As part of the Knowledge Matters School Tour, StandardsWork / Knowledge Matters Campaign has visited over 20 school districts across the country celebrating the implementation of knowledge-building English language arts curriculum that promotes excellence, provides equitable instruction, and inspires a passion for learning.
The Council of Chief State School Officers supported StandardsWork in bringing the Knowledge Matters School Tour to Delaware and Massachusetts and, in doing so, to “find the good and praise” the efforts of educators in those states that have successfully implemented new high-quality instructional materials. Both campaigns involved capturing and sharing teachers’ enthusiasm for their professional learning journey.
With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, StandardsWork provides key assistance to Curriculum Matters, a professional learning network of school district leaders from across the country who lead the adoption and implementation of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM).
With support from the Tennessee Department of Education and other funders, StandardsWork advanced the goals of the state’s Reading 360 literacy initiatives and statewide adoption of high-quality English language arts curricula by elevating educator voices, in social media and blogs, about transformative experiences with such programs.
StandardsWork receives a second multi-year contract from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education to help states build sustainable standards-based adult education models. The current contract helps to build the capacity of state and local adult education program providers to meet the needs of all students, particularly their growing population of English learners.
The Skillman Foundation supports SW in developing for the Detroit Public Schools Community District a set of K-8 teacher resources, which they will provide to the wider community open source, to aid in the implementation of the newly adopted EL Language Arts curriculum.
The William T. Grant Foundation awards SW a grant to facilitate a community of practice in which educators working with English learners in five public school districts across the country apply strategies learned from some of the most distinguished researchers in English learner literacy.
StandardsWork adopts the Knowledge Matters Campaign which exists to restore wonder and excitement to the classroom by putting history, science, geography, art, music, and more back into the education we give all students, especially those least likely to gain such knowledge outside of school.
For a two-year research project of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense, StandardsWork partners with Lockheed Martin to develop The Mars Game (www.themarsgame.com), an immersive 3D game that teaches math and programming to high school students, especially those who struggle. Five studies, including two RCTs, show boys and girls can be motivated to learn complex concepts while playing well-designed games.
National Endowment for the Humanities commissions SW to provide curriculum advice/counsel, including the development of cross-curricular learning connections for iconic images, as part of the widely-heralded Picturing America project.
Charter networks, including Friendship Public Charter Schools, Boys Latin of Philadelphia, and Community Academy Public Charter Schools engage StandardsWork to develop standards-based curriculum tools and train teachers in their use.
District of Columbia Public Schools engages StandardsWork to lead an overhaul of its academic standards in English language arts, math, science, and social studies, an effort that results in DC's standards – once considered some of the worst in the nation – being rated among the very best. StandardsWork goes on to develop curriculum framework documents, parent guides to the standards, and many other support tools over a three-year period of extensive work with DCPS.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation & Improvement awards StandardsWork a three-year grant to conduct public awareness campaigns in Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland to share school accountability information and encourage more active involvement by parents in their children's education.
The first “Results Card”, a report on multiple measures of student achievement in 10 states, is published. Measures include writing proficiency, college remediation rates, percentage of the state's kindergarteners who attended Prek, higher level course enrollments, chronic student and teacher absenteeism, etc.
A follow up report, “Driving Student Success”, described results for a state policy audience eager to begin implementing the new federal No Child Left Behind law.
HireStandards was launched to provide executive search services to school districts and charter school operators looking for academic leaders capable of driving standards-based reform efforts.
Denis Doyle and Susan Pimentel's “Raising the Standard – An Eight-Step Action Guide for Schools and Communities” is published by StandardsWork, Inc., an offshoot of the America 2000 Coalition that was started by Susan Pimentel and Leslye Arsht to provide support to communities working to develop state and district standards.
The America 2000 Coalition is founded to support the national education goals by linking businesses and social-service organizations to local school reform efforts. Central to the organization's mission was to "find the good and praise it”, a guiding principle of then Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander that was coined by his friend and author, Alex Haley.
By Chrys Dougherty
In her post, “Building the Curriculum Reform Plane While Flying It,” Barbara Davidson made a compelling call for on-the-ground research in schools and districts using high-quality curriculum. Following are some suggested questions to guide this research. Questions about student outcomes. One set of questions might look at student outcomes in schools implementing high-quality curricula across […]
By Barbara Davidson
Because StandardsWork has quite a few eggs in the basket of “better instructional materials will contribute to better instructional outcomes,” I’m of a mixed mind about Morgan Polikoff’s recent article outlining the undeniable difficulties of researching and recommending curriculum when we can’t even inventory the darn stuff across our thousands of local school districts. I […]
Leaders of some of the nation’s largest school districts pledge to redouble efforts to see that our schools use high-quality instructional materials and offer curriculum-specific professional development.
By Chrys Dougherty
Eighteen years ago, the National Research Council released How People Learn, a report describing key findings of cognitive science and their application to human learning. In 2005, the Council followed up with How Students Learn, which provided additional examples of how these findings could be applied to school curriculum and classroom teaching. On the eve […]
*We’ve changed the headline on this blog from how it originally ran to clarify this point: there IS a place for teaching comprehension strategies, but those strategies should not be the tail wagging the dog of reading instruction. Our concern is that when we focus primarily on strategies, which have characterized a great deal of reading instruction in […]
Mike Petrilli documents the journey taken by the KIPP organization to embrace curriculum as a vital reform lever – and knowledge-building curriculum in particular – throughout their network of schools.
Because strategies to boost student retention get short shrift in teacher training, Champion Teacher Doug Lemov’s recent blog and accompanying video on retrieval is novel and welcome. Instead of focusing on how to get information into students’ heads (as do most teacher training materials), he addresses how to get students to pull information out of […]
A recent analysis by the Center for Early Reading at Amplify makes clear once again the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension. As a potential collateral benefit that is all too rare in education, that same background knowledge may also hold the key to doing well on current high stakes English language arts (ELA) […]
A great Newsweek article makes the point, again, that “one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about” (Diane Ravitch, 2009).
A must-read primer (and more!) on “The Curriculum Effect.” Congratulations to Chiefs for Change for laying this out so clearly.
