Several organizations that have led the Common Core State Standards Initiative announced that six states have joined a “collaborative” designed to help them implement the standards.
Arizona, California, New Hampshire, Washington state, West Virginia, and Wyoming will join the Improving Student Learning at Scale Collaborative, according to an announcement last week from the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the two groups that oversaw development of the common core. The National Conference of State Legislatures and the State Higher Education Executive Officers group also joined in the announcement.
All four groups will provide a grant to the states as part of the project, and their staffs will provide technical assistance.
The move is designed to help states share information as they implement the standards, and help align various resources and policies within state governments to make implementation easier.
In addition, the grant and support staff are supposed to help states make better connections between the common core in K-12 and higher education.
The release says that many policy decisions about how best to implement the standards “have yet to be made or are being put in place in an uncoordinated way.”