Supporting Effective Implementation of the Common Core State Standards
The Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin and The Aspen Institute
Education and Society Program, in collaboration with Agile Mind, Inc., lead an initiative to
harness the growing momentum and collective power of the districts in the Urban District
Leadership Networks (UDLN) to implement the Common Core State Standards, which are
designed to increase all students’ readiness for college and career.
Our initiative entails the further development and deeper coordination of the Urban Mathematics
Leadership Network, the Urban Literacy Leadership Network, and the Chief Academic Officers
Network, all of which operate under the aegis of the Aspen Urban Superintendents Network.∗
The UDLN includes the current members of these earlier networks.
Effective CCSS implementation will require new approaches to enacting standards and
curriculum and to supporting teacher and leader development. Districts will need analytic tools
for determining the gap between current and desired standards and practices, strategies for
addressing these gaps, new instructional materials aligned to the CCSS, new assessments
(especially those that can directly drive instructional improvement), and strategies to improve
teaching effectiveness and consistency.
Leveraging the UDLN to help districts learn from one another and to explore joint solutions to
commonly held problems and challenges—in particular, those associated with implementation of
the CCSS—offers the promise of creating robust strategies that individual districts could not
develop on their own.
TWO BROAD AREAS OF WORK
1. Build the capacity of a strongly aligned set of urban district leadership networks to
focus on ensuring that all students are college or work ready upon graduation.
Network activities are directly shaped by the pressing need to respond effectively to the
rollout of the CCSS and to the inevitable changes in state and federal accountability and
teacher effectiveness policies. The UDLN convenes network participants to learn about
effective programs and practices, drive the next generation of tool development and
adaptation efforts, and foster dialogue among practitioners, researchers, and policy experts.
∗
UDLN member districts are Baltimore City, Boston, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Chicago, Denver, District of
Columbia, Hillsborough County (Florida), Long Beach, Los Angeles, Memphis, Newark, Pittsburgh, Prince
George’s County (Maryland), Rochester, and Achievement First Public Charter Schools (Connecticut and New
York).
The Aspen Institute and
The Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin
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Spring 2013
The Urban District Leadership Networks
2. Develop or adapt, pilot, and disseminate essential tools (and strategies for their use) to
support implementation of the CCSS.
To ensure coherent CCSS implementation across the district in multiple content areas,
district leaders need a comprehensive set of essential tools to support understanding of the
standards and the standards-aligned assessments. They need, for example, tools and strategies
for studying the new standards and for setting expectations for the standards’ influence on
student work, tools for gap analyses and capacity audits, resources for analyzing instructional
materials, and supports for revising curriculum frameworks.
Similarly, district leaders need strategies for implementing CCSS-aligned curriculum
resources—such as those being developed by the Literacy Design Collaborative, the Shell
Centre, and this project. This UDLN work is co-led by the Dana Center and the Aspen
Institute, designed in close collaboration with district leaders and their leadership teams,
piloted with a limited set of UDLN districts, and then shared across network districts.
To effectively implement the mathematics and ELA/literacy CCSS, districts must have coherent,
consistent, and comprehensive instructional resources that are connected to explicit pedagogical
strategies, aligned with assessments, and supported by high-quality professional development.
To address this need in mathematics, the Dana Center, in collaboration with Agile Mind, Inc.,
has
•
developed and disseminated free, open-access resources designed to demonstrate
implementation of the new standards across high school mathematics courses (see
www.ccsstoolbox.org).
•
developed, produced, disseminated, and iteratively improved low-cost resources for each
day of mathematics instruction, beginning with Algebra I and Geometry.
In literacy, the Aspen Institute has worked with pilot districts to implement resources developed
by the Literacy Design Collaborative (funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
The essential tools are also broadly applicable for districts that are not in the networks. We are
working to identify the best channels for dissemination beyond the networks and to provide
online access to ensure that districts (and states) outside the networks know about and can use
the tools and resources.
The Aspen Institute and
The Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin
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