It’s been a while since we’ve chatted with you about a plan to pilot the common standards in urban school districts. That’s because the plan has been incubating at the American Federation of Teachers and the Council of the Great City Schools.
We’ve mentioned it in passing in our blogs, and AFT President Randi Weingarten has mentioned the plan in an official statement about the release of the standards. But no details have emerged thus far.
Now comes news about which districts are participating in that pilot. At this very-early stage of the game, it seems that Albuquerque, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Paul, Minn., are the players. Figuring this stuff out is thorny, though, so I’m guessing that the shape of the project is very much a work in progress.
UPDATE: I chatted with Jodi Omear and Stephanie Shipton of the National Governors Association (one of the two lead partners in the common standards initiative). They noted with rather a fine point that the urban pilot is “very much in the early stage” of discussion, with no final decisions yet made on the work, the funding, or the sites. Ohhhh-kay!
Also, I really should have noted in my original post on the urban pilot that not every state that includes one of those potential pilot districts is waving the for-sure flag on the common standards. And it would be kind of tough to pilot a set of standards your state hasn’t adopted. As we said: a work in progress.