He promised that new assessments would measure how students “analyze and solve complex problems, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings.” And Duncan’s speech blurred the line between the common state standards initiative and the 21st century skills agenda: “[M]any so-called experts questioned whether states could work together to set rigorous, globally competitive standards or collaborate to develop assessments of 21st century skills. But resolute governors, state education chiefs, and committed stakeholders across the country have proved the skeptics dead-wrong. Your collective courage today will transform educational opportunity for decades to come.”

The Secretary didn’t elaborate on what assessments of 21st century skills might look like, so allow us to offer you a preview: “For example, one possible assessment of 21st century skills would focus more on a student’s operational skills, such as her expertise in using multiple sources appropriately and efficiently, rather than on whether or not a correct response was submitted.” (Emphasis added; see full document here.)

Answering a question correctly: not a 21st century skill.

James Elias

Instead ETS has produced a predictable info dump on every topic that is believed to be related to student achievement except for what children are taught.  These topics are familiar:  poverty, fatherlessness, nutrition, technology access, etc.  You can finish the list.

Is it possible that ETS and the many other parties interested in finding a solution to the gap have been looking in the wrong places all along?  And that a look into the content of what black and white (and poor and wealthy) children are being taught may be an area worthy of research?  If there is a difference in the content of what children of different races and levels of wealth are being taught in America, isn’t that not only important information for investigators, but a real cause for concern among parents and others?  Wouldn’t such a difference, fundamentally, represent what is meant when we talk about a child being left behind?

At Common Core we’re confident that every student will succeed if they are provided with a rigorous, content-rich curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences. Yes, it would be marvelous if every student lived in a wealthy, two-parent family, ate three square meals each day, and had his own computer.  But the fact that a student may not have an ideal home life does not negate his ability learn.

Lynne Munson and Skye Frontier

Lynne Munson

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

Guernsey explains that American schools essentially ignore student development and achievement until after third grade despite the regular appearance of books and studies stressing the importance of a student’s earliest years (birth to age 8). Guernsey’s radical proposal is to “give all American children – especially those in poor circumstances — exposure to language-rich and cognitively stimulating environments in their earliest years.” Yes: give all students a content-rich education beginning in kindergarten. That’d be a good start.

James Elias

The New America Foundation’s Lisa Guernsey has surveyed the latest research on learning and early childhood development for the Washington Post and concluded that “American public education is out of whack.” This has been true for quite a while, but Guernsey’s piece outlines just how little has been done to address the problem.

Broad, indeed. The NRC’s insistence on vague, big-picture thinking about science has created a document that is practically useless. To provide a “broad description” of science knowledge, the writers identify core ideas so general (e.g., “What is energy?”) that it’s possible to imagine any quality of standards, curriculum, and assessments (everything from excellent and clear to shoddy and vague) spinning off of this framework.  When it comes down to it, the NRC document’s just a list of stuff.  And maybe not all of the most important stuff, either.  We’ve caught wind of concern among some of the nation’s most prominent scientists that sections of the framework are not current with the latest science.  And by “latest” we mean knowledge that has already been around for a hundred years or more. 

So broad and full of holes. We hope NRC’s next draft is better.

Lynne Munson and James Elias 

Take a close look at Weingarten’s section on curriculum. She begins by actually naming the subjects that make up a comprehensive education: “All students need rich, well-rounded curricula that ground them in areas ranging from foreign languages to phys ed, civics to the sciences, history to health, as well as literature, mathematics and the arts,” but Weingarten also points out that solid, liberal arts curricula “aren’t routinely in place” and that teachers are “forced to [make up curriculum] every single day.”

That doesn’t make sense and it isn’t what high-performing nations do. Weingarten suggests that America take a good look at countries – she names Finland, but there are many others – that outperform us on international assessments. None have narrow, ad-hoc curricula. All have strong, coherent, comprehensive liberal arts curricula. Maybe America should dare to try something that works?

James Elias

Robert Atkinson, the head of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, has published a piece in the Huffington Post lamenting the incompetence of recent college graduates he’s hired over the years. He’s frustrated that America’s top schools can’t mint “graduates who can write basic sentences and do basic math.” Atkinson’s job applicants were unable to perform basic tasks on a short do-at-home test emailed to the applicants before they are selected for an interview. Atkinson says that ”[t]he questions are pretty simple: “Go to this person’s bio online and write a three or four -sentence version of their bio for us to include in a conference packet,” or, “Enter these eight items in a spreadsheet and tell us the average for the ones that end in an odd number.””

According to Atkinson, these grads can’t perform these tasks because colleges teach content rather than skills, and Atkinson believes that “for most college graduates and for most jobs (one exception being science and engineering jobs), it really doesn’t matter if they learn English literature or 20th century comic books. What does matter is if they acquire needed skills. And this kind of 21st century skill acquisition is at best something they pick up by chance in the course of learning about French literature or 20th century American politics. The result is that too many graduates have grown in knowledge on various subjects but not developed practical skills.”

Ignore, for a minute, that students actually don’t know all that much basic stuff. (This lack of knowledge is what Don Hirsch has called “the most significant deficit in most American students’ education.”) Look at the sample tasks from Atkinson’s test: Writing three or four sentences about something. Calculating the average of a few numbers. Don’t you think students should be able to do these things long before they arrive for orientation? (Hint: Many of them can’t.) But is it really a good use of time to have college professors diagramming sentences and demonstrating long division? If, as Atkinson puts it, “the American K-12 system is a failure,” is the best solution turning seminar rooms into fourth grade classrooms?

Atkinson thinks that’s part of the answer. He wants “a national test that all college grads should take to measure skills competency. This wouldn’t measure whether you know that Adolph Hitler was Chancellor of Germany or other “facts,” but rather skills like logic, reasoning, basic writing and math, etc.” There are already a couple of tests that try to do this. And the no-stakes NAEP assessment (the gold standard for ed testing) of reading ability for 12th graders shows that “students who leave school at the end of our K-12 education cannot read, learn, or communicate very well…because the schools are not effectively imparting the knowledge that the effective use of standard language depends on.” So Atkinson’s suggestion that students would learn skills if only we didn’t spend so much time on knowledge-building just doesn’t make sense because skill proficiency is contingent on domain knowledge.

The second component of Atkinson’s fix is a national survey of employers to find out what kind of skills they’re looking for. This is necessary because “most college students don’t even know the types of skills that are valued by the industries they want to work in. For example, do managers in accounting firms prefer young workers who can quickly and accurately proofread a spreadsheet or give a persuasive power point presentation?” Well, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills already does this kind of survey. Atkinson just wants one done by somebody else (the U.S. Department of Education). Atkinson’s survey would include questions on which schools produced the best employees (a very objective metric), and he believes that “doing so would help parents and prospective college students make decisions on which school is best for them.” There you have it: College is for learning how to write memos. Not all that other stuff. I’m glad I got out before the humanities were really and truly dead.

James Elias