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Fordham’s review does not unequivocally say the standards are higher, either. They may be higher than some state standards but they are certainly lower than the best of them

Nor are the Common Core standards necessarily clearer.

Andrew Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education

conclusion was stark: Those who hope that the Common Core standards represent greater focus for U.S. education will be disappointed by our answers. Only one of our criteria for measuring focus found that the Common Core standards are more focused than current state standards…Some state standards are much more focused and some much less focused than is the Common Core, and this is true for both subjects. We also used international benchmarking to judge the quality of the Common Core standards, and the results are surprising both for mathematics and for [ELA].… High-performing countries’ emphasis on “perform procedures” runs counter to the widespread call in the United States for a greater emphasis on higher-order cognitive demand.

with only somewhat less redundancy in the middle grades

There is much to criticize about them, and there are several sets of standards, including those in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, and Washington, that are clearly better.

Where this gap is most obvious, and most important, is in laying the foundation for college readiness in mathematics early, by grade 6 or 7. Judging by state standards, few people see a connection between elementary school mathematics and college math, let alone really understand how the foundation is built.

et Common Core is vastly superior—not just a little bit better, but vastly superior—to the standards in more than 30 states.

the standards don’t rank in terms of quality in the middle 20 percent of state standards, but, instead, fall in the top 20 percent.

Fewer than 15 states are explicit about the need for students to know the single-digit number facts (think multiplication tables) to the point of instant recall. States love to have kids figure out many ways to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but often leave off the capstone standard of fluency with the standard algorithms (traditional step-by-step procedures for the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers).

only 15 states mention common denominators. Common Core does a pretty good job with arithmetic, even a very good job with fractions.

do the math standards resemble those recommended by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)

There will always be people who think that calculators work just fine and there is no need to teach much arithmetic, thus making career decisions for 4th graders that the students should make for themselves in college. Downplaying the development of pencil and paper number sense might work for future shoppers, but doesn’t work for students headed for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

There will always be the anti-memorization crowd who think that learning the multiplication facts to the point of instant recall is bad for a student, perhaps believing that it means students can no longer understand them. Of course this permanently slows students down, plus it requires students to think about 3rd-grade mathematics when they are trying to solve a college-level problem.

There will always be the standard algorithm deniers

Some seem to believe it is easier to teach “high-level critical thinking” than it is to teach the standard algorithms with understanding. The standard algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers are the only rich, powerful, beautiful theorems you can teach elementary school kids, and to deny kids these theorems is to leave kids unprepared. Avoiding hard mathematics with young students does not prepare them for hard mathematics when they are older.

You learn Mathematical Practices just like the name implies; you practice mathematics with content.

At present, it seems that the majority of people in power think the three pages of Mathematical Practices in Common Core, which they sometimes think is the “real” mathematics, are more important than the 75 pages of content standards, which they sometimes refer to as the “rote” mathematics

NCTM followed shortly with its 2006 Curriculum Focal Points, a document that finally focused on what mathematics is all about: mathematics. Since then, NCTM seems to have regressed, as evidenced by its 2009 publication Focus in High School Mathematics, a document that is full of high-minded prose yet contains little rigor or specificity.

The Common Core mathematics standards are grade-by-grade‒specific and hence are more detailed than the NCTM 2000 standards, but they do resemble them in setting their sights lower than our international competitors, by, for example, locking algebra into the high school curriculum.

And they contain inexplicable holes even when compared to the much shorter NCTM Curriculum Focal Points, the major one being the absence of fraction conversion among their multiple representations (simple, decimal, percent). Other puzzling omissions include geometry basics such as derivation of area of general triangles or the concept of pi. One can argue those can be inferred, but the same can be said regarding all those state standards we acknowledge as “bad”—that all those missing pieces “can be inferred.”

How do the Common Core math standards compare to those in use in the world’s highest-performing nations?

the Common Core standards are not on par with those of the highest-performing nations.

Professor R. James Milgram of Stanford, the only professional mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, wrote when he declined to sign off on the Common Core standards: This is where the problem with these standards is most marked. While the difference between these standards and those of the top states at the end of eighth grade is perhaps somewhat more than one year, the difference is more like two years when compared to the expectations of the high achieving countries—particularly most of the nations of East Asia.

Professor William McCallum, one of the three main writers of the Common Core mathematics standards, speaking at the annual conference of mathematics societies in 2010, said, While acknowledging the concerns about front-loading demands in early grades, [McCallum] said that the overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [with] other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels.

Jonathan Goodman, a professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute at New York University,

“The proposed Common Core standard is similar in earlier grades but has significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.”

