Updates on the Common Core Standards Initiative

Education Week reports that the Common Core Standards Initiative, an effort spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, proceeds apace:

Academic scholars, teachers, state officials, school administrators, and at least one librarian fill the ranks of the newly announced “work groups,” for developing K-12 standards in English-language arts and math… The two teams will have the duty of completing the second phase of common state standards. The first phase was the drafting of college- and career-readiness standards, a draft of which was released a few months ago.

 

Meanwhile, Ed Week reports here that at least seven states have suspended or slowed their own development of state standards in an apparent attempt to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to the national standards movement.

(For some background, see my prior posts on this topic.)

The debate over 3-year bachelor’s degrees

Recently, NEWSWEEK published this cover story by former US Secretary of Education (and current Republican senator) Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Sen. Alexander argues that four-year bachelor’s degrees are outmoded and too expensive to maintain in the current economic climate. He concludes:

Expanding the three-year option or year-round schedules may be difficult, but it may be more palatable than asking Congress for additional bailout money, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students.

 

In the same issue, NEWSWEEK published this very interesting debate between five researchers and policy makers from around higher education. Both these articles are well worth reading.

Will national education standards lead to national standardized tests?

In this post last April, I described a new push by US governors and state educational commissioners to develop national education standards for K-12. Now, Education Week reports in this article that:

As 48 states charge ahead with plans to adopt common academic standards, the U.S. Department of Education will enlist experts and the public to help design a $350 million competition for the next step: the development of common tests.

In coming weeks, top Education Department officials will travel to Atlanta, Boston, and Denver for a series of meetings that will solicit testimony from testing experts, including those with research and technical know-how, as well as to hear from the public

Denver teachers go from “crazy idea” to new school

CNN reports:

“I have a crazy idea”: Those five words changed a simple meeting of school officials into the realization of Kim Ursetta’s dream.

Ursetta, then president of a local teachers’ union, blurted out those words 18 months ago during a meeting in the office of Denver, Colorado’s, schools superintendent…

“I want to start a new kind of school,” she said, a union-sponsored public school led by teachers, not a principal.

“I started talking about 21st century skills and wanting to prepare our kids in math and science, especially our low-income and ethnic minority students,” Ursetta said. “We’ve been doing schools the same way in this nation for 150 years, so if we don’t step up, then nothing is going to change.”

Superintendent Michael Bennet — now the state’s freshman U.S. senator — did not say no to the idea, and Ursetta walked out the door “excited” and “shocked.”

She immediately started “pulling together a group of teachers to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and ask how you would do a school differently.”

Three weeks ago, Ursetta’s dream became a reality, as Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy opened its doors to 142 kindergartners and first- and second-grade students in Denver’s mostly low-income, largely Hispanic Athmar Park neighborhood.

U. S. Dept. of Ed report shows American students lag behind other nations in science and math

CNN reports:

…A special analysis put out last week by the National Center for Education Statistics [compares] 15-year-old U.S. students with students from other countries in the Organization for Economic Development.It found the U.S. students placed below average in math and science. In math, U.S. high schoolers were in the bottom quarter of the countries that participated, trailing countries including Finland, China and Estonia.

According to the report, the U.S. math scores were not measurably different in 2006 from the previous scores in 2003. But while other countries have improved, the United States has remained stagnant.

In science, the United States falls behind countries such as Canada, Japan and the Czech Republic.

The report is available here.

Scientific literacy in the U. S.

Dan Vergano of USA Today writes:

Science enjoys the best and the worst of times today, celebrated as the secret sauce behind economic growth, but embattled in high-profile areas such as climate change, stem cells and evolution.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said President Obama, in April at the National Academy of Sciences.

At the same time, Obama noted, federal funding of physics and related sciences has fallen by nearly half since the 1980’s, U.S. schools trail in math and science versus Japan, England, South Korea and others. “And we have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas,” he said.

ACT organization: Less than a quarter of incoming college freshmen ready for college coursework

USA Today reports:

Even as high school graduates in recent years have grown increasingly better prepared for college, too many members of the class of 2009 cannot adequately perform all of the academic skills they will need to succeed, a report says.

Just 23% of students, up from 22% last year, earned test scores suggesting they can earn at least a C in first-year college courses in English, math, reading and science, says the report, released today by the non-profit Iowa-based testing company ACT. It’s based on scores of 1.48 million 2009 high school graduates who took the ACT’s college entrance exam.

NEWSWEEK on “The death of handwriting”

NEWSWEEK reports on ‘the death of handwriting’ – as a combination of technological change and standardized testing, among other factors, lead students to spend more time on math and reading and less time on practicing their penmanship, some educators and others worry about the ramifications of poor handwriting skills.

The NEWSWEEK article cites a study published in the February 2009 edition of the Journal of Educational Psychology. That study’s abstract reads as follows:

A random sample of language arts, social studies, and science high school teachers (N = 361; 53% women) from the United States were surveyed about what their students wrote, their use of evidence-based writing practices, the adaptations they made for weaker writers, how they assessed writing, their preparation to teach writing, beliefs about the importance of writing, and judgments about their students’ writing capabilities. The findings from this survey raised some concerns about the quality of high school writing instruction. The writing activities they were assigned most frequently by teachers involved little analysis and interpretation, and almost one half of the participating teachers did not assign at least one multiparagraph writing assignment monthly. Although the majority of high school teachers did apply most of the evidence-based practices and adaptations included in the survey, they used these practices infrequently. Most teachers did not believe their college teacher education program adequately prepared them to teach writing. A sizable minority of language arts and social studies teachers indicated that their in-service preparation was inadequate too. For science teachers this was close to 60%.

The study can be accessed here (subscription required).

The “new science of learning”

The journal Science has published a paper on a developing “new science of learning.” The article’s abstract states:

Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared with those of other species. Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

The article is available here (subscription required). Science Daily has a summary of the article here.

Note: this is cross-posted with my Cognitive Science Blog.

Replacing textbooks with digital resources

The NY Times reports:

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”