The Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley New Teacher Project--under the aegis of the New Teacher Center--devised a program to train teacher mentors to help new teachers incorporate the Common Core standards into their teaching. The three-year program yielded five critical lessons: Mentors need ongoing support to develop their readiness and willingness to…

Researchers at the Center for the Study of Curriculum at Michigan State University have developed a tool to help teachers implement the Common Core State Standards in mathematics by letting standards, not textbooks, guide their instruction. Using the web-based Textbook Navigator/Journal, teachers can pick a standard and ask which portions of the…

People dislike the Common Core for several different reasons, and so it is important to disaggregate the sources of opposition and to assess and then to dispel some of the myths that have built up around it. It also is important to understand the unusual political alliances that have emerged in opposition to Common Core implementation and how they…

Nearly all states have standards for student learning and they have assessment programs to measure students' proficiency on those standards. But schools within each state nonetheless are left to develop their own standards-based student report cards as the primary means of communicating information about students' performance. To address the…

To no one's surprise, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has become a political football in this election season. Amidst the heated rhetoric and impassioned claims, it can be easy to forget that NCLB is no one thing but rather an awkward compendium of many disparate pieces. While public officials are pressed to render absolute judgments--that…

Summarizes responses from directors of early childhood education in all 50 states to a survey asking for information about their kindergarten and prekindergartern programs and about future prospects for expanding early childhood education. (Author/MLF)