The Council of the Great City Schools has just unveiled a new website on the Common Core State Standards that is designed specifically to help urban districts more easily communicate the changes that will be afoot both for teachers and for students under the new academic expectations.
To help districts explain these very complicated shifts to non-English-speaking parents, the council has produced a three-minute video in Spanish that describes the common-core standards and what parents should expect.
The Council’s common-core website has a section on English-learners and features a video of the recent panel discussion at the College Board that focused on ELL students’ rights to rigorous academic programs and content.
In addition to parent guides in English and Spanish that are already in circulation in the urban districts the council represents, the council will soon have them available in other widely spoken languages, including Korean, Russian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Mandarin. Educating parents on the new standards, especially those of English-learners, is a huge and important undertaking, as reported recently by my colleague Sean Cavanagh.