The Learning Curve

Pearson Education which is based in the United Kingdom is one of the supporters of a new information spot called the The Learning Curve

Of note, the Learning Curve has issued its first report. Included is the executive summary. Most importantly for the Common Core is #1. Nothing is possible without the basics!


Executive summary

The value which education can provide through the inculcation of skills is enormous. Looking at economic outcomes alone, the OECD estimates that half of the economic growth in developing countries in the last decade came from better skills. How best to give those abilities to students is therefore a matter of great importance.

This report considers what new lessons we have learned about how to inculcate skills in students; it examines how to maintain or expand skill levels among adults and explores the relevance of developed-world answers to these questions for emerging markets.

The main findings are as follows:

East Asian nations continue to outperform others, while Scandinavia shows mixed results

In the latest edition of the Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment, South Korea tops the rankings, followed by Japan (2nd), Singapore (3rd) and Hong Kong (4th). The success of these countries highlights the importance of having clear goalposts for the educational system and a strong culture of accountability among all stakeholders. Scandinavian countries, strong performers in international education rankings since the 1990s, display mixed results. Finland, the 2012 Index leader, has fallen to 5th place, due to its performance in the 2012 PISA tests. Sweden has also declined (from 21st to 24th), fuelling the debate over the country’s free schools policy. Denmark and Norway, however, have made gains (rising to 11th and 21st position, respectively). Other notable improvers this year include Israel (up 12 places to 17th), which achieved major gains in PISA maths and science scores, Russia (up seven places to 13th) and Poland (up four places to 10th).


PISA results show the value of engaging all of society in education

Many of the messages about educational success from this year’s PISA reinforce those from earlier years. A wider range of survey questions accompanying the test, however, point to the importance of widespread engagement with the education system. Schools in which principals work with teachers on school management, and thus can function autonomously, tend to produce better results; parental expectations have a measurable impact on student motivation; and student interest has an effect on outcomes in a variety of ways. Effective education requires a broad range of actors, which points to the benefit of having a broadly supportive culture.


Better adult retention of skills depends on how often, and the environment within which, they are used

All adults lose skills over time, but better skill retention depends on the environment in which they are used. The OECD’s PIAAC study found that from around 25 years of age, skill levels tend to decline, even when accounting for the quality of initial education. Skills need to be used in order to be maintained; greater levels of personal or workplace reading and mathematical activity lead to a slower decline in skill scores over time. An adult learning infrastructure, possibly outside the formal education system, is likely to facilitate this.


Lifelong learning helps slow age-related skill decline mainly for those who are highly skilled already

It is difficult to determine the impact of adult education and training on individuals because those who engage in it are almost always already highly educated and skilled. Teaching adults, therefore, does very little to make up for a poor school system; a strong foundation is important not just for inculcating skills in the first place, but also for maintaining them. Moreover, those with high skills continue to maintain them for a reason; adult education needs to find ways to convince low-skilled individuals of its value.


Before focusing on 21st century skills, developing countries must teach basic skills more effectively

Many, but not all, of the lessons of PISA and PIAAC for developed countries are useful for developing ones. The unique needs of developing countries can differ widely from those in the OECD. As a result, nations such as Brazil and South Africa may be able to derive useful insights about investing in teachers and the status of the teaching profession, as well as the importance of accountability. But the 21st century skills debate will have less resonance in systems that often have difficulty teaching more basic skills successfully.


Four lessons in adult learning

1. Little is possible without the basics

Strong early education is a prerequisite for effective adult learning. Education systems that teach children early how to learn set students up for more effective learning later in life – in part by instilling a desire to learn. For developed and developing countries alike, the best route to good adult education is investment in good initial education.

2. Skills must be used to be maintained

Even when primary education is of high quality, skills decline in adulthood if they are not used regularly. Greater involvement in reading or number crunching at home or at work appears to correlate with higher overall literacy and numeracy, and may slow the decline of skills as adults age.

3. Countries must take adult education seriously

Nations which perform better in surveys of adult skills have established some type of adult learning infrastructure outside of the formal education system. And an economy which makes proper use of the population’s skills also reduces the risk of individuals losing their abilities over time.

4. Technology is helpful in fostering adult learning, but is no panacea

Mobile technology and the internet can remove some obstacles to adult skills education, particularly in the developing world. These and other technologies ease people’s access to adult education, but there is little evidence that their use helps individuals actually develop skills.

