In March, EdWeek’s Catherine Gewertz ran a long article on the race to develop supporting materials for the new common standards. Now that 36 states (and counting) have adopted the standards, it’s worth revisiting what’s meant by “alignment,” since everyone’s begun claiming that their product or service is “aligned” to the CCSS. That’s exactly why, in Gewertz’s piece, Jack Jennings and Russ Whitehurst advised everyone to exercise caution when encountering the phrase “aligned.”
Today Common Core released its curriculum maps for K-12 ELA. These entirely new maps, drafted by teachers, are based on the common standards. Not merely aligned to them. We did not take a pre-existing document and alter it to claim standards alignment. With encouragement from NGA and support from the Gates Foundation we took the standards along with the recommended exemplar texts and used them as the basis for creating new curriculum maps that we believe teachers today will be excited to use. We even tapped the same expert who worked on the reading standards for the CCSS to create a new pacing guide for the teaching of reading customized to our maps. And of course our maps address every standard (we’ve included grade-by-grade standards checklists to prove it).
We didn’t merely align something with the CCSS. We took our inspiration from the high bar the CCSS set, and tried to create curriculum materials worthy of the new standards. Please look at the maps and tell us if you think we’ve been successful.
James Elias
[...] adopted Common Core State Standards. The next step is to figure out how to teach the standards. Common Core (an independent group) has released curriculum maps for K-12 English Language Arts based on the [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Patrick Riccards, Laura Bornfreund. Laura Bornfreund said: RT @Eduflack: New K-12 ELA curriculum maps more than just aligned to common core standards — http://blog.commoncore.org/2010/08/19/not-merely-aligned/ [...]