ARCHIVED INFORMATION Horizontal line

The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education

Meetings to Discuss the Common Core State Standards Public Comment Draft

To:Members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
From:Mitchell D. Chester, Ed. D., Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education
Date:March 12, 2010

line

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) released drafts of the K-12 Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and English Language Arts on March 10, 2010 for a period of public comment that lasts until April 2. During this period CCSSO and NGA will be accepting comments on the survey section of the Common Core State Standards Initiative's website, Common Core State Standards Initiative.

We have sent you copies of the draft standards and have planned two opportunities this month designed to help you evaluate the drafts and inform the Department's comments to the CCSSO/NGA. The Board is not taking any action on the standards this month. They are draft standards for which we have the opportunity to comment.

On March 22, from 3:00 to 6:00, you are invited to discuss these drafts with Massachusetts educators in a meeting that I have asked Jeff Nellhaus to convene here in Malden. We have invited a number of K-12 educators and college faculty to come to the meeting prepared to share their impressions of the draft standards in relation to our existing standards and to answer any questions you may have about them. We will focus on the English language arts draft from 3:00 to 4:30 and then address the mathematics standards from 4:30 to 6:00.

For the benefit of Board members who are not able to attend the meeting on March 22, we will continue discussion of the draft Common Core Standards at our regular meeting on March 23. We have asked the educators to attend this regular Board meeting as well to answer any additional questions members might have. As I outlined for you in the January memo on the Common Core process, we anticipate coming back to the Board for further discussion of the standards this spring after CCSSO and NGA have revised them in response to comments received from the public.