Three years ago, in the fall of 2009 and early winter 2010, the Board of Regents launched an educational sea change in New York State. The goal of the Regents Reform Agenda is very straightforward: all students should graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college and careers. One of the key pillars of that agenda is the shift to the Common Core Standards.

As I visit classrooms around the State, I am continually impressed by the work teachers and administrators are doing to implement the Common Core. From an evidence-based conversation about Esperanza Rising in a 5th grade classroom in North Collins to the application of mathematics to engineering in Project Lead the Way classrooms across the State, from a thoughtful discussion in student teams of real-word ratio problems in Pioneer to a close reading and careful analysis of a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Bronx, I am continually encouraged by seeing the Common Core in action. In a few weeks, after three years of work on implementation by teachers and administrators supported by Race to the Top-funded Network Teams, the ever growing collection of resources on EngageNY.org, district and school-level professional development, and the work of Teacher Centers and professional organizations, students in grades 3-8 will for the first time take assessments that reflect the Common Core. Next year, in 2013-14, the Regents exams will also begin to reflect the Common Core.

Of course, any major change initiative comes with anxiety and challenges. Some have even called for delaying the alignment of curriculum, instruction, professional development, classroom feedback, and assessment to the higher standards required for college and career success in the 21st century. But in point of fact, our students are already accountable for the Common Core. They do not have time to wait. Every time a college freshman takes a placement exam that first month on campus, he or she is being tested against the very expectations in the Common Core. Every time a high school graduate faces a daunting task on a challenging job (from the welder applying knowledge of fractions to the electrician reading the National Electrical Code), he or she is being tested against the Common Core. And quite frankly, our students are not doing well enough on those real world tests. Only about 35 percent of our students graduate with the skills and knowledge necessary to be called college- and career-ready. That’s why the Regents moved forward so decisively in 2009. They understand that going slow means denying thousands of students the opportunity to be successful.

So, what do Common Core assessments really mean? Here are five key points – emphasized in a recent field memo from Deputy Commissioner for P-12 Education Slentz – that should help address some frequently asked questions about the transition to the Common Core.

1. In 2013, New York State, for the first time, will be reporting 3rd through 8th grade student grade-level expectations against a trajectory of college- and career-readiness as measured by tests fully reflective of the Common Core. As a result, the number of students who score at or above grade level expectations will likely decrease.
2. As mentioned above, we expect the assessment scores will decline. But we also expect that decline will have little or no impact on principals’ and teachers’ State-provided growth scores. Based on New York’s approach to measuring growth relative to demographically similar students, similar proportions of educators will earn each rating category (Highly Effective, Effective, Developing, and Ineffective) in 2012-13 compared to 2011-12.
3. The number of students meeting or exceeding Common Core grade-level expectations should not be interpreted as a decline in student learning or a decline in educator performance. The results from these new assessments will give educators, parents, policymakers, and the public a more realistic picture of where students are on their path to being well-prepared for the world that awaits them after they graduate from high school.
4. No new districts will be identified as Focus Districts and no new schools will be identified as Priority Schools based on 2012-13 assessment results.
5. Local policies and practices should balance the need for increased rigor against legitimate student expectations for access to educational programs, including local promotion and admission policies.

There’s much more information about the Common Core and the new assessments below and on EngageNY.org. Take a moment to check out what’s posted there.

Again, I understand how stressful change can be, especially when you’re asking students to read more challenging texts, to better support their arguments with evidence drawn from text, to write from sources, to achieve deep conceptual understanding of the most important math concepts of each grade, and to apply their math skills to real-world problems. But we owe it to our students to move forward; opportunity awaits them and it’s our responsibility to make sure they’re equipped to seize that opportunity.

Thank you for your dedication and perseverance over these last three years and now as we continue to move forward to implement the Regents Reform Agenda. Our students, schools, communities, and state are all the better for the work you do every day.

Dr. John B. King, Jr.

I continue to applaud everyone in the District on our efforts to improve our academic performance. As I’ve written many times in the past, I know that our RCS students can do better on our Math and ELA measures, as well as many of our Regents exams. When we look at similar school districts, with students much like our own, they are achieving more. We said this long before all of the new accountability measures came out from the New York State Education Department.

Improving our academic performance is important. Why? So that our students can have an edge over all of the other students in NYS with whom they will compete for college entrance and careers. Isn’t it important to make the most of the time we have with our students? To have high expectations for ourselves and for our students? Simply put, YES. And we’re going to get there.

However, we must remember that academic performance is NOT the full measure of every child. Teachers and parents and administrators and worst of all, STUDENTS, are overly stressed about the results on our local achievement measure, iReady. Listen to me. The common core curriculum in Math and ELA, grades K-8, is MUCH MORE RIGOROUS than our prior NYS Learning Standards. If your child isn’t achieving as well as you’d like, it doesn’t mean your kid is stupid. We cannot allow our students to walk away with that idea. We must be encouraging and say, “Wow! This is harder than what I’ve seen in the past, more than your older sister was expected to do at this grade level. I’m proud of you for trying so hard. It will get easier.”