Education Poll Finds Common Core Standards Remain A Mystery To Most Americans

From the Huffington Post

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Have you heard of the Common Core State Standards?

If not, you're in good company. Neither have most Americans, according to aPDK/Gallup poll released Wednesday.

Almost two-thirds of Americans don't know what the Common Core State Standards are -- a statistic that is sure to vex educators and policymakers as the standards begin to hit the classroom. Among those who have heard of the standards, 64 percent indicated wrongly that the federal government "insists" they be implemented.

For those wondering, the Common Core is a huge U.S. education initiative: a set oflearning standards that are supposed to prepare students for a 21st-century economy by emphasizing critical thinking skills and informational texts in reading, and depth in important math concepts. The standards were voluntarily adopted by states, with some incentives from the federal government: The Education Department's Race to the Top competition gave states who took on higher standards more cash.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia are revamping their curricula to line up with the Core. Recently, the politics of the Core even spilled into the national limelight, with the tea party making anti-Core efforts its next frontier.

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Before today, have you ever heard of the Common Core State Standards? | Create infographics

So why is the public nearly clueless?

"You have policy elites dancing on the top of a pin," said Andy Rotherham, a former Clinton education official who now heads the Washington-based consulting firm Bellwether Education Partners. Which is to say, the public generally isn't aware of the details of even the most important public policy initiatives, he explained.

Parents are generally more clued in to tests, but in most states, tests haven't reflected the Common Core standards, said Ben Riley, who oversees policy for the NewSchools Venture Fund. "It's time for the folks who support the Common Core to get more vocal in promoting it," Riley said. "No one has taken a serious effort to get grassroots support."

The Core was designed to make American students competitive, but according to the PDK/Gallup poll, only four in 10 of those familiar with the initiative think that it could accomplish that goal.

"People haven't learned about the substance of the Common Core, what new expectations look like," said Sandra Boyd, chief operating officer of Achieve, the organization contracted to write the standards. "Sixty percent of the public doesn't know what the Core is -- I can almost guarantee you that 100 percent of the public didn't know what their previous standards were or that there even were standards."

Wednesday's release marks the 45th administration of the PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, the longest-running such survey. Produced by Phi Delta Kappa International, an educators association, and Gallup, the well-known polling firm, the survey questioned a nationally representative group of 1,001 American adults in May 2013. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percent.

Another poll released this week, conducted by the Harvard journal Education Next, found somewhat different results. It showed that 65 percent of Americans support the Core, compared to 63 percent in 2012.

But Education Next asked about support after explaining the Common Core in a question: "All states are currently deciding whether or not to adopt the Common Core standards. ... If adopted, these standards would be used to hold the state's schools accountable." The survey spoke to 1,138 adults and had a margin of error of 3 percent.

As in previous years, the PDK/Gallup survey found high levels of trust in teachers and principals, as well as major dissonance in public opinion on education: While most parents gave their own children's school an A or B, most gave the nation's schools a disappointing C.

The poll also asked a series of questions on the use of standardized tests. "Three-quarters of Americans believe that the increase in student testing had made no difference or hurt the schools," said Bill Bushaw, executive director of PDK. "That's not a good omen for introducing new, more rigorous standards that will result in lower student results," he added, referring to the adoption of Common Core standards.

Fifty-eight percent of the PDK/Gallup respondents opposed requiring teacher evaluations that "include how well a teacher's students perform on standardized tests," compared to 47 percent in 2012. When asked whether a "significant increase in standardized testing" has "helped, hurt or made no difference" in local school performance, 22 percent said that it has helped. Thirty-six percent said it has hurt, and 41 percent said it has made no difference. Back in 2007 -- just six years after passage of No Child Left Behind, a law credited with encouraging the testing surge -- 28 percent thought the rise in standardized testing had helped.

These results seem to run counter to another poll released earlier this week. On Monday, the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research published a major survey of American parents with children enrolled in grades K-12. It found that 61 percent "think their children take an appropriate number of standardized tests," while 26 percent think they take too many. Seventy-five percent of parents indicated that "standardized tests are a solid measure of their children's abilities."

When asked about the dissimilar results, Bushaw noted that the polls took the pulse of different populations: the general public vs. parents with schoolchildren. He also pointed out that the questions in the two surveys were phrased differently.

"Ours asked about, did it help, hurt or make no difference," Bushaw said. "Theirs asked was there too much, too little or just the right amount."

According to the PDK/Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans think that teachers' performance reviews should be released to the public, and 52 percent think that teachers should be allowed to go on strike, compared to 40 percent in 1980.

