Sean C. Morgan
The days of CIM and CAM, benchmarks, state assessments, OAKS and 21st Century Schools are passing on as the state and Oregon school districts begin implementing federal standards called “Common Core Curriculum.”
This year’s eighth-grade students will take a new test and work under the new standard.
School District 55 is already busy preparing to meet the new standards, and next year teachers will spend time on Fridays working on them.
“Most of the states have adopted them,” said Supt. Don Schrader.
The new test is called “Smarter Balanced.” Graduation requirements have changed over the past few years, increasing the number of required language arts and math credits, this year’s juniors must have four credits of language arts and four credits of math. Along with that, they must pass an essential skills test, OAKS for now and Smarter Balanced in the future.
The standard does not differ significantly from previous benchmarks, but it rearranges things and educators are changing the way they instruct students.
For example, since the 1990s math instruction has been divided into five different strands, such as algebraic relationships, measurement, statistics and number sense, Schrader said. More recently, the National Center for Teachers in Math has developed a new way to teach math, along with more precise standards. The new method has developed focal points that narrowed the standards, he said. Curriculum at each grade level is articulated based on the standards.
Education is always changing, Schrader said, and Common Core is the next change. Common Core will require educators to teacher seventh-grade material in the fourth grade, and it will step up the rigor a lot.
It will take a few years to get the standards articulated among the grades, he said. The new approach emphasizes “concepts” that build on each other to create a scaffolding for more advanced concepts.
Language arts is shifting too, Schrader said. Teachers have always known that as students move up grade levels they must become more proficient at locating and comprehending information.
And teachers are already training students to read more technically, he said. That skill is how kids across the world access everything, from social studies to science.
When Schrader started teaching in California in the 1980s, educators had dumped everything in pursuit of “whole language,” he said. The local superintendent was run out of town, and test scores were dropping down the tubes. The industry threw out the basics and attempted to develop literacy simply by reading books. Students weren’t learning how to analyze what they were reading.
The new approach is much more balanced, building on basic skills to teach reading and writing, he said. They require students to develop an academic vocabulary and write about what they read. They must find evidence for what they write in what they read.
The approach to language arts is a philosophical change that ensures children are prepared for college or other careers, Schrader said. Educators want children to read for fun, but they also want them to be able to read more technically. When they go to college, they need to be able to locate information and use it as the basis for writing papers.
“What any standard does is just narrow the focus,” Schrader said. “We know what a fifth-grader should know by the time they leave the fifth grade. People get worried that what we’re doing is ‘teaching to the test.’”
That’s never been the case, he said. Standards show whether students are learning and improving academically.
When a student leaves the third grade, the fourth-grade teacher should be confident that the student knows what he or she needs to know going into the fourth grade.
“But without these standards, how do we know?” he asked.
While Schrader was teaching in California, Oregon was developing a pretty good system that other states were using as a model for their own statewide standards, he said. “They were ahead of the game. I thought Oregon was kind of leading the way.”
“It used to be, everyone was on their own.”
With a statewide standard, students should be able to leave move from one district to another and be on the same page as the other students, he said. A national standard means a student could leave Arizona for Oregon and be on the same page.
Different districts are in different points of progression as they implement the Common Core Curriculum, Schrader said. Gresham-Barlow has already implemented it in kindergarten through fifth grade.
“Right now in Sweet Home, we’ve met with our leadership team, and we’ve put together a framework,” Schrader said. Next year, having Friday open will really help the teachers, and the first several Fridays are scheduled to provide training and implement Common Core standards into the curriculum.
Next year’s freshmen will take the Smarter Balanced test in their junior year, and they’ll have a second chance their senior year, said High School Assistant Principal Keith Winslow. The current OAKS test allows three chances throughout the year. The new test will allow only one per year, and the students will need to prove competency in essential skills using the test to graduate. It is 250 minutes long, but can be taken in several sessions.
This year’s kindergarten students will be the first ones not to use the OAKS test at all, taking their first Smarter Balance test in the third grade, Schrader said.
While changing curriculum, the district will need to accomodate older students who are working under the current standards, Schrader said. If, for example, seventh-grade lessons move to the fourth grade, there will be gaps for fourth- through sixth-grade students.
“We want to make sure there are no gaps,” Schrader said, and the district will need to build bridges for the students. “Teachers will have to be creative.”
Any time something like this comes up, people sometimes feel overwhelmed, Schrader said, but education is dynamic and always changing.
With the arrival of the Common Core Curriculum, the way is paved for the exit of No Child Left Behind and its Annual Yearly Progress requirements.
NCLB is in a lot of people’s minds a punitive measure that had its place but is long overdue to be removed or rewritten, Schrader said. That’s the sentiment of many lawmakers too.
States are now applying for and receiving waivers from the AYP requirement, Schrader said. Oregon is applying for a waiver too, and President Obama has already signed waivers for 24 states.
While transitioning to Common Core, districts are entering into achievement compacts with Gov. John Kitzhaber, Schrader said. Under the compacts districts must show that students are improving in math and language arts. In the compacts are specific statements about achievement. The compacts are simply promises, a sort of goal statement by the districts, Schrader said.
While not necessarily one adopted by Sweet Home, Schrader said, the statements can be things like reaching an 80-percent graduation rate by 2013 or 80 percent of a grade level meeting or exceeding benchmarks in math.