Drafting Common Standards: What's Ahead -- And What's Missing

Last week the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors’ Association (NGA)—the two organizations leading efforts to develop “common core” state standards—released a first draft of their “college- and career-ready” standards. The overall reaction from education groups, policy wonks, and other observers has been pretty positive so far, although some critics say the standards devote too little attention to specific content knowledge.

These standards articulate what students should know and be able to do in English language arts and math by the time they graduate from high school, in order to succeed in college or the workforce. But as regular Early Ed Watch readers know, the path to college and career readiness begins much earlier than that—in preschool and the early grades. “College and career-ready” standards define end goals for public schooling. The real meat of the “common core” effort will lie in a series of grade-by-grade academic standards, which will define what students need to learn each year in K-12* schools in order to stay on track to reach the “college and career ready” goalposts.

As experts convened by CCSSO and NGA work to develop those grade-by-grade standards, they need to make sure that they provide clear expectations for the content and skills children should learn each year, and that those standards are aligned from grade to grade. This will be especially important in the early grades, which are often an area of particular weakness in existing state standards. Many states’ early elementary standards are too vague to provide useful guidance to teachers and repeat the same standard over multiple grades (NOT helpful for alignment!). In a few states, the expectations for grades K-3 or K-2 are clustered into a single standard (even less helpful!).

Discussions about the CCSSO-NGA effort often emphasize the need for standards that are “common” and “rigorous.” But for standards to serve as tools educators can use to drive real improvements in student learning—and that’s what we want, right?—“clarity” and “alignment” are just as important. When the grade-by-grade standards come out, we’ll be paying very close attention to ensure that they provide the clarity and alignment necessary to support high-quality, aligned educational experiences for children in the early grades.

*Note that we say “K-12.” As we’ve previously noted—with disappointment and disapproval—CCSSO and NGA have declined to include pre-k standards in their efforts—even though pre-k is increasingly becoming part of the public education system in a number of states. This omission is particularly problematic because it does not allow for easy integration with the Obama administration’s efforts, through the Early Learning Challenge Fund, to raise standards for early childhood programs and help states build more coherent early childhood systems. A clear definition of what children should learn in pre-k, in order to be on track for college readiness by the end of high school, would be very helpful to these efforts. Since the CCSSO-NGA effort isn't going to provide that, someone else needs to.