Forging a State STEM Policy Agenda

Chris Roe: I'd like to turn to our next speaker, we're running a little bit behind the time. The lieutenant governor was extremely generous with his time. We have Sue Burr, she's executive director of the State Board of Education. I know that she has to be downtown fairly shortly for a meeting, but she's going to come up and talk for a few minutes and take a few questions as well. So Sue, I will talk just a little bit about your background because I want folks to know, Sue come to the state board as the new executive director in April. She formerly was the head of CSESA, which I know a number of you in the room are familiar with that organization. She's also worked under the administration of Governor Gray Davis and was codirector of the California State University Institute for Education Reform. So she's had a long history in education policy and in administration, she's a terrific resource for the state. She was able to fill in for Mike Kirst, so we're really pleased if she's here today. Please welcome her at the stage, thank you. Susan Burr: Good morning, everybody. I'm gonna try to get you back on schedule. First I wanna say, though, I had a great fortune of being in Bavaria over the last couple of weeks, and I know their secret, it's beer. So, maybe--we actually went to Munich and we went to Oktoberfest, and man, do those people know how to have a good time--so maybe--and I know this is heresy here at UC Davis, whose emphasis is on wine--but maybe we should shift our work toward beer. Just a thought. So I just wanted to give you a brief update on priorities of the State Board of Education. I will also, I send--bring regrets from State Board President Mike Kirst, who actually is on his way to Germany, see, there is something happening there. He was asked by the Department of State to go to Germany, so he was unable to be here today. There are sort of two major pieces of work that the state board is engaged in right now that I wanted to share with you, that I think it's very pertinent to the work that you are all doing, and you may have heard some of this yesterday. I think when, certainly, when Superintendent Torlakson spoke and I know you had a panel that Lupita Alcala was on as well. So I hope not to be completely redundant but just give you a little finer point. And the other--I actually have two jobs in this new role. We are always trying to consolidate and conserve our resources in California, and I serve as the education policy advisor to the governor. So over the last several days, we've been very busy signing bills and in some cases vetoing bills. And I wanted to give you a little bit of update, especially around legislation that relates to the implementation of the Common Core Standards. And just as a very brief background, you'll recall that California adopted the Common Core Standards in August of 2010. And those Common Core Standards were essentially pulled together by the National Governor's Association, the council of two state school officers. But the thing that I think is important for us to remember in California--and this goes a little bit to Lieutenant Governor Newsome's comments--they were based on California standards, the standards that we adopted back in the late 1990s, we're seeing as really the best standards, among the best standards in the country, ours and Massachusetts. So even though we adopted new standards, I would say, especially in English language arts, the changes are relatively minor. They're changes in emphasis that I'll share briefly with you what those are. And the English language arts especially, there's a focus on expository writing, I'm sure those of you in the room recognize that. There needs to be a lot greater emphasis on analytical writing and on expository writing, and that will be done with the full implementation of the standards. Interestingly, too, there was a choice made, two choices I wanna share, with the adoption of the Common Core Standards that, in prior attempts at standards development, we started at the bottom--What do the little kids need to know?--and worked our way up. With the Common Core Standards, they did exactly the opposite and they said, What will students need to be ready to go to college and be successful and ready to go into careers and be successful? and worked their way back down. That's a very important distinction and especially important when we talk about the new generation of assessments that we'll use with our K-12 students. The English language arts standards, again, just to return to those for a second, also, are interesting and that they feature work in history science and technology, which is a little bit different than what we do right now. So that's an interesting dimension that, again, I think affects all the work here. I also think it's important to know that standards adoption in of itself is kinda meaningless. It's like building the foundation of a house and then forgetting to do the framing and the roofing and all of that. There are many, many things that have to be put in place in order to ensure that our students have better educational experiences in their classrooms, so we need to do curriculum frameworks, we need to do criteria for instruction materials, we need to do new instruction materials adoption, we need to do professional development, we need to have a new test. This is something that will roll out over several years. So in order to accomplish that, I want to mention these three bills that the governor signed last week that will hopefully, again, sort of create that whole house. Assembly Bill 250 by Ms. Brownley will actually restart our curriculum framework and textbook-adoption process, and some of you may know this, because of our terrible state of our budget over the last several years, we essentially froze that process. And so, we can't go forward with instruction materials adoption, we can't devote money to that, which is probably short-sighted but unfortunately that's where we are. With the signature of Assembly Bill 250, that recreates, that restarts that process. So the English language arts curriculum framework will be adopted by May of 2014 and the mathematics framework will be adopted by May of 2013, so that work will begin very quickly with the State Department