The enrollment requirements of four-year state colleges overwhelmingly consist of at least three years of high school mathematics including algebra 1, algebra 2, and geometry, or beyond. Yet Common Core’s “college readiness” definition omits content typically considered part of algebra 2 (and geometry), such as complex numbers, vectors, trigonometry, polynomial identities, the Binomial Theorem, logarithms, logarithmic and exponential functions, composite and inverse functions, matrices, ellipses and hyperbolae, and a few more.

What should we make, then, of a recent study purporting to “validate” that Common Core standards indeed reflect college readiness?

Look at California’s standards for example. They are great standards and have been unchanged for over a decade, but many in math education hate them. They think they are all about rote mathematics, but I think such people have little understanding of mathematics.

We, in this country, are still not on the same page about what content is most important, even if everyone says they’ll take Common Core. Without a unified, concerted effort to teach real mathematics, there isn’t much chance of catching up.

In other countries, if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers,” no one questions how this should be done; students should learn and understand the standard algorithm. In the U.S., even if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers with the standard algorithm,” some people will declare wiggle room and try to avoid the standard algorithm.

What, then, are your main areas of disagreement?

Ze’ev refers to Andrew Porter’s work to support his argument that Common Core lacks focus.

he says that 39.55 percent of grades 3‒6 coarse-grained topics for the states are on Number Sense and Operations, but Common Core gets 55.47 percent. To me, that says that Common Core focuses on arithmetic in grades where arithmetic should be the focus, and that the states did not focus on arithmetic.

If Common Core is mediocre, then mediocre is being set at a high standard. There are many states that set a very different, and much lower, standard for mediocre.

I would take these interview comments with a grain of salt. Everyone is an expert.

I can tell you that Ze’ev had not taught and I don’t think has spent any amount of time in the classroom. I served on a committee with Ze’ev evaluating questions for the California Standards Test.

Ze’ev is correct. I thought this long ago. It’s too vague and there is too much wiggle room. The wiggling will be in the downward direction. In fact, they don’t have to wiggle very much. Everyday Math will add a few more units and Math Boxes about standard algorithms, and then they will continue to trust the spiral.

BY FAR the majority of the population did not “get” math when it was taught using the methods and approaches these pompous mathematicians propose. Like so many uninformed “experts” they think that if we just teach math the way they learned it every things will be smooth sailing. But we taught math their way for a very, very long time and we failed. And that’s when the world hd very little technology, far less problems to solve, and agriculture and manufacturing ruled the world. But the world has changed fellas. And we now have scientific research that debunks the didactic, direct, one-way approach to learning math. For one thing we’ve learned that the brain doesn’t learn for the long term the way they propose. Their methods work to pass tests in the short run, but do little to instill knowledge retention and application of the mathematics in solving real problems. If their approaches to learning math worked, we wouldn’t have a very large segment of the adult population, including a lot of elementary teachers, saying things like, I never got math, I hate math, math is too hard.

Thankfully, we’re finally moving toward an educational system that honors the mathematical practices on which the CCSS were developed.

Bottom line… We need to ensure that our students are getting a solid foundation at the early grades to ensure that they are able to engross themselves in deeper, more abstract problems in the future. This, I believe will be enhanced by the common core although I would agree that the standards themselves do not fix the issues.

the International Baccalaureate standards; and the Knowledge and Skills for University Success

The authors wanted to see how closely the content covered, the range of material included, and the depth of that material correlated with the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

alignment in the topics covered and the range of content between the common-core standards and the five others, the common core demanded a bit more cognitive complexity in some topics, particularly English/language arts, the report says.

The comparison standards lacked the depth of challenge in reading for informational texts, writing, and reading and writing for literacy, and, on the math side, in geometry. However, some of the rigor of the common core will be defined by examples of student work and can’t yet be measured for depth of knowledge required

the report is not meant to measure the quality of one group of standards over another, but rather to test the conclusion that the common-core standards place a strong emphasis on preparing students for postsecondary education by comparing the standards with others that also focus on college readiness.

The study continues a line of evidence that the core standards that states have adopted have a solid research base and will help teachers and students,”

The next step for states is to ensure that during the implementation of the standards, teachers have the support and tools that they need to teach the new standards.”

some experts ask whether having comparable international, national, and state-to-state standards means that the common core makes it more likely a student will be prepared for college.

States also shouldn’t focus on trying to make sure everything in their standards and all the details line up exactly with the common core as they do their own in-depth comparisons

Instead, they should look for broader correlations.

different standards have different purposes

the comparison and alignment of the “long-standing, well-respected” IB standards with the common core was particularly noteworthy, given that the common-core crafters have claimed that they are internationally benchmarked, and the results of the study could give some support to the claim.

