State Board of Education

Understanding the Common Core State Standards – Implications for District and School Practices

California Community FoundationMarch 11, 2013

Ilene W. Straus, Ed.D.Vice President

California State Board of Education

History of the Common Core Standards

• Created by National Governors’ Association & Council of Chief State School Officers

• Adopted by 45 states and D.C. in 2009-10• Federal funding - two state assessment

development consortia ($350 million)– PARCC Partnership for Assessment for

Readiness for College and Careers– SBAC Smarter Balanced Assessment

Consortium

Goals of theCommon Core Standards

• Fewer• Higher

• Deeper

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• Developed by teachers, school administrators, postsecondary educators, and content experts,

• the CCSS define the knowledge and skills

necessary to succeed in entry-level credit-bearing college courses and in workforce training programs

Key Aspects of the CCSS• Reading increasingly complex texts closely• Communicating effectively across multiple media

and content areas• Using evidence; interpreting with justification• Engaging in inquiry and research

• Engaging in mathematical practices that use mathematical reasoning in application

• Using mathematical skills across content areas and contexts

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The shifts build toward College and Career Readiness for All Students

Common Core Standards – ELA Reading

Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

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Key Shifts in Common Core

1. Complexity: Regular practice with complex text and its academic language

2. Evidence: Reading, writing, speaking and listening grounded in evidence from text, literary and informational

3. Knowledge: Building knowledge through content rich nonfiction

Key Shift 1: Complexity

• Standards include a staircase of increasing text complexity from elementary through high school (what students can read, in terms of complexity is greatest predictor of success in college)

• Standards reward careful, close reading rather than racing through texts

• Standards focus on the words that matter most—not obscure vocabulary but the academic language that pervades complex texts

Key Shift 2: Evidence

• Focus on students rigorously citing evidence from texts to support claims/inferences

• Require writing to sources rather than writing to de-contextualized expository prompts

• Require purposeful academic talk

Key Shift 3: Knowledge

• CCSS does not just pertain to ELA but literacy across the disciplines of science, social studies, and technical subjects too

• Standards require certain percentages of literature and informational texts (modeled on NAEP)

• Standards call for regular short research projects

Texts Worth Reading and

Questions Worth Answering

• Students should be able to:– “understand,” “describe,” “explain,” “justify,” “prove,”

“derive,” “assess,” “illustrate,” and “analyze.”

• They need to be able to:– “model,” “construct,” “compare,” “investigate,” “build,”

“interpret,” “estimate,” “summarize,” “represent,” “evaluate,”

• Students should be able to “extend,” and “apply” their learning to a wide range of real world problems– including uses in science, engineering and

technology problems

Common Core Standards – Math

Model Course Pathways for Mathematics

Pathway ATraditional in U.S.

Geometry

Algebra I

Courses in higher level mathematics: Precalculus, Calculus (upon completion of Precalculus), Advanced Statistics, Discrete Mathematics, Advanced Quantitative

Reasoning, or other courses to be designed at a later date, such as additional career technical courses.

Pathway BInternational Integrated approach

(typical outside of U.S.)

.

Mathematics II

Mathematics I

Algebra II Mathematics III

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Implications• Professional development content and

delivery – teachers and leaders• Instructional supports and materials

alignment • Implementation costs and technology

infrastructure• Assessment of learning• Alignment with higher education• Communication to all stakeholders

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Common Core State Standards

Preparing all of our students to beCollege and Career Ready