It will. And we’ll take care of our students in grades 5-8 who are most caught in the middle of a huge shift in expectations for learning. And we’ll weather whatever storm comes next from NYSED, together. Teachers can’t perform if they are terrified they’ll lose their jobs, students can’t do their best if their self confidence is shot, and we cannot become a school that is solely about testing.

It’s up to each of us to keep it all in perspective. Realize we’ll figure it out together, we aren’t going to suddenly fire teachers over test scores. Stop stressing out the students. Why? Because your highest achieving students are freaking out and your lowest achieving students will give up. Neither works.

Continue to create a comfortable, encouraging classroom environment in which you hold our students to high expectations while helping each to thrive. Teach the common core curriculum, utilize your class time to advantage, work hard. Love our students. Sound familiar? That’s because I’ve been saying it all year. Just another reminder that we started this accountability journey as a great school district. We’re just working to be better.

Our daughter is in her third year of teaching–her tenure year–in a neighboring elementary school. For her first two years, she taught fourth grade and this year she’s teaching ELA to fifth and sixth grade students. As I reflect on the almost daily conversations that I have with her about teaching, I’m left thinking about our profession and our expectations for teachers and students.

1. Curriculum

I pieced together my curriculum from the textbooks I found in the classroom and from my college notes, from talking with my colleagues, and from contacting a neighboring school district who I heard had developed a curriculum (which was basically a list of topics and vocabulary), and old Regents exams. She is piecing hers together from the common core guides, EngageNY, the textbook left in the room from the previous teacher, the assessment program on the NYSED approved list that her district purchased, assessment data on her current students, conversations with colleagues and BOCES staff development experts, and the NYS exams.

2. Evaluation

My principal came in and observed me once or twice per year using a simple district created evaluation document. I prepared as I did any other lesson, she observed, she wrote it up and gave it to me. The principal taught the same subject that I did and offered  good suggestions. My daughter spent hours preparing a nine page pre-observation report, discussed it with her principal yesterday, will be observed using the Danielson rubric today, will receive the evaluation and will discuss it with her principal. As it’s her tenure year, I’m guessing this will happen three times this year, I know it will be at least two to meet the ‘multiple’ evaluation rule. She’ll also prepare a portfolio for review and scoring at the end of the year on Domains 1 & 4 of the Danielson rubric–Planning & Preparation and Professional Responsibilities.

3. Accountability

That evaluation was pretty much it for me, along with my interactions with the principal and/or superintendent and my colleagues, and if there was any parent feedback, which I doubt. Now, my kid will have a state growth score based on how much her students grow on the NYS ELA 5th and 6th grade assessments and a score for how many students achieve a 3 or a 4. Those will be combined with her evaluation scores for an overall composite score that will be shared with parents in her District. The quality of her teaching will be judged on this score—and I wonder how much the parents will understand what goes into that score and also important, what doesn’t.

4. Mindset About the Job

I loved my job from day #1, so did she. I worked hard all day, used my preparation periods to their fullest (I had kids at home), and advised everything from the junior/senior classes to the yearbook to the Spanish club with trips abroad. Then I went home and focused on my life outside of school, my family and friends, being a mom. From the contact I’ve maintained with many of those students taught during my ten years at Pine Valley, I know that what they remember most is how I treated them not how well they did on my Regents exam.

Our daughter works hard all day and then never stops. She thinks about/plans for/works on her lessons and her students just about 24/7. Our conversations focus on how to do more for every student, especially those at the top. She obsesses over whether or not she’s doing enough for the little girl who’s at a reading level well beyond her grade level and the little boy who can’t handle the reading level expected by NYS in the common core. Like so many of her colleagues, she tries to maintain joy in her classroom while pushing her students with high expectations. She talks, she asks questions, she worries about so many things that I didn’t have to think about— getting a differentiated curriculum right so that each of her students excels on the NYS assessments, what her school community will think of her if she doesn’t show enough of a gain with every student, and squeezing every inch of learning out of every child–that differentiation is the most important and biggest challenge of our profession. She worries about gaining tenure and preparing her students for the following year, raising her school’s achievement levels for 5th and 6th grade ELA, and if she’ll still have a job at the end of it all.

Are we better as a profession with all of the change? She’s a much better teacher than I was—in part because of who she is and in part because of the demands on her as a teacher in NYS in 2012. But I must honestly say that I sometimes worry that we’ll forget that we are talking about children–who come to us as tiny little people with complicated problems and emotions and needs and dreams–we cannot suck all of the joy out of the school day for the children we serve or for the adults that care for them.

