Common Core Meets Education Reform: What It All Means for Politics, Policy, and the Future of Schooling
Frederick M. Hess
How can the Common Core complement and not conflict with school improvement efforts already at work across the United States? How can it be seamlessly integrated into accountability systems, teacher preparation and development, charter schools, and educational technology? This timely volume brings together prominent scholars and policy analysts to examine the pressing issues that will mark Common Core implementation. Whether or not you agree with the standards, the Common Core is coming, and this book will help policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders anticipate the challenges and take steps to address them.
Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education
Glenn Beck
Public education is never mentioned in the constitution. Why? Because our founders knew that it was an issue for state and local governments—not the federal one.
It’s not a coincidence that the more the federal government has inserted itself into public education over the years, the worse our kids have fared. Washington dangles millions of dollars in front of states and then tells them what they have to do to get it. It’s backdoor nationalization of education—and it’s leading us to ruin.
Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement
Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, Christopher
Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Reading and Writing Project have helped thousands of educators design their own pathways to the Common Core. Now, with Pathways to the Common Core, they are ready to help you find your way.
Designed for teachers, school leaders, and professional learning communities looking to navigate the gap between their current literacy practices and the ideals of the Common Core, Pathways to the Common Core will help you:
- understand what the standards say, suggest, and what they don’t say;
- recognize the guiding principles that underpin the reading and writing standards;
- identify how the Common Core’s infrastructure supports a spiraling K-12 literacy curriculum; and
- scrutinize the context in which the CCSS were written and are being unrolled.
- In addition to offering an analytical study of the standards, this guide will also help you and your colleagues implement the standards in ways that lift the level of teaching and learning throughout your school. Specifically, it will help you:
- become a more critical consumer of the “standards-based” mandates that are flooding your desk;
- craft instruction that supports students in reading more complex texts, developing higher level comprehension skills, and writing at the ambitious levels of the CCSS;
- develop performance assessments and other tools to propel Common Core reforms; and
- create systems of continuous improvement that are transparent, collegial, and accountable.
Above all, this book will help you interpret the Common Core as a rallying cry that ignites deep, wide and lasting reforms and, most importantly, accelerates student achievement.
Vocabulary for the Common Core
Robert Marzano, Julia Simms
The Common Core State Standards present unique demands on students ability to learn vocabulary and teachers ability to teach it. The authors address these challenges in this resource. Work toward the creation of a successful vocabulary program, guided by both academic and content–area terms taken directly from the mathematics and English language arts standards.
Benefits
- Learn to incorporate CCSS vocabulary into teaching and student learning.
- Recognize the impact that quality vocabulary instruction can make on reading ability, mental process, and academic achievement.
- Understand how students learn vocabulary.
- Make academic and content–area terms from the CCSS relevant to students.
What Is Common Core?
Darcy Pattison
Cutting through the hype from supporters and defenders of the CCSS, this book documents the process for the adoption and implementation of the Common Core, which was developed as the result of politicians and business men deciding to create change in the education community so the U.S. could compete better in the global marketplace.
This insightful critique focus on these issues:
- Is the CCSS a “national curriculum?”
- The CCSS relies on a national student database: the pros and cons of keeping tabs on students.
- Constructivism Mathematics is the basis of Common Core math. What does that mean for instruction, student homework and fluency with multiplication tables.
- New Criticism Literary Analysis is the basis of Common Core ELA. Explore this theory of reading that underlies all language arts activities.
- Explore reasons why the CCSS, a public policy document, is privately copyrighted and can’t be changed, modified, or corrected.