Comparison and alignment with Texas, a state that didn’t adopt the common core, is also important,

Texas has been a leader in the establishment of college- and career-readiness standards, and overall received positive remarks for strong and in-depth coverage

what we see are findings that Texas College and Career Readiness Standards are found to be at or above the standards contained within the common-core state standards.

According to a related study EPIC released in August, most entry-level college professors found the common-core high school standards were relevant to college-level courses.

There’s a big danger if you look at these standards as everything you need to know to be ready because it’s not.

The common-core standards are a step in the right direction, but we still need more information on what makes a student college- and career-ready and still have a way to go toward creating stronger standards and assessments than [evaluating a student] by a cut score on a test.”

according to the report, this approach "fails to adequately capture the level of content mastery, rigor, and depth of change necessary to meet the expectations of college and career readiness in the Common Core standards."

the report identified several other challenges affecting implementation:

Ongoing budget crises at the state and local level;

The misconception that the Common Core State Standards are federal standards;

Initiative fatigue on the part of teachers in the midst of simultaneous and sometimes conflicting educational policy shifts;

The need to modify teacher preparation programs;

The need for colleges and universities to adapt their admissions practices based on the changes happening at the K-12 level; and

Communications between state agencies and educators.

Educators themselves also identified several concerns, including the need for:

Information about how Common Core implementation will affect policies governing their careers and teaching practices;

Access to model lessons, resources, and professional development;

Time for planning; and

Information about Common Core assessments and the technologies that will be required to implement them.

we believe that states can minimize the cost by taking advantage of emerging best practices and consciously repurposing existing state funding streams focused on these areas.

We first estimated the expenses associated with a business-as-usual scenario, in which states simply spend more on traditional delivery methods—hard-copy textbooks, face-to-face professional development, and paper-based standardized tests. Such an approach would, according to our calculations, require an additional $12 billion in spending across the 46 states and the District of Columbia, or an average increase of $289 in per-student spending.

The increase here would represent less than 3 percent of that figure.

With some changes in approach—what we call "balanced implementation"—the total cost could drop to less than half the estimate: roughly $5.1 billion, or $121 per student. And if we consider the fact that some existing resources could be repurposed, the additional net cost for states could be even lower, likely less than $100 per student.

What does our balanced-implementation scenario look like? Our ideas include:

• Moving away from hard-copy textbooks and doing more sharing of online materials.

platforms are available for self-publishing textbooks,

We can already see examples of cross-state sharing of curriculum and materials, such as the tri-state materials-sharing platform utilized by Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island.

• Using computer-administered technology to offer formative assessments.

• Delivering professional development through a mix of in-person and online instruction

Customized professional development should address the needs of individual teachers, including specific gaps in knowledge and areas needing growth.

states are not treating common-core implementation as something above and beyond their usual use of materials, assessments, and professional-development practices. Instead, they are viewing the transition to the common core as an opportunity to adapt their practices in an effort to deliver 21st-century education.

• States, districts, and charter providers must be willing to stop purchasing goods and services from their existing vendors if they don't meet their current needs, and seek out new vendors willing to take advantage of the opportunities the new standards present.

the commonness of the common core has the potential to restructure these markets dramatically, thus opening up a host of new opportunities, including cross-state resource sharing.

The conditions are ripe for locally developed curricular modules, lesson plans, formative assessments, and professional-development resources to have a national impact.

The commonality of the standards should be a blessing for individual classroom teachers, allowing them access to resources that meet their unique needs. The common standards, coupled with 21st-century technology, have the potential to create a new kind of community of districts, school leaders, and teachers—a community liberated to improve instruction in ways that were once thought to be impossible.

ightened purse strings should force states to seek cost-effective solutions that make the best use of funds while leading to the use of high-quality instructional materials, assessments, and professional development. Implementing the common core won't be cheap, but the expense will be worth it if it leads to improved teaching and learning.

The agreement includes districts serving New York City; Los Angeles; Chicago; Clark County, Nev.; and Hillsborough County, Fla., all among the nation's largest.

The standards themselves, however, don't go into detail on how student textbooks and instructional materials should look, thus the creation of the publishers' criteria.

To fully reflect the standards, for example, the publishers' criteria for grades 3-12 note that "80 to 90 percent of the reading standards in each grade require text-dependent analysis; accordingly, aligned curriculum materials should have a similar percentage of text-dependent questions."

