SKILLFUL TEACHING | THE MISSING ELEMENT IN SCHOOL REFORM
p The Common Core curriculum standards brought a spotlight onto critical thinking, deep understanding, and students’ capacity to articulate their thinking and support their positions with evidence. This focus has, un- fortunately, been sidetracked by erroneous assumptions that the standards are a national curriculum. Common Core standards are not a curriculum; they are competency targets to shoot for. They originated from the gover- nors of 50 states, not the U.S. Department of Education. The Council of Chief State School Officers decided to contract with experts to write them; there was no federal participation at all. These erroneous assumptions were compounded by fear that the tests derived from the standards would be harder than the current ones states use, because they require more thinking and writing. Thus state scores would go down.
p The enactment of ESSA has given us a breather from the testing mania still abroad in the land, but it has done nothing about the central issue—creat- ing the required conditions to support a highly skilled teaching profession based on sophisticated expertise and deep collaboration.
Although these programs have had some positive effects, they have not led to enough progress in raising the quality of our schools overall because none of them systematically or consistently addressed the most important variable in student achievement: skillful teaching. The valuable work of the last two decades on other aspects of school improvement has not been in vain or off target. It was necessary but insufficient. We needed standards. We needed accountability and a focus on results for students. We needed data systems to track student learn- ing at a fine grain. But these hallmark reforms of the 1990s and 2000s have still not budged student achievement significantly because we left off the third leg of the stool in school reform—standards and accountability for the expertise of our teacher corps in the complex knowledge and skill of good teaching.