of Education assembling teams to provide the direction that school districts and county offices will need, with respect to the standards. The other thing I'll say that's kinda interesting, in that legislation, there is language that says, the framework should address issues such as creativity, innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, so trying to inject the kind of creativity and innovation that I know you're all interested in seeing. Senate Bill 140 by Senator Lowenthal from Long Beach will have the state, the Department of Education, and ultimately, the State Board of Education adopt a list of supplemental materials. We call these Bridge Materials because in this intervening time period, where school districts need to have guidance about what materials will help them teach the new standards, this will be very helpful to them and that list will be available by July of 2012. Perhaps, most important to all of you, and I think, you probably heard a little bit about this already, the governor signed SB300, which will require the state to update the science standards, which I'm sure most of you in the room know have not been updated since they were initially adopted in 1998, so they're badly in need of updating. The good news is, I'm sure you're aware, there's a lot of work going on nationally with the Science Teachers Association, the National Research Council, among others, to develop next-generation science standards, these are really the science piece of the Common Core Standards. California is a leading state in that effort. And we expect to have the science standards updated--I'm looking at Phil La Fontaine--by July of 2013. He's lots of work ahead of him at the Department of Education. So we think that's gonna be a real dramatic improvement. The other thing I will mention, and this is kind of the ending point, if you will, once you start standards adoption, it's how do you measure, whether or not students are attaining those standards and that will happen through a new assessment system. California this last fall joined the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, which is one of two national consortia that are funded by the federal government to measure, to put together new-generation assessments to measure the Common Core Standards. We're very excited about this, this new assessment system. We think it has a lot of promise, it will be all online, which will be very different. It's an adaptive test model, some of you may be familiar with that. We have many adaptive tests now that are used, the graduate record exam, the law, LSAT exam as well some of those. We think that's especially promising for the diverse student population that we have in California. And so, and we also think that, with the plan under the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, is to have much richer assessment items. So for example, performance assessments, constructed response, things that we don't currently have under a straight, you know, fill-in-the bubble kind of test. So, we think that this will be a great improvement. And that new test is supposed to be online in 2014, '15. So you'll see there's lots of things that will be happening over the next several years to try to ensure that there's an effective implementation of the Common Core. And two things I'll mention briefly, that are in the works but we need to do more work on them. You may know that California has a very robust set of career technical education standards that were adopted a couple of years ago. And we've just began, I think, sort of scratching the surface about how will we ensure that our Common Core Standards are aligned with, that our career technical education standards are aligned with the Common Core. Because if we truly are gonna try to prepare students to either be college ready or career ready, ideally both, we have to make sure that those career technical standards are interwoven with the Common Core. And then, the last thing is, our relationship with higher education. You know, we have kinds of fits and starts, I was pleased to hear Leslie's question because I've seen a lot of work that's been done in San Bernardino County, and trying to make sure that K-12 is aligned all the way through higher education, many other counties are doing that as well. But now, and again, with a new set of K-12 standards, we have to make sure that we're working very closely with the California Education Roundtable to ensure that those K-12 standards are also extended in a way that's meaningful, into higher education, and that assessments are aligned, particularly, as it relates to students who are preparing to go into the university system. So those are the two pieces that we're still working on but we're certainly aware of them. Just in terms, it occurred to me, just the irony here of being at a technology conference and we're not using the technology at all, so I apologize for that. But if you're interested in materials on the implementation of the Common Core Standards, there is a wealth of materials on the Department of Education's website, they've done a fantastic job. And if you look at the State Board's website, we've been having conversations at each one of our meetings, beginning last July and we'll continue to through next year at a minimum, I'm sure we'll do it beyond that. But we expect that there will be a full implementation plan for the Common Core Standards brought to the State Board in January, so stay tuned for that. All those materials are up there for you to look at. That was really fast, I'm trying to get--I'm happy to answer any questions that people might have about what's going on with the State Board or any of the legislation that the governor recently acted on with respect to education. Questions. Debby. Debra Mustain: The issue around the detail of--of your thinking in terms of where we need to go. I think everyone-- Burr: Okay, I'm not sure people heard the question but it was about Senate Bill 547 by Senator Steinberg, which was a bill that would have created the education-quality index, which is basically three additional indices added to the API for the purposes of rating schools, and the governor vetoed the bill, we had lots of conversations with Senator Steinberg. I think fundamentally, there are sort of