An example of part of the publishers' criteria for grades K-2 notes that "though there is a productive role for good general questions for teachers and students to have at hand, materials should not over-rely on 'cookie cutter' questions that could be asked of a text, such as, 'What is the main idea? Provide three supporting details.' " Rather, the criteria say, questions should be individually crafted and draw students into the texts at hand.

it's a long way from setting criteria to developing, adopting, and publishing curricular materials and programs,

The question publishers have, he said, is how the criteria will figure into actual procurement decisions.

"It really shifts more toward comprehension and asking the right type of questions, as opposed to 'read this text and answer these questions.' "

For most states, shifting to the common standards will require a shift in instruction.

There are as few as 28 standards for math for some grade levels, “which is fewer standards than ever before, but you now have to teach them and drill much deeper into them

Students are expected to conjecture and reason and problem-solve. That’s a new day in math. That’s a shift for everyone; therefore, we have real professional development that needs to get done.

PD should not be confined to a one-time conference or class,

but rather become an ongoing process for teachers.

the writing portion of the standards also represents a shift to a richer and more rigorous understanding of writing.

Teachers with a significant amount of experience might not have very much experience with the kind of teaching that would lead kids to be successful with these standards

although the common standards provide an opportunity to share resources between states, education leaders need to keep in mind that all teachers will come to those resources and professional-development opportunities with different backgrounds

Another issue for online PD around the common core is identifying high-quality resources

One of the challenges is that everybody, at least in their claims, appears to be aligned to the common core with professional development and instructional supports,” she said. Looking at those resources with a critical eye and making sure they are high-quality before distributing them to teachers is essential

States need to be “patiently aggressive” in developing and distributing professional development for teachers around the new common standards

If we move too quickly, [the resources] won’t be what we need them to be

If we wait for the assessments [due out in 2014-15], they will not have had the instruction necessary. We have to patiently but aggressively prepare professional-development resources, and the teachers need to know what the standards are.”

The James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, an affiliate center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Durham, N.C., is one of the providers of online resources on the common core. The organization has created a series of videos, posted on YouTube, that describe various aspects of the common core, such as how the standards were developed, what the key changes are in the subject areas involved, and the reasoning behind those changes.

The videos are designed not only for teachers, but also for school board members, policymakers, administrators, and even the PTA.

“Right now, I think you’re seeing the development of a lot of [curricular] materials,” she said, “and then the professional development to actually use those materials and teach the standards is the next frontier.”

four questions to guide districts in supporting teachers during this transition.

these questions will help ground and steer districts to ensure teachers and students alike are ready.

first guiding question

what kind of professional development will clarify which previous strategies associated with past assessments should be kept and/or adapted, and which should be discarded?

This question should be raised with teams of reading teachers, both schoolwide and grade by grade. Assessments related to advanced student learning not described by the common core should also be addressed. We believe previous lessons learned about alternate assessments and special populations, such as English-language learners, deserve special attention.

second question

There are no common-core content domains for reading, like those that are available for math. Therefore, what kinds of professional development should be designed to support the identification of curriculum-mapping and instructional strategies for reading? This question demands a long-term view toward comparative student growth across grades.

we have documented a proliferation of free online trainings at the state level that support transitioning to reading within the common core. Superlative examples of state-level offerings include those developed by the Oregon and Maine education departments.

third question, is which professional-development activities and resources should be generated at the district level?

it appears that extensive support programs for teachers are not as common at the district level. A few standouts at the district level include Orange County, Calif., and the city of Baltimore.

a variety of partial-, full-, and multi-day professional-development seminars for teachers and administrators related to the common-core English/language arts standards

The work in both Orange County and Baltimore illustrates a larger lesson: In deciding what kind of professional-development opportunities to create at the district level, a focused approach should be used, one that is resplendent with examples of both content and practice.

fourth and last question

Appropriate technology-based skills related to instruction and to formative, interim, and summative assessments of reading must be considered, leading to our final question: What professional-development activities would ensure the kind of teacher proficiency needed to administer, understand, and interact with computer-adaptive and computer-based testing specific to reading?

A baseline of teacher knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to technology must first be carefully documented before any professional development can be designed. Likewise, corresponding documentation of teacher growth should be maintained throughout the process.

basic professional-development needs among teachers implementing the common core include training on literacy assessment, technology skills, practical learning experiences oriented toward the new standards and assessments, time for professional collaboration, a teacher-leader in each school, and continuous networking between teachers.

the CCSS cites an ACT report called Reading Between the Line that says that the ability to answer questions about complex text is a key predictor of college success.

The text covers a wider range of genres and formats.