I keep talking to our daughter about balance and perspective and the big, beautiful life that she has–how her life cannot be solely focused on student achievement, SLOs, growth scores, composite scores, curriculum, APPR, and tenure. Not for her and not for her students. And to help keep that balance and perspective and focus on all of the good things in her life–I remind her that there’s always Dubai. Like all of our teachers, she’s got to reconcile herself to “what’s the worst thing that could happen? I don’t get tenure or I land on a teacher improvement plan?” To diffuse the worry I hear in our conversations I now remind her that she can always do something else, she can always get a job teaching in Dubai. 😉

Sound silly? Maybe. But I know how hard she and so many of our best teachers are working and I know that their lives need to be about more than just the work. I’m a bit of an overachiever myself, so I get it. But the thing that keeps me fresh and ready to do my best every day no matter what’s come the day before is my ability to turn off school in my head when I get home. Home is when and where we re-energize, where we clear our minds so that we can bring it all again the next day. Let’s keep that perspective and continue to enjoy our work and our lives outside of school too. We’ll all be better for having done so. I promise.

LET’S GO BOYS! Ready to win some Cardinals Football tonight. Looking forward to seeing our players and coaches do their best in the Section VI Championship! Win or lose, our players know the entire Randolph community loves and supports them, including me. Proud of each and every one of you, as I am all of our athletes.

Let’s GGGGGOOOOO!

With all of the changes in NYS with teacher and principal accountability, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our Intervention Groups in our Elementary School. In an effort to better meet the needs of all of our students, our Admin team determined last year that teachers on grade level should work together with the remedial teachers to form fluid ability groups. What’s it look like? Three grade level teachers work together with one or two remedial teachers to use the iReady diagnostic data to group all of that grade level’s students for intervention time in Math and ELA, by ability. We’ve called it fluid ability grouping because we want to acknowledge that the groups can change as student learning and progress are monitored throughout the year.

That’s the idea we started with last year. How did we get to that?  We identified the problem as “differentiation in our instruction isn’t consistent, it’s very hard to do well, and our results show that we’re not doing enough for our mid to top students”. We talked to teachers, we listened and we made a decision to try to fix the problem—teachers will work together on grade level to analyze data and determine ability groups for Intervention. Teachers will be able to teach with focus to a smaller, similar group. We will be able to better focus on the needs of all of our students. We directed teachers to do this last year and then again this year.

But what really happens when we give a directive like this one? Some teachers listen and take to heart everything that we’ve asked, implementing the “solution”. Some teachers comply with the request, but don’t really make the changes necessary to the instruction to meet the unique needs of the students assigned to them for intervention. And a few may believe more in what they’ve always done than in the initiative being implemented building wide.  Administrators assume what they asked teachers to do is what’s actually happening—with monitoring— BUT it ends up looking differently throughout the building when what we were aiming for is CONSISTENCY  and a way to raise expectations for every child. All teachers are working hard, but in very different ways with varying results.

Here’s what I wish could happen. We identify the same problem—“we aren’t adequately differentiating instruction in our classrooms. Our instruction is largely to the middle of the group, we need higher expectations for all students and we’ve got to do more for our kids at the top.” Teachers work together to determine what works best for their situation, including an analysis of those teaching strategies used last year that got us the greatest student gains. One grade level may determine that they’re going to share the students as indicated in the solution above while another grade level may determine that each teacher can adequately differentiate within the classroom and will do so through targeted centers.  Another grade level may have a blended approach or come up with something completely different that we haven’t even thought of yet.

And most important of all from my perspective? We’re giving iReady as an interim assessment so that we can continually assess our own practices and use data to make informed instructional decisions so let’s not implement anything without constant monitoring and consideration of what’s working best.

With the accountability measures in place this year for every RCS teacher—NYS composite scores—we have to consider what each teacher determines will work best for his or her own students, don’t we? If I’m the classroom teacher and each of my student scores are tied directly to me and my score–I need a BIG SAY in how I’m teaching them for ELA and Math–both regular instruction and in intervention. It’s my responsibility and my composite score that’s on the line. If I have a better idea about what the 20-25 students in my class need and how I can deliver it to them, then I’ve got to speak up and make that happen.  I have to ask questions and suggest solutions—IF I can show a way that will accomplish more for each child.

To excel and be the professionals that we’re expected to be, in the effective to highly effective ranges,   we have to continually analyze and challenge our own thinking. And we have more data than ever before on which to base our instructional decisions—but every teacher has to be self assessing, talking to colleagues, thinking about what works and what works better so that we can all improve, every day.

