Challenges to Common Core State Standards Implementation: Views From Six States

Smith, Joanna; Thier, Michael

doi:10.1177/0192636517712450

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This nationalization of EL accountability policy stands in stark contrast to the decline in overall specificity around general education accountability, beginning with NCLB waivers and concluding with state ESSA plans, which were uniformly approved without much critical review following political pushback (Author, 2019a). It is also notable that in the context where CCSS-aligned national assessment consortia have struggled to maintain stable relationships with states due to political backlash (Smith & Thier, 2017), WIDA's and ELPA21's standards and assessments have remained relatively stable with most states utilizing the same ELP standards and assessments with little concern about if and how reliance on these national consortia undermines local control.…”

Section: The Nationalization Of Elp Assessmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authority over power in English learner accountability policies: Maintaining a national role within a context of local control

Flores

García

Edgerton

2023

EPAA

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Pushback against the perceived federal overreach into educational reform has led to renewed calls for a return to local control of schools. In contrast to this general trend, there has continued to be a strong national role for English learner (EL) accountability policies related to EL identification, monitoring and reclassification processes. In this article, we seek to bring attention to the historical development and contemporary instantiation of these EL accountability policies. The general accountability system has typically focused on coercive strategies connected to rewards and sanctions. In contrast, the EL accountability system has typically focused on harnessing the expertise of research to provide increasingly specific guidelines for how to meet federal mandates related to supporting students officially classified as ELs. This approach may help explain how national actors have been able to maintain an active role in shaping these policies without being perceived as a threat to local control. We conclude with implications for national educational actors interested in using authority to shape other areas of educational policy as well as possible limitations of this approach.

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Section: The Nationalization Of Elp Assessmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authority over power in English learner accountability policies: Maintaining a national role within a context of local control

Flores

García

Edgerton

2023

EPAA

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“…Districts also have varied in terms of the curricula and instructional materials they have made available and the ease with which teachers have been able to access and implement the materials coherently (Gao et al, 2018; Makkonen & Sheffield, 2016; Porter et al, 2014; Smith & Thier, 2017; Swars & Chestnutt, 2016; Timar & Carter, 2017). Providing high-quality science materials has been especially challenging for districts.…”

Section: Review Of Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting Change in Instructional Practices to Meet the Common Core Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards: How Are Different Supports Related to Instructional Change?

Cashdollar

Cassata

2022

AERA Open

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The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards encourage substantial shifts in teaching, but how to enact change is not specified. This mixed-methods exploratory study shows how different implementation supports were related to teachers’ use of standards-aligned instructional practices in the Chicago Public Schools. It provides comparative evidence that professional learning opportunities were strongly related to instructional practices, whereas curriculum and instructional resources had more modest and mixed relationships. In particular, collaboration with colleagues around instruction had consistently positive relationships with instructional practices in math and science, and these relationships were as strong among teachers who perceived many barriers to standards implementation as those who did not. We discuss implications for education leaders as they make decisions about how to best support teachers in standards-aligned math and science instruction.

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“…The issue of capacity is reflected in more recent scholarship as well. Smith and Thier (2017) found that SEA officials felt that they lacked the capacity themselves to take on the increasing number of responsibilities that ESSA allocated to states compared with previous federal requirements—for example, states now have more control over their accountability indicators and their interventions for low performing schools. This observation is reflected in the Rentner, Frizzell, and Kober (2017) study where 31 out of 45 states reported needing to work more collaboratively with districts, or let districts take the lead in supporting school improvement, because SEAs did not have the capacity to take on that workload.…”

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confidence: 99%

How Do States Implement College- and Career-Readiness Standards? A Distributed Leadership Analysis of Standards-Based Reform

Pak

Desimone

2018

Educational Administration Quarterly

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Purpose: Our primary purpose is to examine the implementation of college- and- career- readiness content standards in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas through the lens of distributed leadership theory, and to determine the affordances and challenges of this distributed leadership through the lens of policy attribute theory. Research Methods/Approach: We analyze data from 66 hour-long interviews of state and district administrators across the three states collected from Spring 2016 to Spring 2017. Using a deductive coding approach, we developed themes around distributed leadership as they pertain to the five attributes of policy implementation: specificity, consistency, authority, power, and stability. Findings: Using the distributed leadership and policy attribute theories, we find similar trends in state leaders distributing instructional leadership to regional, district, and organizational leaders to add specificity to the college and career readiness standards at the expense of compromising the consistency and power of the reform. This distribution of leadership is thought to contribute to the authority of the reform, though this authority is made tenuous by the instability of educational policies at the national and state levels. Implications: We highlight the need to examine the implementation of education policy using leadership frameworks and to understand leadership relationships between the state their regional and district partners. We extend the use of the distributed leadership theory beyond the K-16 level and the use of policy attribute theory to showcase where state actors can strengthen their reform initiatives.

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Challenges to Common Core State Standards Implementation: Views From Six States

Cited by 10 publications

References 12 publications

Authority over power in English learner accountability policies: Maintaining a national role within a context of local control

Authority over power in English learner accountability policies: Maintaining a national role within a context of local control

Supporting Change in Instructional Practices to Meet the Common Core Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards: How Are Different Supports Related to Instructional Change?

How Do States Implement College- and Career-Readiness Standards? A Distributed Leadership Analysis of Standards-Based Reform

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