Current Status of the Common Core State Standards
As K-12 education transitions to the new Common Core State Standards, teachers have understandably been asking the “When do we start teaching the new standards?” and “Will we need new curriculum to teach the Common Core State Standards?” questions. State departments of education and school districts have been scrambling for answers. Teachers have been left in limbo.
No answers have been forthcoming from on high, although the Common Core State Standards Initiative certainly received federal carrot and stick support in the Race to the Top competition, funded through the U.S. Department of Education. Currently, as of May 28, 2011, 43 of the 50 states have adopted the Common Core State Standards. These seven states have not: Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Texas, and Virginia. Washington passed the Common Core State Standards provisionally and is considering formal adoption. The U.S. Virgin Islands have also adopted the Standards. Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands have not adopted the Standards.
The status of the above questions varies state to state, but the answers are consistently unison: “It depends upon the economy.”
California provides a stark example of how this economic recession has savaged education and stymied reform. California adopted the Common Core State Standards, with some revisions: more in mathematics, less in reading/language arts, on August 2, 2010. However, the California legislature suspended Education Code Section 60200.7 until July 1, 2013. This code establishes the process and funding by which standards are put into place, curriculum frameworks are developed, and textbook adoption guidelines are created for publishers, until July 1, 2013. In other words, nothing can happen until the suspension of this code has been lifted by the California legislature.
With no legislative action and resulting money, the California State Department of Education has developed two “what if” scenarios, the first of which is already out of date. The first scenario was completion of the mathematics and reading/language arts curriculum frameworks in May, 2013 and May 2014, respectively, if an urgency clause was passed by both the State Assembly and State Senate in the early months of 2011. This did not happen. The second scenario was this: “If no legislative action is taken to remove the suspension, the soonest a mathematics framework could be completed within current statutory and regulatory requirements would be May 2015 (with a subsequent adoption in 2016 or 2017)” and presumably, the reading/language arts framework would follow one year later with the framework completed in May, 2016 (with a subsequent adoption in 2017 or 2018). Adoption refers to textbook approval based upon the curriculum frameworks.
To put things in perspective for teachers and their students: If no additional legislative action and allocation of resources is made available (the most likely case at the time of this writing) to implement the Common Core State Standards, seventh grade English-language arts teachers would not be equipped to teach the existing state standards until their current seventh grade students had completed their first or second years of community college.
For those teachers and school districts implementing the Common Core State Writing Standards, Pennington Publishing provides two curricular writing resources aligned to the Standards. Both resources are appropriate to help teachers teach the Common Core Writing Standards and differentiate writing instruction for upper elementary, middle school, and high school students.
The first, Teaching Essay Strategies, includes 42 essay strategy worksheets corresponding to the Common Core Writing Standards, the e-comment bank of 438 prescriptive writing responses with an link to insert into Microsoft Word® for easy e-grading, 8 on-demand writing fluencies, 8 writing process essays (4 Common Core Standard informative/explanatory and 4 Common Core Standard persuasive), 64 sentence revision and 64 rhetorical stance “openers,” remedial writing lessons, writing posters, and editing resources to differentiate essay writing instruction in this comprehensive writing curriculum.
The second, Teaching Grammar and Mechanics, makes sense of grammar instruction with a curriculum designed to integrate grammar and writing instruction. Throw away your ineffective D.O.L. or D.L.R. “openers” and last-minute grammar test-prep practice, and teach all the grammar, mechanics, and spelling that most students need in an hour per week. Teaching Grammar and Mechanics, provides a coherent scope and sequence of 64 no-prep Sentence Lifting lessons that include Teacher Tips and Hints for the grammatically-challenged, simple sentence diagrams, and both basic and advanced rules/skills. The mechanics and grammar skills complement those found in the 72 Grammar and Mechanics Worksheets and target the diagnostic needs indicated by the Grammar and Mechanics Diagnostic Assessments. Perfect for upper elementary, middle school, and high school students.
