The Council of Great City Schools has released an excellent report entitled "Implementing the Common Core State Standards in Urban Public Schools." This survey of 36 urban school districts has a ton of great insights about the "state of play" with regards to Common Core implementation.
There are some interesting findings in here:
First, only 58% of districts have developed a written plan to implement the CCSS. With the complexity that good implementation will require and 87% of respondents stating that they plan on implementing by 2014-2015, the need for a plan is going to quickly become a critical one.
Just as interesting are approaches to staff professional development. There is a significant difference between the percentages of respondents stating that their district level staff have sufficient knowledge to discuss the classroom implications of the standards (69%) vs. school level staff (28%). And what kind of PD is taking place? It appears to be most heavily weighted towards general awareness building of the standards as opposed to deeper professional learning around new instructional strategies, etc.
It’s a great snapshot of where CCSS implementation is in our large urban districts. Updates to this report should be interesting.
I’m curious to hear from the teachers and district leaders out there. Is most of the PD in your district focused on general awareness now? Or are you digging deep into instructional practices?