We’re talking about teacher ownership of the responsibility for the new accountability measures and about equity for students. I’m struggling to balance a district perspective which throws a one size fits all solution at the problem to gain equity for all kids with an individual teacher’s perspective that may or may not own the complexities of teaching to every student. I truly don’t know how to reconcile those two ideas but I’m sure that individualizing the solution by team or teacher after careful consideration while maintaining the minimal expectation of ability grouping is the answer.

Here’s what I’m most bothered by in the current solution. We’re asking teachers to better differentiate and consider the needs of each individual student and then we’re implementing a single plan for all teachers. Shouldn’t we be differentiating the solution for each teacher too? I want to expect more of every teacher just as we’re asking you to expect more of every student. If you’ve got a better way of doing things, we want to hear about it. And it needs to be for all of the RIGHT reasons, not just because you want to do things the way you’ve always done them. Because frankly, we can’t afford to do that with the new accountability measures. And from my perspective, that’s a good thing that should bring about equity for all students. NOTHING is more important in the education of our children than the teacher who stands in that classroom every day. Please bring your thoughtful analysis, an open mind and your best ideas to your data team meetings this month.  And admin team, stay the course with high expectations for every teacher in the district and for yourself. 

When are we going to expect teachers in our colleges and universities to meet higher standards for teaching? As we continue to work to improve education with our PK-12 teachers, we are driven by the goal of college and career readiness. I write this post not to point fingers at my college level colleagues but to provoke some thinking on the topic. Or maybe this post has just been rattling around in my head for so many years that I’ve got to get it out of my head. And I’m generalizing, I know. I’m sure in every university there are exceptions to what I’m about to write.

My son was home Sunday and Monday on a brief mid-semester break from his junior year in a private university. As we had all day to talk yesterday, I had the opportunity to ask him lots of questions about each of his classes. I frequently “interrogate” him, I’m curious and like lots of information. I realize that having this conversation with him is 50% of the story—that each of his professors would have something to say about the experience too. Having said that, and considering the enormous amount of money that we pay to this university every year, including debt that we are both taking on, I would love the chance to have a conversation with the president of his university.

Here are the questions I want to ask her.

1. As a junior on an academic scholarship in the Honors program, who has taken his requisite amount of courses each semester, why is he still wondering when he’ll get to take the marketing courses that will prepare him to be able to actually succeed in a job in marketing?

2. Why are the instructional methods that he describes so removed from our efforts in local high schools? Our teachers are jumping through continual hoops to use innovative methods, teach with 21st century skills so our students can think well, and to meet each child’s individual needs. This is a good thing.  Are college professors using similar instructional methods? Are they asking their students to engage in meaningful discussions? To analyze and to think and to challenge the thinking of others?

3. Communicating well verbally and in writing is a critical skill in virtually every profession. Are you truly teaching students how to communicate for their future careers? Because if they are still reading over-priced textbooks with the unbelievable amount of information available freely on the web and responding to the textbook chapters—you’ve got to step it up a couple of decades. Seriously.

4. For $38,000 per year to attend, I want professors who truly desire to teach, to help our son learn the necessary skills and content needed to get the very best jobs. Not professors who are teaching there because they are using it as a vehicle to study in this country, or to have time to research and publish. That’s not good enough. Teaching is a complicated, critical profession–not something you do so that you can work on what’s really important to you.

5. When I graduated from a similar local, private university in 1985 we all said that we hadn’t really learned anything to help us on the job–that all companies cared about was that we had that piece of paper with the degree listed. With how hard we’re pushing to improve public education K-12 so that our children come to you better prepared to succeed, I expect more from you too.  What are you doing to change and improve and meet the needs of our children? Because now I’m paying for it and I think that means I have a right to ask those questions. You want students who come to you college ready? Well I want a son who graduates career ready when he leaves you.

And the other thing I keep wondering about? We constantly hear about the increased percentage of children who need remedial courses when they get to college. This is definitely a complicated problem, including the NCLB changes in the schools leading most of our students to think college is the only option and then the whole mess of masses of students with college debt from one or two years at a school with no degree.  It’s also complicated by more and more parents stepping in to solve every minor problem for their children when we need parents who say “Problem Solving 101 Kid, go talk to your teacher (or counselor or principal) tomorrow and figure it out”. BUT I keep wondering if a contributing factor is that we are doing so much to engage our students, to offer assistance when needed, to support our students and families that when they get to college, there simply isn’t enough work on the part of many professors to offer better instruction.

This isn’t about one student’s experience. No college kid EVER has loved his university more than my kid loves his. It’s a great school in a million ways. I just wonder what conversations we’re having about the quality of teaching and the learning in higher education.

Bottom line? College professors should be held to similar standards as we’re holding our K-12 teachers to with expectations for better teaching. I’d really like the opportunity to evaluate college professors using Charlotte Danielson’s 2011 Rubric. Please consider holding your teachers to the Danielson standards. That would be interesting.