Education Week - January 23, 2013 - 6

EDUCATION WEEK

JANUARY 23, 2013

www.edweek.org

FOCUS ON: CHARTER SCHOOLS

Charters Prepare
For the Challenges
Of Common Core
By Katie Ash
Charter schools throughout the
country are coping with myriad
challenges in preparing for the
Common Core State Standards,
an effort that could force them to
make adjustments from how they
train their teachers to the types of
curriculum they use to the technology they need to administer
online tests.
Charter schools were designed to
serve as independent entities with
a great deal of autonomy to operate
outside the rules that govern traditional public schools. Yet charters,
as public schools, are also expected
to adhere to the common core, a set
of uniform academic expectations
adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia.
Many of the academic, financial,
and administrative issues charters
face closely mirror those of their
regular public school counterparts,
including concerns about the high
costs of implementing the standards and the challenges of putting
the technological infrastructure in
place for online testing. Charter advocates have complained for years
that they have not received funding comparable to that of regular
public schools, which could pose an
additional burden.
Plus, questions remain about
whether the common-core standards will bolster or hinder the
independence and flexibility that
charters see as their greatest
strengths.

‘A Leg Up’
“I don’t want to attack common
core without more evidence that
it is in fact getting in the way,”
said Nina Rees, the president and
chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter
Schools, based in Washington.
“Common core is the basics you
need to cover, but you can go
above and beyond that.”
Despite the hurdles ahead,
many charter school officials and
advocates say they believe schools
within the sector, because of their
tradition of flexibility, are well-positioned to make the changes necessary to comply with the standards.
“[Common-core standards] made
so much sense to us because we
have always tried to boil things
down to what are the big ideas
that children really need to understand and understand in depth,”
said Catherine C. Whitehouse, the
founder, principal, and chief educator for the Intergenerational School,
a charter in Cleveland that eschews
grade levels for multiage classes.

While the common standards provide expectations for children, charter schools like hers are prepared to
craft curriculum to flesh out those
broad academic guidelines.
“Charter schools have a little bit
of a leg up on [district schools] because we’re very nimble,” she said.
Currently, about 6,000 charter
schools educate 2.3 million students in 42 states and the District
of Columbia.
Stacy Emory, the director of curriculum and resources for the K-8
San Carlos Charter Learning Center outside San Francisco, said that
her school is at an advantage because it has traditionally not used
textbooks for the curriculum, allowing for more curriculum flexibility.
The school employs project-based
learning and multiage classes,
which Ms. Emory said align more
closely with the common standards
than the previous California state
standards because the projectbased approach emphasizes covering fewer topics in greater depth, a
key goal of the common standards.
The San Carlos charter school
is building its own common-core
curriculum. But schools planning
to rely on prepackaged, vendorcreated common-core curricula
should approach the materials
with a critical eye, warned Lindsey
Blackburn, the director of curriculum and assessment for the Ohio
Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
“Every vendor is slapping ‘common core’ on something and trying
to sell it to you, but it doesn’t mean
that it’s been properly aligned,” she
said.
Also, having teachers create their
own curriculum maps—documents
that outline the content and skills
covered in class—rather than
obtaining such maps from other
sources, allows them to get more familiar with the standards, she said.

Sharing Ideas
The standards, which cover English/language arts and mathematics, were finalized in 2010. Two
federally funded state consortia
—
the Partnership for Assessment of
Readiness for College and Careers,
or parcc, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium—
are crafting the computer-based
assessments that schools are
scheduled to roll out in the 2014-15
school year.
Sandra Alberti is the director of
state and district partnerships and
professional development for Student Achievement Partners, a New
York City-based nonprofit founded
by three of the standards’ lead writers that is helping schools imple-