two things if you read the governor's veto message in it, it's on his website is that, although we think the API probably does need to be improved, that given all of the other work that I just described in terms of the, especially, I think, the demands that are gonna be placed on school districts, to run implementation of Common Core, professional development, etcetera, we should all wait and see how that goes. We should also wait and see how these new assessments turn out, because if the new assessments are as whizbang as we think they're going to be, they will yield results that measure college inquiry readiness. So we may not need to have separate indices. I think the second thing that fundamentally, from the governor's perspective, is that, it make sense for us to have a state measurement and a state accountability system, but there also has to be rigorous work at the local level, for people to understand the quality of their schools. He gave an example of, perhaps, local panels. I will just give an example of the school accountability report card. I think most of you know, the school accountability report card was put in place when Proposition 98 was passed, and you could argue that it's got way too much information in it because we keep adding to it. But every piece of information that was otherwise gonna go in the EQI, is in the accountability report card. And at least from my perspective, and I had these conversations with Senator Steinberg, I don't think it's fair for school districts to say, Oh by the way, you have to continue to do all of that and then we're gonna ask you to do it over here, and we're gonna add it up into a number and we're gonna find yet another way to label you. So, more to come on what happens with the accountability system, but I think fundamentally--and I encourage you to read the governor's veto message on that because I think it does really reflect his--he wrote it. He writes veto messages himself, so it really does reflect his feelings about them. Yes. Audience member: You were talking about the education--early next year. What do you--when would it start? Burr: It's actually right now, in reality, that, at a minimum, the out year will be 2014 or 2015, because that's when we expect the assessments to be given for the first time for real. So essentially, what we'll be doing in cooperation with the Department of Education is kind of backtracking from 2014 to 2015, what needs to be online. You can plug in some of these dates that I already mentioned, here's where we'll have, a new framework for math, here's where we'll have, a new framework for English language and arts, this is when the science standards will be developed. So conceptually, if you look at what's already on our website or the department's website, you'll see a lot of work in progress, but this kinda puts meat on the bones in terms of what the deadlines will be and what schools can expect. I know that many districts have already, you know, they've started to look carefully at the Common Core. I know the county offices have provided a lot of information about what's in the Common Core, crosswalks between our current standards and the new ones. And I think some districts are, you know, already implementing. But when the rubber meets the road, you know, is when we actually measure what we expect students to know. Audience member: [inaudible] Burr: So, the question is, what's the view about CALPADS, the student database, and CAL TIDES. I appreciate you asking that because we actually convened the group with the help of Public Policy Institute of California last Friday, really to look at what data currently exist. And I'll just say, we don't lack for data in the state. Boy we have got, we have lots of data. So I think there's--the perspective is that CALPADS, which is almost fully implemented, every student has a unique student identifier. School districts are uploading information, that's both demographic, if you will, and is of use to the Department of Education for purposes of federal reporting. I think--I'd asked school district folks who were in the office to say the usefulness of it at the local level, and that's not a knock on CALPADS, I think, CALPADS was intended for something other than helpful instructional decision making at the local level. So, we are examining what the next step needs to be, I think it's also important to note that CALPADS does collect teacher data. Every teacher has his or her own unique identifier, that's also reported through CALPADS, and they continue to do a match between teacher assignment and the subject matter in which they were trained. So, I think, we're continuing to examine it, what needs to be done going forward, or is it a case, is there really a need to do any additional linking, is there a need to do additional expansion, or do we need to much more carefully look at what we already have? There's a very robust data system that the California Postsecondary Education Commission maintains for all of the segments which will continue to be maintained through an interagency agreement. So lots of questions around it, but again, I came away from that saying, It's not for lack of data, I think it's for lack of understanding, what's out there and how to use it and make sure that people know it's there. But I think, I will say from the governor's perspective, again, there is a distinction between what we need to do at the state, for purposes of collecting and reporting, versus what kind of information is available at the local level that guides decisions around good instruction. Audience member: Every time I hear a conversation about--for standards at science maybe, we get this little focus--and I know that the science teacher. Burr: Yeah, and so I agree with you and that's why we recommended and got a signature on SB300. I think the pieces that still need to be put in place, science was not as a discipline put into the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortia or the other consortia, which is known by an acronym PARCC. So that has to happen, I think, for it to be fully integrated and then be counted in the accountability system and all of that, so we certainly won't lose sight with that, I appreciate you're letting us know. Other questions? Okay, thanks so much for having me.