Madison superintendent, schools turn focus on Common Core implementation

Georgia O'Keeffe Middle School: Madison schools will be teaching to Common Core standards this year -- with the district's helpBefore becoming the superintendent of Madison schools, Jenifer Cheatham was at the forefront of implementing the Common Core State Standards in Chicago. She needed to help 26 schools upgrade their courses, but the district hadn’t started moving forward with the new benchmarks.

“I had to decide … was I going to work with teachers to start planning instruction around the old Illinois standards, or do we just take the leap and start working with the Common Core?,” said Cheatham. “We decided to take the risk.”

And it paid off. Students in the 26 schools teaching to the Common Core tested well on state standardized exams and Cheatham moved to the district’s central office to become Chief of Instruction.

Cheatham stepped into her current position as Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent on April 1 of this year and developed a multi-year plan to help schools in the district with the Common Core standards.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was developed by the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2009. The standards, which have been adopted in full by 45 states, outline what K-12 students should know at each grade level in math and English. Wisconsin State Superintendent Tony Evers adopted the benchmarks in 2010, to replace the previous ones which only covered grades 4, 8, and 12 and were not deemed “college and career-ready” as the new standards are.

Teachers across the state will be teaching to the Common Core, Madison schools included. Cheatham admits that, as of this summer, the district had not offered much implementation support.

“As a system, we hadn’t done much more than providing the standards themselves for teachers to begin to take a look at on their own,” she said.

Some groups of teachers and administrators have taken the initiative to update curriculum according to Common Core, just as Cheatham did within the Chicago schools.

“We’ve got school teams within schools and some schools in their entirety who’ve really jumped on board and have done their own learning around the standards,” Cheatham said.

Tuyet Cullen, an eighth grade math teacher at Whitehorse Middle School has been working for a year and a half to help align the Connected Mathematics Project -- the basis of math curriculum in Madison middle schools – with the Common Core.

She says she generally likes the standards, though they’re not as revolutionary as some administrators have claimed.

“When it gets down to it, the day to day is not much different,” said Cullen. “Many teachers already do these [requirements], it just gives them definition.”

Students will be tested according to the standards beginning in 2014-15, and test scores are expected to drop for all students. This is one reason the standards have grown controversial over the last several months. Critics have also targeted unforeseen costs as a problem with Common Core.

Cheatham says the district hasn’t spent any extra money on the standards yet, though it may seek grant money in the future. She says schools in the district already have the technology in place to support online testing next year.

Tea party groups and other skeptics have become more vocal this past year, claiming that the Common Core standards are too challenging, not challenging enough, and supported too heavily by the federal government and its funds. Liberals and conservatives have criticized the “one size fits all” approach of the standards and the fact that they weren’t piloted on a small scale before adoption across the country.

The political debate around Common Core, Cheatham thinks, has become a distraction, undermining its value to schools.

“There’s much fewer standards, much clearer, much stronger – as opposed to the previous standards in many states, including the state of Wisconsin,” she said.

Both Cullen and Cheatham acknowledge imperfections in the standards, and Cheatham says teachers have some liberty in adjusting them to student needs in their classrooms.

Cullen hopes for ongoing collaborations to make those needed adjustments in the future implementation of the standards.

“I like the Common Core,” said Cullen, “I just wish we had more conversations [about it].”