Common Core and College Completion: A Shared Agenda for K-12 and Higher Education
By Jacqueline E. King, Director, Higher Education Collaboration, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
While K-12 education has been pre-occupied with implementing the Common Core State Standards, higher education has been engaged in its own reform agenda aimed at radically increasing the number of Americans with high quality postsecondary credentials.
Read More →NC Superintendent’s shines light on CCSS history, future
North Carolina’s State Superintendent June Atkinson shares her first-hand knowledge of how the Common Core State Standards were created in her blog, “Common Core – It’s About Reading and Math.” Superintendent Atkinson explains that she met with about 45 other state superintendents in Chicago a few years ago to discuss how they could work together to determine what students should know in mathematics and English language arts.
Read More →Republicans Denounce Common Core in Opposition to Business Roundtable
In The New York Times editorial, “Republicans Versus the Business Community,” editorial writer Brent Staples conveys that the Republican National Committee’s recent criticism of the Common Core State Standards has now placed them in a compromising position with businesses.
Read More →Extending Quality Technology for Effective Teaching and Learning
By Todd Roberts, Ed.D., Chancellor North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
Faced with new standards and decreased access to professional development offerings, more and more teachers are taking a do-it-yourself approach to professional learning. They’re scouring the Web for quality content, often using Google to find materials.
Unfortunately for these proactive professionals, many initiatives designed to address the new standards have not yet produced the large collections of aligned materials needed to effectively implement a new curriculum. The quality of content found in a broad search of the Internet varies, and educators are spending much of their limited planning time slogging through content that hasn’t been evaluated or slick vendor sites designed to convince them that an out-of-the-box solution is just a $450 check away.
Read More →Getting to the Truth About the Common Core
Writers Kathleen Porter-Magee of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, address the false claims made by critics of the Common Core in the National Review online article, “The Truth about Common Core.” Porter-Magee and Stern make it clear that the Standards “simply delineate what children should know at each grade level and describe the skills that they must acquire to stay on course toward college or career readiness. They are not a curriculum.”
Read More →Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: A Tom Vander Ark ‘Smart City’ Area
Education advocate, advisor, and author Tom Vander Ark has been exploring where innovations in learning are occurring and the organizations that are making an impact across the country in his Smart Cities series. In this week’s Education Week series, Vander Ark writes about North Carolina’s Triangle Region, including its “top-notch” universities and some extraordinary schools making significant improvements in innovation. Moreover, Vander Ark mentions the successful educational leadership efforts of former North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., as well as The Hunt Institute, and its efforts as a leader on high standards, college/career readiness, and preparing education leaders.
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