Despite its incredibly short tenure, the commission found itself at this meeting in an awkward place. Seemingly it had lurched through its first meeting to the point of recognizing that its primary job was to adopt the Common Core Standards and focus energy on adding up to 15 percent additional standards to make the final product recommended to the State Board of Education "California-esque." Work done by the staff--Sue Stickel and her colleagues at the Sacramento County Office of Education--and back channel discussions over the past few weeks indicated that the commission has been headed in this direction.
Indeed, the commission' agenda for the past two days seemed to focus on a taking the important next steps of:
- Confirming the Common Core Standards as the basis for California's academic content standards
- Staff presenting recommendations on an additional standards that fill in gaps (yes, it's subjective) between Common Core and current standards.
- Commissioners moving the ball by closing down on English Language Arts and the focusing the final meeting next week on math.
So how'd they do?
Well, it's possible to see through quite a few twists and turns the progress commissioners made. But it was an interesting ride and distinctly non-linear in that progression.
Commissioner Bill Evers presented a number of recommended additions to the English Language Arts Common Core Standards, thus giving his colleagues two sets of additions to consider (staff also presented additions). Additionally, Evers invited Sandra Stotsky, an influential commentator on academic standards and member of the Massachusetts Board of Education) to provide comments via a phone conference with the commission. Stotsky has criticized the Common Core Standards.
Commissioners were obviously left somewhat dizzy. Any attempt to close out English Language Arts went by the way side as it was apparent that commissioners will need to see a final document that incorporates all of the additions they discussed. Lots of very specific content, very little context, and no time.
And the same thing happened yesterday with math. At the very end of the day, staff presented recommendations for revision. Evers and fellow commissioner Ze'ev Wurman had requested that Professor Jim Milgrim, a key writer on California's standards and a reviewer of the Common Core, present to the commission. Like Stotsky, Milgrim raised a number of concerns about the Common Core Standards. And there the meeting ended, with a fairly obvious sense that next week's focus on math will be crushing in its complexity.
So how could I leave the meeting feeling somewhat optimistic that this is all going in the right direction? Is it possible that the commission and its staff will be able to pull together this seemingly impossible task of voting next week to close down and send off Common Core Standards with a California imprint on them to the State Board of Education?
I think so. Here's why:
1. Commissioners and staff are working from the assumption that their job is to adopt the Common Core Standards for use in California.
2. There seems to be far more agreement than disagreement that maintaining the quality of California's standards efforts is worth both discussion and formal review.
3. The messiness in the process to date is built on putting a lot of information in front of commissioners and trusting them to see their way through that to the promised land.
To get there, commissioners and staff will need to be disciplined and focused next week, especially in the flow of their discussion and action. It will be incumbent on Chair Geeting and staff director Stickel to impose this order.
Tomorrow, we'll look at a few specific issues that will be coming up next week, as well as reflecting on some of the comments from this past meeting that will give a sense of structure to the math debate that's sure to happen.
