Common Core in the Districts: An Early Look at Early Implementers
How is implementation of the Common Core State Standards going? This report, by Education First and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, explores four early implementer school districts to examine how educators are putting higher standards into practice. The study looked at district, school, and classroom levels of implementation and discovered several key findings. Based on the in-depth study of the four school districts, the authors make implementation recommendations that include the following: allow teachers to have a hand in developing materials they’ll use in the classrooms; beware of recycling old materials when they don’t share fundamental precepts of the Common Core; and take a serious look at the quality of implementation efforts.
This report was built on the “assumption that states that have adopted the Common Core want to implement it well.” The content of this study does a good job of examining selected districts that are viewed as making positive progress in implementing new CCSS. By indentifying “early implementing districts that have moved quickly on rolling out the standards and … have lessons to share with the field,” the report highlights important practices that could be utilized by other districts as well. This is a very lengthy report, but its design allows a reader the choice of quickly identifying findings and practices or conducting a more extended review of the detailed findings and practices of the four districts profiled. The report ends with a methodology section that articulates the process for the selection of the profiled districts and the approaches used for gathering data and reporting findings.