Get Ready for Math Tasks

This year will be full of anecdotal and real life stories on how different students' experiences with school are due to the changes in the way teachers teach and what the students are learning.  A big change for kiddos are Math Tasks....get used to that word because it is all about the tasks from here on out.

Essentially a math task is a mutlistep word problem in math.
Check out this video clip from a California news station explaining some of the differences.
California News Clip on Math Learning

New math curriculum aims to boost reasoning skills, problem solving

ELK GROVE, CA - As kids start heading back to school, parents can expect some major changes in the curriculum like essays in math class.

It's all part of the new Common Core State Standards curriculum that California school districts are adopting for the foreseeable future.

"We do a lot more talking to our partners, and they show it to us in a different way, so if we learned it last year, they're going to teach us another way to do it," fourth grade student Landyn Batson said.

At Elk Grove's David Reese Elementary School, a year-round school, 4 th graders in Lindsey Lilley's class don't just have to get the right answer, they have to explain how they got the answer.

"They're getting better at working with their partner," Lilley said. "They know that they can't just luck out and get the answer, so it really challenges their thinking."

"When I was in 3rd grade, we didn't have partners. I didn't know how to explain it to myself, so now I can explain it to my partner, and it's more easier than complicated," 4th grade student Lailani Cardenas explained.

That's exactly how educators behind the new Common Core State Standards curriculum hope students will respond. The new system has been adopted gradually, with 3rd through 6th grade math students getting their first exposure to the cirriculum this year.

"As a student articulates his or her reasoning, they kind of self correct errors in reasoning that previously might have led to miscalculations," Elk Grove United Director of Curriculum and Professional LearningDr. Anne Zeman said.

And that's really the key with the curriculum, identifying multiple approaches can give students an early sense of confidence at problem solving.

"As they do this work in 4th grade and they draw things out when numbers are relatively simple, that's helping their onramp to be able to do well in algebra," Zeman said.

Check out what type of questions students are expected to answer in the new curriculum here:

• Math curriculum test questions
• English curriculum test questions

Ed Source: CCSS challenge for students, opportunity for teachers?

An interesting article on how the Common Core will be a challenge for students but an opportunity for teachers. I suggest that they have the title backwards- most students seem to absorb the Common Core b/c it is not a change for them. The change is on the teachers- and change is difficult for adults.

Common core demands more sophisticated language from teachers, students 
One of the challenges of the Common Core State Standards is for teachers to make sure students have a solid vocabulary to express their ideas and their work in strong academic terms, whether it's working on projects with classmates or explaining their approach to complex math problems. A recent training program highlighted the need to educators in California. "Students need to be using these more formal uses of language, and they won't be if teachers are not aware of it themselves and do not have the pedagogical expertise," said Robert Linquanti, an adviser on the common core and state English-language standards. He made presentations at the training program. 


See the following:
Ed Source: http://www.edsource.org/today/2013/common-core-poses-big-challenge-for-students-big-opportunity-for-teachers/37065#.UgpXv_l0X95

With an emphasis on developing verbal and analytical skills, the new Common Core standards will pose a big step up for most students. For English learners, who comprise a quarter of California’s children, it’ll seem more like a pole vault.

“Common Core is pushing us toward a higher level of achievement, and that depth is predicated on an ability to use language in sophisticated ways,” said Ben Sanders, director of standards, assessment and instruction for the 10 districts that formed the nonprofit California Office to Reform Education, or CORE.

Recognizing this will also be a unique opportunity and a heavy lift for teachers. CORE’s second annual Common Core summer conference for 450 teachers and administrators in San Francisco this month concentrated on teaching academic language – the shorthand for becoming fluent in the vocabulary, compound sentences and thought processes demanded to analyze texts, form coherent questions, create logical arguments and collaborate on projects.

Robert Linquanti, an adviser on both the new state English Language Development standards and the new Common Core English language assessments (photo by John Fensterwald).

These are the priorities of the Common Core, which 45 states, including California, and the District of Columbia have adopted. In a sign of agreement over its importance, the California Teachers Association also made academic language under Common Core a theme at its annual Summer Institute for 1,100 teachers in Los Angeles – and for those who viewed webinars online last week.

Summing up the challenge, one principal at the CORE conference quipped, “Academic language is a foreign language.” 

