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The new standards were designed to be "fewer, clearer and higher," says David Coleman, co-founder of Student Achievement Partners, the nonprofit that helped develop the new standards, and they are precisely that, generally speaking. (You can read them at corestandards.org. For example, on average, states used to require first-graders to learn 13 different math skills, according to veteran education researcher William Schmidt, which meant teachers did not have time to go into all of them in depth (and sometimes skipped some altogether). The Common Core requires that first-graders learn just eight skills. At the same time, the new standards are higher--more rigorous, according to a 2010 study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute--than the existing state standards in 39 states and about the same as those in the remaining states.
They are also as high as any found in the top education systems in the world, from Finland to Japan. The ratcheting up of math expectations is vital, given that Americans rank 26th in the world on a math test given to representative samples of 15-year-olds in 70 countries (a far worse ranking than in reading). Even the country's richest teenagers perform 18th in the world in math compared with their privileged peers worldwide.
In English class, instead of writing about how a story made them feel, high school students will analyze whether an author's evidence and reasoning make the text more convincing. In addition to literature, they will also grapple with more nonfiction texts, since that is an area of weakness for American students compared with their international peers.
But writing lofty standards is much easier than making them work. To make the standards matter, teachers need time and high-quality training, two of the scarcest resources in American schools.
How Kentucky Responded
In August 2010, Kentucky schools rolled out the Common Core standards in math and English. "It was pretty much a nightmare," says Peggy Preston, a veteran math teacher in Louisville. Overnight, the Pythagorean theorem went from a 10th-grade lesson to an eighth-grade lesson. Instead of just identifying the first-person point of view, middle-school students suddenly had to be able to explain why an author chose to use it and how that decision influenced the text. "We were overwhelmed and frustrated," says Kate Grindon, an English teacher at Meyzeek Middle School. Many teachers were also afraid the new standards were too high. "There were a lot of people in the room who said, 'Our kids can't do this.'"
What happened next depended in large part on the principal and superintendent of a given school. In the places with the strongest leaders, teachers got time to study and discuss the new standards with one another, brainstorming how they could reinvent their lessons for the higher expectations. Kentucky's education commissioner, Terry Holliday, enlisted teachers to help at every step in the process, explaining the new standards to parents and designing test questions--a model he advises other state chiefs to follow. "Teachers are your best voice in the community," Holliday says.