Understanding the Common Core

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Forty-six states, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands have adopted the Common Core standards, and tests based on these standards are set to go into effect in 2015. That's not far away! The Center for Public Education's director, Patte Barth, recently held a presentation on what you need to know about Common Core standards.

The common core state standards: Focus for school board members, March 6, 2012 (Click here to download the PPT).

Resources

Common Core State Standards:
the official website for the CCSS where you can download the standards and keep up with state CCSS adoption.

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC):
the main website for the 14-state PARCC assessment consortium under the project management of Achieve, Inc. Sign up to receive updates on progress.

SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium:
the main website for the 29-state SMARTER assessment consortium headquartered at the Washington state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Tools for the Common Core standards:
a blog by Bill McCallum, lead author of the CCSS mathematics standards. A good place to stay up to date on progress, download tools as they come available, and engage in conversations with other professionals.

The Illustrative Mathematics Project:
still under construction at this writing, this website will “illustrate the range and types of mathematical work that students will experience in a faithful implementation of the Common Core State Standards, and by publishing other tools that support implementation of the standards.”

Rubrics for aligning Open Educational Resources (OER) to CCSS.
Rubrics designed “to help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of OERs to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs.” The eight rubrics address such areas as content quality, usefulness of materials, assessments, practice exercise, and others. Achieve, Inc.

Next Generation Science Standards
Next Generation Science Standards: the official site for the state-led effort to draft new science standards.

Center for K-12 Assessment & Performance Management at ETS
Center for K-12 Assessment & Performance Management at ETS. The Education Testing Service maintains this website to monitor progress on the state assessment consortia and offers reports, power points and webinars.