Robert Linquanti, a senior researcher at WestEd and an adviser on both the new state English Language Development Standards and the new Common Core English language assessments, would agree. It’s challenging for most students, but especially English learners, who start with a deficit: They start school on average with a knowledge of 5,000 fewer words than their fluent English peers.

A lesson on bats, an exercise in high-skills learning

Robert Linquanti led teachers at the California Teachers Association’s Summer Institute through a simple classroom exercise on how to train students, particularly English learners, in analyzing a complex text. The content was a two-paragraph description of bats for fourth or fifth graders suitable for an English or science class. It included facts such as bats are the only mammals that can fly; one-fifth of mammals are bats; the bones of bats’ wings look like the human hand; bats eat insects like mosquitoes that carry disease.

Students are told that they will be read the passage three times.

• The first time they should just listen;
• The second time they should listen for key words and phrases;
• The third time they should listen and take notes;
• Next, they should read their notes to a neighbor and together reconstruct the text;
• Finally, the teacher should show the original text to students, and invite them to discuss differences or similarities between the original text and their texts.

The exercise involves listening, reading and writing; the redundancy in reading the passage three times allows students to relax and focus on important words, Linquanti said. By working in pairs, it demonstrates how learning is cooperative and social. An English learner at the end of this exercise was overhead to tell his partner, “See, I told you I wasn’t dumb.” Do not undervalue the importance of productive group work, Linquanti said.

Academic language, “is not just informal talk that could occur in the playground or on a basketball court, or just hanging out with your friends at home, or texting – which is its own form of communication,” Linquanti, who gave presentations at both the CORE and CTA conferences, said in an interview. “Students need to be using these more formal uses of language, and they won’t be if teachers are not aware of it themselves  and do not have the pedagogical expertise.”

Adds Sanders, “In the context of Common Core, almost all students are academic language learners. At the same time we all agree – as English language researchers vociferously assert – that the needs of EL students are distinct from native English speakers, and it would be a mistake to assume otherwise, even as we mount an effort to support all students’ development of academic language and literacy development.”

Unified, coherent, interdisciplinary

Effective teachers have always taught students how to analyze, critique and debate through group and solitary work, writing and oral presentations. The difference is that Common Core has made as guiding principles the ability to “comprehend and evaluate complex tasks” and “construct effective arguments” across subjects and disciplines. Particularly in later grades, it stresses the ability to analyze and cite evidence from informational texts (gohere for a useful teacher’s guide to creating text-dependent questions). The new math standards also require verbal proficiency; students will be asked to explain their work in multiple ways, to “make conjectures … justify their conclusions, communicate them and respond to the arguments of others.”

The Next Generation Science Standards, which the State Board of Education is expected to adopt this fall, incorporate similar objectives. And the newly adopted English Language Development Standards, which identify the knowledge, skills and abilities that English learners need for academic work, now align with the Common Core English language arts standards and its goal of preparing students for college and careers. The themes running through all of these sets of standards offer more coherence than found in previous standards.

Patrick Bohman praises the coherent approach to critical thinking found in the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core (photo by John Fensterwald).

That interdisciplinary approach excites Patrick Bohan, an assistant principal of Sacramento City Unified’s School of Science and Engineering, which focuses on STEM careers for students in grades 7-12. The school’s mission, he said, is “to make critical thinking more explicit” and to reinforce common approaches to analyzing problems, whether in engineering, biology or history.

“We have a significant population of English learners who plateau after they are reclassified as fluent in English,” he said. Other students can “fake it” even though they test as proficient in middle school. “Common Core will push them beyond just getting by.”

Common Core, ELD standards on same page

It’s always been a tough sell for single-subject high school teachers to become conversant with English Language Development standards, Linquanti said. But the new ELD standards, with fewer and clearer standards, “can give teachers insights to where students are and help them to draw students’ language skills forward,” he said. At the same time, dedicated time for English language learners, whether pullout periods or after-school classes, needs to be better coordinated with mainstream classes to develop academic language. There should be no more teaching grammar for grammar’s sake or “impoverished forms of ELD instruction where we’re just focusing on bits and pieces of language that don’t add up to a whole,” Linquanti said.

Hilary Cloud, a language coach with Sanger Unified, one of the CORE districts, welcomes the ties between Common Core and English Language Development standards. “Lots of teachers haven’t been focused on ELD, which they saw as done in another classroom,” she said.

For teachers, a messy, risky, necessary shift

A new approach to academics under the Common Core will be challenging, but also potentially liberating for teachers who have labored through pacing guides and prepackaged lesson plans that have frustrated them and bored students.

