds of jobs openings.
• Increased economic development in our cities, including $7 million to promote rehabilitation and construction that revitalize key downtown areas.
• Stronger infrastructure that’s necessary for our businesses’ success and a high quality of life, including a $500 million transportation investment over five years to support what the News Journal and others have recognized: “the state needs to invest in its infrastructure.”
• Programs to give our most vulnerable citizens a better chance, including $1.3 million for a proven nurse visitation initiative that helps low-income mothers and $250,000 to help youth get on the right track when they leave the juvenile justice system and return to their communities.

Making those necessary investments requires hard choices, including a mix of cuts and new revenues to support our priorities. I hope you will take the opportunity to review these proposals online.

If we’re going to have a lasting impact in creating opportunities for our fellow citizens, we must take the same challenge President Kennedy issued in Delaware just over 50 years ago when he dedicated the new highway running from Wilmington to Baltimore. He recognized the highway was created because of a commitment made years earlier, and he called on Americans to “begin things which will make this country a better place to live in for the rest of this century.”

By strengthening our infrastructure, spurring innovation, and supporting a quality workforce, we’ll build on the things that make our state a better place and we’ll keep Delaware moving forward.

Tags: budget, Delaware, finance, fiscal responsibility, responsible government, transportation