Teachers adding new content to lessons without removing old
Jackie Kerstetter, Director of Communications, C-SAIL
gse-csail@gse.upenn.edu
(814) 440-2299
*Note for TV and radio: The University of Pennsylvania has an on-campus ISDN line and ready access to a satellite uplink facility with live-shot capability.
Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core state standards, while the other remaining eight states are implementing their own new challenging standards for college- and career-readiness. But carefully crafted standards matter little if they do not change how teachers teach. In its latest series of reports, the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) uses new state-representative teacher, principal, and district survey data to understand how college- and career-readiness standards are impacting classroom instruction, what implementation challenges schools face, and which resources educators find most useful in supporting use of the standards.
“Teachers in all states are mostly implementing the content in new standards, but they are also teaching a good deal of content they should not,” says report author Adam Edgerton.
“If we continue along this trajectory, standards reform efforts will fail,” says C-SAIL director Andy Porter.
C-SAIL researchers Laura Desimone (University of Pennsylvania), Adam Edgerton (University of Pennsylvania), and Rui Yang (American Institutes for Research) find that although teachers in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas—three of C-SAIL’s partner states—are adding to their instruction to cover standards-emphasized content, they are unlikely to amend outdated lessons to remove de-emphasized content. They also find that implementation challenges and useful resources reported across states are largely consistent. Among the reports’ key findings:
Changing classroom instruction
Challenges to implementing the standards
Useful Resources
Access the state reports here: Kentucky, Ohio, Texas. To speak with the report authors or C-SAIL director Andy Porter, contact Jackie Kerstetter at gse-csail@gse.upenn.edu or 814-440-2299.
About C-SAIL
The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) examines how college- and career-ready standards are implemented, if they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. Based out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School for education, C-SAIL is led by the school’s former dean Andy Porter, with a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, American Institutes for Research, and Vanderbilt University. The Center is funded through a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.
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