Education Week (4/22) runs a package of articles titled “Vision Meets Reality: Common Core in Action,” with the articles exploring how the Common Core Standards have impacted education policy and practice in the US over the past four years. The focus of the package is how the standards’ original conception has “bumped up against reality” as educators work to implement them.
A Scripps Howard News Service (4/3, Kambhampats) article gives a primer into the origins of and the controversy surrounding the Common Core Standards. The piece touches on how classroom instruction is different under the standards, the role of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in creating them, and how they were a response to concerns “that a large number of high school graduates need remedial college help.” The piece notes that President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “signaled to states that they should embrace these standards or similar if they hoped to win a grant through the Race to the Top program in 2009.” The piece explores states’ adoption and implementation of the standards and describes the growing backlash and controversy surrounding them.
USA Today (10/23, Atteberry) reports that the preliminary results of a study into the effects of “flipping” classrooms show little if any improvement to education. Flipping classrooms is a popular concept wherein students watch teacher lectures outside of class and devote class time to “real world” problems. Four professors from Harvey Mudd College found “no statistical difference” between student outcomes in traditional and flipped classrooms in a pilot study. The professors recently received funding for a much larger three-year study into the same concept and caution that their final results may be different from the pilot test.