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"Last spring, Susan Sluyter quit teaching kindergarten in the Cambridge Public Schools. She'd spent nearly two decades in the classroom, and her departure wasn't a happy one. In a resignation letter, Sluyter railed against a "disturbing era of testing and data" that had trickled down from the upper grades and was now assaulting kindergartners with a barrage of new academic demands that "smack of 1st or 2nd grade." The school district did not respond to a request for comment."

"As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts."

"RACE is the acronym we've adopted school-wide to help unify our teaching language and help students develop good answers. The thought is that even kindergarteners can start restating questions verbally and teachers in the youngest grades can use the vocabulary when they are modeling."

"Until the release of the Common Core State Standards, many educators didn't realize that writing skills need to develop incrementally, with the work that students do at one grade level standing on the shoulders of prior learning. It would be hard to achieve this high level of craft and knowledge if students weren't moving steadily along a spiralling curriculum, practicing and extending skills in each type of writing each year. After all, in math, teachers agree on content and ensure that students move up the grade levels with the essential skills that teachers agreed upon. That same focus on writing as content, as a set of skills, will move grade levels of students forward, rather than individuals who happened to get this teacher or that. Writing will needto be given its due, starting in kindergarten and continuing throughout the grades."-LUCY CALKINS

" I say "rough sketch" because, let's be honest, Arizona doesn't look like that. But it's also a rough sketch because you need far more than three colors of white board marker to tell the full story of the states' collaborations to build both the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests. Related Posts Why Indiana Is Scaling Back Participation In Common Core Testing Consortia PARCC Before Today's Governing Board Meeting: Five Things To Know About PARCC Ritz: Pausing Common Core Rollout Keeps Standards, Assessments Aligned Education Next: Common Core Is A Set Of Standards, Not Curriculum Minnesota Warns Parents To Prepare For Lower Scores On New Common Core Tests How Michigan Might Provide A Template For States Hoping To Leave Common Core How Science & Social Studies Teachers Are Transitioning To The Common Core Topics The story isn't only complex because of Indiana's recent "pausing" of both the Common Core's implementation and the state's participation in the PARCC consortium. (Though state officials have stopped attending governing board meetings, Indiana hasn't officially left the group, so Elle still colored them blue.) Explaining to me why she mixed her work with my work of art, Elle broke it down like this: 20 states and the District of Columbia participate in PARCC: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Dakota*, Oklahoma** 24 states participate in Smarter Balanced: Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, Hawai'i, North Dakota*, Alaska*** * North Dakota participates in both PARCC and Smarter Balanced. ** Oklahoma announced this week it will develop its

"Reading a picture book aloud from her armchair, 20 children gathered on the rug at her feet, kindergarten teacher Jamie Landahl is carrying on a practice that's been a cornerstone of early-literacy instruction for decades. But if you listen closely, you'll see that this is not the read-aloud of your childhood. Something new and very different is going on here."

"There may be no crying in baseball, but there's certainly math and science. On a recent Friday morning, students at the Center for Academic Success, a charter school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in Sierra Vista, learned that Pythagoras might have played as big a role in baseball as Babe Ruth. They began by learning the distances between the bases on a Major League Baseball field and mapping its geometry. They found isosceles and right triangles, talked about the Pythagorean theorem and how it's applied to the triangle formed by home plate, first base and second."

"On an early October morning, a mix of six kindergarten and third-grade teachers walked into Andrea Easley's third grade classroom in Tracy, California to teach a science lesson. Students stared eagerly at the newcomers as Easley positioned herself the front of the classroom. "Today we are going to do another experiment," Easley said. "Yay!" the third graders cheered, some jumping out of their chairs in excitement."