Where do K-12 policy decisions get made in US states?
August 20, 2014 at 8:18 am 4 comments
As I talked about in my NCWIT Summit Flash talk, the second step in changing a state’s K-12 computing education policy is figuring out where you are and how you move K-12 in your state.
Rick Adrion found a terrific set of resources that help to get a handle on what’s going on in each state.
- How is your state education system governed? Elected or appointed officials? Turns out that there are just a handful of common models: http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/08/70/10870.pdf
- Who decides high school graduation requirements in your state? In some states, like California and Michigan, there’s a minimum decided at the state level, so you really have to work at the district level to get CS to count. Here’s a list of the state-level high school graduation requirements in all 50 states, and here’s a state-by-state map so you can look up easily just your state. Amazingly, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado, and Nebraska have no state-level requirements at all. All the decisions are made at the district level. That makes it really hard to get CS to count.
Resources like these make it more clear why efforts like NGSS and Common Core are in trouble. In quite a few states, most decisions are pushed down to the district level. If states aren’t willing to make decisions for their whole state, how could they even consider requiring national standards?
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: ECEP, public policy.
Computing Education Research Blog 
1.
alanone1 | August 20, 2014 at 9:19 am
“If states aren’t willing to make decisions for their whole state, how could they even consider requiring national standards?”
If countries aren’t willing to make decisions for their whole country, how could they even consider requiring national standards?
????
2.
Yves | August 20, 2014 at 2:34 pm
In California, the power actually resides with the UC / CSU systems, which decide their a-g entrance requirements. Districts do have a lot of power to set graduation requirements, but they communicate the UC / CSU requirements to students and align with them so that their college-bound students are eligible for state schools.
3.
Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) | August 20, 2014 at 7:58 pm
Reading the title of your post the only thing I could think was “anywhere except in K-12 schools.” 😦
4.
Bonnie | August 27, 2014 at 9:52 am
It was done at the state level here in NY, but there has been tremendous pushback by teachers, who are enlisting parents to fight against the standards. The most common reason given is “Common Core is too hard for the kids”. I am not happy because my district’s curriculum improved a lot when they went to Common Core, especially in math.