Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013 - S25

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has not measured up to their promise.
"We end up cherry-picking these discrete little standards
and plopping them into a standard, and I think
that's even worse than what we were doing before," said
Ms. McLaughlin, who is also the associate director of the
Institute for the Study of Exceptional Children and Youth,
based at the university. Teachers have not been given the
time and the training to meet and craft meaningful blueprints
for students, she said.
Nevertheless, the common core offers an opportunity for
positive change, she said.
"At least the common core looks at a set of knowledge
and skills within a grade and age band for kids," Ms.
McLaughlin said. That conversation, she said, has been
"totally missing from standards-based IEPs." The challenge,
she said, is to drill down into a set of standards
and determine which are the critical elements, and then
figure out how to get a child to a point where he or she
can understand those elements.
"Capturing the essence" of the standards is how Bar-
bara Van Haren, the director of special education at a cooperative
educational service agency serving more than
30 districts in southeastern Wisconsin, describes the necessary
work when she provides professional development
to teachers.
But that work is difficult when talking about an 8th
grader, for example, with the academic skills of a much
younger student.
"That's where I have a lot of conversations around
universal design, response to intervention, and building
those core principles, so that we can ensure our students
with disabilities have access to the higher-level skills
that are embedded in the common core," Ms. Van Haren
said.
Refocusing Attention
Kim Mearman, an assistant director at the State Education
Resource Center in Connecticut, said there is "a lot
more attention than I've heard in the past about general
curriculum for students with disabilities. I'm not so convinced
that people were thinking about that as much before."
The center is a nonprofit agency primarily funded by
the state's department of education to provide professional
development to schools and districts.
Connecticut teachers seem to be most concerned about
students who have significant cognitive disabilities, said
Ms. Mearman, who has produced an electronic presentation
on the common core and special education for use by schools
and districts.
Ms. Mearman has tried to get teachers thinking about
the standards in different ways. For example, she said, one
English/language arts standard talks about being able to
cite evidence from text.
"That's also a life skill," Ms. Mearman said. "I need to
know if I need to wear a coat this morning and I need evidence
to make that decision."
She said that "unwrapping" the standards in that way
makes it easier for teachers to see the common-core-aligned
elements in their current instruction.
"Then," she said, "people are better equipped to think
about that concept." n
Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards
and the common assessments is supported in part by a grant from the
GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.
Moving Beyond the Mainstream: Helping Diverse Learners Master the Common Core > www.edweek.org/go/diverse-report | S25
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Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013

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