In order to be college-, career-, and life-ready, students need to be familiar and comfortable with texts from a broad range of genres and formats. The Common Core State Standards focus on a broader range and place a much greater emphasis on informational text.

The Common Core sets expectation that, in grades three through eight, 50 percent of the text be expository. Specifically, in grades three through five, there is a call for more scientific, technical, and historic texts, and in grades six through eight, more literary nonfiction including essays, speeches, opinion pieces, literary essays, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical, scientific, technical, and economic accounts.

In addition, students are expected to understand the presentation of texts in a variety of multimedia formats, such as video.

There is a greater emphasis on evidence-based questioning.

The standards have shifted away from cookie-cutter questions like, "What is the main idea?" and moved toward questions that require a closer reading of the text.

The questions are more specific, and so the students must be more adept at drawing evidence from the text and explaining that evidence orally and in writing.

Students are exposed to more authentic text.

The Publishers' Criteria for the Common Core State Standards, developed by two of the lead authors of the standards, emphasize a shift away from text that is adapted, watered down, or edited, and instead, focus on text in its true form. While scaffolding is still considered an important element when introducing students to new topics, it should not pre-empt or replace the original text. The scaffolding should be used to help children grasp the actual text, not avoid it.

The standards have a higher level of specificity.

There is a great amount of flexibility for educators to determine how they want to implement the new standards and the materials they choose to use and/or create; however, the standards themselves are quite specific.

Additional Expectations

Shared responsibility for students' literacy development. In grades six through twelve, there are specific standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. The message here is that content area teachers must have a shared role in developing students' literacy skills.

Compare and synthesize multiple sources. Students are expected to integrate their understanding of what they are currently reading with texts that they have previously read.

need to answer how what they have just read compares to what they have learned before.

Focus on academic vocabulary. One of the biggest gaps between students, starting in the earliest grades, is their vocabulary knowledge. The new standards require a focus on academic vocabulary, presenting vocabulary in context, and using the same vocabulary across various types of complex texts from different disciplines.

The Common Core State Standards are not "test prep" standards. They aim to teach students how to think and raise the bar on their level of comprehension and their ability to articulate their knowledge.

However, the depth of the standards and the significant differences between the CCSS and current standards in most states require a whole new way of teaching, so even the most experienced teachers will need to make great changes and require support in doing so.

A lot of publishers are repurposing old materials and saying that they are "aligned" with the Common Core.

teachers must shift their practice and teach more advanced materials to their students in more successful ways

We believe the answer lies in two key strategies: greater teacher collaboration and better instructional materials in the classroom.

teachers indicated they need more professional support and development to implement these standards

the best professional development comes from those already in our schools. When engaging in inquiry or lesson study, teachers draw on their shared trust, expertise, and experiences to improve instruction. And when this collaboration focuses on student work, it builds educators' capacity to address students' academic needs immediately.

Too often, teachers do not have sufficient opportunities to work together to examine work and structure interventions within their classrooms. As the new standards are implemented, we must ensure that teachers are not left alone to figure out how best to teach to them.

The standards are an opportunity for greater collaboration, fresher thinking, and a rearticulation of shared goals for teachers and students. By collaborating with each other and with instructional specialists through cycles of examining student work, creating hypotheses about how to implement common-core-aligned lessons, implementing them, and making adjustments in their practice in real time, teachers can find the best ways to help their students reach these higher expectations while still maintaining individual styles and flexibility.

this commitment to deep collaboration also requires new types of materials aligned to the standards, with a focus on real-time assessment and its translation into classroom practice. Two examples of this kind of collaboration are the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and the Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC), through which groups of traditional public school and public charter school teachers, curriculum experts, and other educators are working together to create high-quality, useful lessons and research-based instructional tools incorporating the common-core standards. In addition to developing a free, online library of new lessons and units, these efforts, funded by the Gates Foundation, are pioneering new pathways for how educators can work together to shift teacher practice.

Adopting the common core extends the teacher's role as coach, carefully designing activities to build specific skills, providing constructive feedback, and continually modifying lessons based on student understanding. Through professional development, teachers learn how to assess and give meaningful, consistent feedback; to share what works with their peers; and adjust lessons appropriately.

Some say working with the collaboratives has been the best professional-development experience of their careers

Teachers also say they have found that some of the extra time spent on this approach in the first few modules is recouped later in the year because students can apply the skills learned to future lessons.

Providing teachers with real training and templates, not scripts and worksheets, and meaningful opportunities to work together to implement strategies that will improve student learning, are critical components of any strategy to implement the common core.