“I can be nothing but optimistic for the chances of kids in this city,” Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, told me last week as we discussed the new three-year academic plan D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson is expected to roll out this month. I called Casserly after having breakfast with Henderson at Ted’s Bulletin. She and I had talked about a bunch of things, including the event some have called the “Academy Awards for teachers” being held Monday at the Kennedy Center. But what captured my imagination, making me deliriously excited, was our conversation about “common core” curricula development and implementation in which she and others in DCPS have been involved. If all goes well, it will revolutionize classroom instruction while equalizing the quality of education.
The “common core” initiative was launched in 2009 by the National Governors Association, Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. It requires national academic standards in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12 to be “research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked” and “aligned with college and work expectations.”
There wasn’t a specific road map to that destination, however.
Last year, Henderson was scouting for curricula that would align with the standards. She spoke with David Coleman, who helped write the “common core.” It turns out he and his crew were looking for a school system with which they could collaborate to write companion curricula. The two teams have been working together since November, creating an academic plan that could serve as a national model. DCPS teachers also spent two weeks in the summer going through intensive training to ensure mastery of the plan.
“The District is not only ahead of many cities, but the quality of the work was really quite good,” said Casserly, whose organization conducted an independent review of the plan. “We were impressed.”
In this first year, the focus is on literacy. Next year it’s math. The final year deals with writing.
“The big push in literacy is reading primary source materials and complex text,” explained Henderson. The movement is away from “an overreliance on textbooks, while helping students deconstruct what’s happening in the source materials.
“It’s a significant shift,” she said.
“Kaya’s doing a super job of revamping and reinvigorating the instructional side of the house. It’s the real meat and potatoes of why and how kids learn,” said Casserly. “It’s the hard stuff.”
Henderson said that, for some folks, “This is all inside baseball.”
Parents will understand this: Every DCPS child will be taught the same section of the plan at the same time. “It gives us the ability to equalize, to ensure kids in Ward 8 are getting the same content and same level of rigor as kids in Ward 3,” Henderson said.
There’s much more work to do. But, said Henderson, “I think the staff, students and families will have a dramatically better year in D.C. Public Schools.”
Jonetta Rose Barras’ column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