“Teachers have to have confidence to get off script,” Sanders said.

For elementary and middle school teachers, that will require engaging students in different ways through guided one-on-one student conversations, teaching them how to listen critically, to offer feedback, to stay focused. For high school teachers, it means shifting from the lecture format, turning over control to students. Teachers, Sanders said, need to model the behaviors.

The shift “will be messy,” Sanders warned, sometimes exhausting and even “chaotic – at least the fear of it.”  Principals will now have to look for more open, active classroom practices that “look different from what they have valued.”

As a principal acknowledged in a discussion group at the CORE conference, “You have to be able to allow your staff to take risks.” Added another, “and not play gotcha.”

Principals, too, have to be honest about what they don’t know, Linquanti said. “Administrators are going to have to get smarter about what good instruction looks like, because many of them have been dumbed down just like our teachers with scripted curricula that really devalued skillful pedagogy,” he said.

This transition may be easier in Sanger, known for its effective professional learning communities,and the other CORE districts, like Sacramento City, San Francisco and Fresno, which have clear, district-wide plans for rolling out Common Core (Fresno alone sent 73 teachers and administrators to the conference). The waiver from the No Child Left Behind law that eight of the CORE districts got last week will free up millions of dollars for Common Core work this year.

But in the many districts that are just now wading into Common Core, without a history of collaboration, teachers will be confused over where to turn for guidance and lesson plans. Money for professional development has been scarce, although the Legislature in June did allocate $1.25 billion – or about $200 per student – for Common Core preparation (whether districts will spend it on iPads or teacher training remains to be seen). And the first Common Core assessments, in spring 2015, are less than two years away.

Those impending tests are particularly worrisome, and the experience last week in New York State, where initial scores on Common Core-aligned state tests fell 30 percentage points, will offer cold comfort. It showed how far schools have to go to teach complex analysis and deeper learning that the new assessments measure.

Teachers, acknowledged Cloud, will have “anxiety and underlying skepticism” even though they’re told that the new Common Core assessments are broader and better, because they’ve faced intense pressure over test scores. “The message needs to be that Common Core is not just about one test score. We all know the scores will go down” initially, she said.

Anxiety notwithstanding, Linquanti and Sanders see the next few years as a unique chance for teachers to take back their classrooms and to refocus instructional practice on academic skills that matter. “This is a golden time,” Linquanti said. “We need to open our doors to our peers, to video ourselves, to learn from the great teachers in our schools.”

“Teachers have been isolated for so many years; there is really this renaissance going on,” he said.

Common Core Resources for Parents

Back to school for so many students and it is remarkable about how much parents do not know what their own children will be learning. As with the additional funding in math and science from the federal government after the fear from Sputnik, American classrooms will significantly be altered by the adoption of the Common Core.

Click this link to find helpful documents and explanations of what the Common Core is: http://www.achievethecore.org/leadership-tools-common-core/parent-resources/

Although some politicians and political groups have tried hard to scare folks from the adoption of a national curriculum, the Common Core will help to get all children with similar learning targets throughout the country.


Shown above, my son Davidson is reading to a kindergarten student even though Davidson was in the 3rd grade. It is the ambitious goal of all third graders reading proficiently that the Common Core hinges its success. Let's all help our futures, our children's future, or our children children's future by understanding the Common Core.

California Governor Commits $1Billion to CCSS implementation

From a recent update from CA Governor Brown's office, CCSS implementation is important to fund even during a time when politicians are attempting to keep costs minimal and justified. See the following:

In addition to the higher ongoing funding, the May Revision proposes to invest $1 billion in one-time revenues to fund professional development, instructional materials and enhancements to technology to support implementation of new national standards for evaluating student achievement in English-language arts and math (known as Common Core Standards).

Understanding Resistance to CCSS

In the last couple of weeks, the Tea Party and some conservative religious groups have been critical of the adoption of the CCSS. Superintendent friends have reported to me that their central offices are fielding phone calls with critical questions about the CCSS. The main concern of the opposition is that local and state control in educating children have been turned over to the federal government.

To fully understand the opposition, check the Tea Party explanation of those for the common core. Also, prominent Education commentator Diane Ravitch has recently come out as anti-CCSS as shown through her blog.  Diane is a wonderful resource but she has done some spectacular flip flops in her career- pro testing/anti testing, etc.

If parents and community members knew more about what is actually in the common core their criticism might be more precise. Hence, the work of Canyon Effect- demystify the common core!