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The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a collaborative effort between the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) that is developing core K12 standards in English-language arts and math. The current patchwork of state standards makes it difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate student performance across states and countries. Dissatisfaction with this situation is a major factor driving the effort to develop common, internationally benchmarked standards. The CCSSO and NGA released draft standards for college and career readiness in September, and the groups plan to have final standards for each grade level ready in January 2010. At that point, the states and territories that are participating in the initiative—all but Texas, South Carolina and Alaska at this time—will submit their timelines and processes for adopting the standards. Any state may choose to include additional standards beyond the common core as long as the common core represents at least 85 percent of that state’s standards.
The implications of this process for states and districts will be profound and far-reaching. We decided to speak about it at length with Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the CCSSO, and Dane Linn, director of the Education Division of the NGA Center for Best Practices, in separate interviews.
Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers
Questions for Gene Wilhoit:
Given your experience as an educator and administrator, what’s your take on the present situation in which each of the fifty states has its own set of standards?
My first encounter with this problem was when I was commissioner in Kentucky [in 2000-2006]. We were trying to set our state standards, and there was no national benchmark we could use to do the work, although we did rely on NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board] work and the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] assessment, and we did look at the discipline-based documents. Each of the states had a very different process, and although there were some common references as we began the work, the processes were all different. As commissioner I could report against our state standards, but I was very concerned that Kentucky students be achieving at a level similar to those of other states. I wanted some means to have over time some benchmark against which we could make those judgments. That didn’t happen.
What changed with NCLB?
What emerged out of the federal-state partnership under NCLB was states reporting success against state indicators, but once you looked inside those you found a different level of expectation, a different set of standards, a different number of schools being affected by the outcome of those judgments, and, I think, a sense of confusion on the part of administrators at the local level about what was actually being reported, and a sense of this not being a fair way of determining accountability. I’m not sure we would have come to this conclusion that we needed some sort of commonality had we not had those frustrating experiences and inability to come together in more meaningful ways out of our prior experiences.
How do you see this particular moment in history as being different from other moments when common standards were discussed?
First, we’re finding that there are some things other countries can teach us. It is not a good idea to take a practice and replicate it exactly without thought, but it is a good idea to use the world as a laboratory for learning. And what we’re finding out is that some of these countries have been very thoughtful and deliberate about what they’re doing to improve learning, and in many ways we could improve our practice by adopting some of their strategies. We have a direct learning program with other countries, and we’ve formed stronger ties with the British and the Japanese systems, we’ve had direct interactions with Singapore and China, we’re learning a lot from Australia and New Zealand about what’s going on—and they’re trying to learn from us—and you can see this kind of connectivity emerging that is bringing some improved practice.
Second, we’ve had to mature over the last few years. When the reforms came about at the local level and at the state level, we had so many things hitting us, and we had so many different concepts being placed in front of us that we had to learn about, accept and incorporate that just the simple fact that we had to move from an inputs-based structure to a performance-based system—well, that’s easy enough to talk about, but that caused dramatic shifting in terms of the work.
I think all of that’s led us to think about what are the points of great leverage that we could bring about in the system. What are the points where we could spend our energy and make the greatest difference? We think one of them is eliminate some of the confusion in the system. Let’s be clear about what we want our students to know and be able to do. Let’s engage the field in that enterprise, and then let’s begin to build around those expectations. Not that those expectations are going to be perfect, but at least we’re coming together around a common agreement of what those students should know and be able to do.
