NCEE » Gene Wilhoit on the Common Core, Part 1 - 0 views
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I’ve noticed a couple of things that trouble me. It is not an easy task to translate standards into a curriculum. You can’t teach standards. They are the objectives. They need to be fleshed out in learning progressions to allow us to create specific curricular designs. But in this country, there is a belief that the curriculum belongs to every local community and every school. We have a lack of capacity to develop strong curriculum at that level and a reluctance to allow others to take this on. Will we be able to translate standards into a strong curriculum design, which will be a basis for instruction and assessment? I see many people ignoring this issue and going straight to tasks and assessment. This is very troubling to me.
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Secondly, I worry about assessment. This experiment by two consortia has produced, from what I can see, better assessments than what states have used before. There is every reason to believe the first full-scale field administration of the tests will be successful. At the same time I see a number of states pulling back because they want a cheap test, but you can’t have high quality on the cheap. Some states seem to think that they can produce high quality tests on their own, but I don’t think any state has the capacity to do that. And, with respect to the tests being produced by the two state consortia, I worry about the states’ capacity to keep the two consortia going over the long haul. We may need to explore new forms of public-private partnerships to sustain and continuously update these new tests.
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Third, our professional development system isn’t geared toward providing the kinds of support teachers need to implement the Common Core State Standards.
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"Gene Wilhoit served as chief state school officer in Arkansas and in Kentucky before the Council of Chief State School Officers asked him to assume the leadership of their association. Two decades earlier, Wilhoit had served as an active member of the board of an organization, the New Standards Project, that I had put together to develop new, internationally benchmarked student performance standards for the American states, along with a set of assessments set to those standards. After he took the helm as Executive Director of the CCSSO, Wilhoit led the successful joint effort of the country's chief state school officers and its governors to create the Common Core State Standards. In this multi-part interview, I talk with Wilhoit about why he thought it so important to create the standards and what he thinks will be needed to fully implement them. "