Dustin Franz for Education Week

Schools’ flexibility seen as potential benefit

ment the standards.
Although some charter advocates express concerns that common standards may potentially
crimp their flexibility, Ms. Alberti
said there is a sharp difference
between national standards and a
standardization of curricula across
the country.
“What education will look like
if we really fulfill the promise of
the standards is college and career readiness for all students,”
she said. “We don’t mean that on
[a specific day] all 6th graders will
be doing the same math exercise.”
Ms. Alberti said that the common
core allows more opportunities for
charter schools to showcase their
innovative instructional strategies
and compare their approaches and
performance with charter schools
in other states and regular public
schools around the country.
The national charter school
network kipp, or the Knowledge
Is Power Program, operates 125
charter schools in 20 states and
the District of Columbia, and has
embraced the adoption of common
standards, said the organization’s
spokesman, Steve Mancini.
The network has identified master teachers who share their lesson plans as well as videos of their
teaching with the rest of the teachers in the kipp network to help
them better prepare for the shift to
the common core, said Mr. Mancini.
The kipp schools—which typically serve students in low-income
urban communities—place a heavy
emphasis on both academics and
character education.
Sayuri Stabrowski is an 8th
grade reading teacher at the kipp
Infinity Charter School in New
York City who is gearing up for the
shift to common standards. She
said the new standards encourage
her to look at students’ reading
progress on more of a continuum.
Now, she approaches her 8th graders knowing what they should have
learned in 6th and 7th grades, as
well as what they will be expected
to do in 9th and 10th. That helps
her differentiate instruction more
effectively for each student.
In addition, the common core emphasizes different types of reading,
requiring more integration of nonfiction into the curriculum, Ms. Sta-

browski said. To meet that requirement, she plans to include more
nonfiction reading assignments
to accompany the fictional works,
such as To Kill a Mockingbird.
Some educators, however, are
worried that the common core will
de-emphasize the reading of fiction.
Implementing common core,
analyzing what the standards
mean, and coming up with lesson
plans that address the standards
have fostered greater collaboration
throughout the kipp network, said
Ms. Stabrowski. She uses a website called Better Lesson on which
teachers from any school in the
country can post, share, and download lesson plans for each other,
which has opened the door for feedback from other teachers, she said.
“There are more sets of eyes looking over our work, challenging us,
and also asking questions to help
us rethink for the next unit,” said
Ms. Stabrowski. And the collaboration isn’t just happening within
kipp, she pointed out.
“Because common core is common language, it’s opened up relationships across many schools,” she
said. “We actually get to sit down
with people from district schools
and talk about the exact same
stuff and speak that language together because we’re all changing
together. We all have this challenge
to face, and I feel like it’s unified
teachers a little more.”

‘Heavy Lift’
But when preparing teachers for
the common core, not all charter
schools are created equal, cautioned
Nelson Smith, a senior adviser for
the National Association of Charter
School Authorizers, in Washington.
Charter schools that are part of
large state or national networks,
such as kipp, often have staff to
track the latest developments
around the common core and deliver that information to educators,
he said. But independent charters
may need extra help.
“[Independent charters] really
need some special attention to
make sure they’re aware of the
changes coming down the pike and
getting ready for them,” said Mr.
Smith.
In Arizona, charter and district

Morgan Smith, 6, a student at
the Intergenerational School in
Cleveland, works on an English
assignment. The charter school
is preparing for the commoncore standards.

schools are working together to
provide teacher training, said Justin O’Connell, the quality-schools
training manager for the Phoenixbased Arizona Charter Schools Association, which has been certified
to provide common-core training
to charters and traditional public
schools in the state.
“This is a heavy lift for all schools,
and we’ve got to figure out ways to
make it so that they’re not all trying
to reinvent the wheel,” he said.
The state department of education has been holding workshops on
common-core implementation, and
the Arizona Charter Schools Association provides that service as well.
Despite states’ best efforts, many
charter schools, as well as regular
public schools, are struggling to
finance high-quality professional
development, said Ms. Rees from
the National Alliance for Public
Charter Schools.
Beyond the professional-development challenge, the reality is that
many districts and charters are
not ready for the technological demands of the common core.
Wendy Ranck-Buhr, the principal of the San Diego Cooperative Charter School, which serves
students in grades K-8, says that
although her school is well-positioned to implement the common
core because its curriculum is a
good fit for the standards, she worries about finding the money to
beef up her school’s technology infrastructure in preparation for the
online assessments.
As it is, her school operates in a
district facility with outdated technological infrastructure, she said.
Moving the assessments online
“is a great idea,” she said, “but the
reality of it has me tremendously
worried.”
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.

http://www.edweek.org http://www.ge.com/foundation

Education Week - January 23, 2013

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