Three years after Wyoming adopted the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and math, schools here are still struggling to teach to the new standards. That’s according to survey results released this week by the Wyoming Department of Education.
Only about 1,000 teachers, 54 principals and 28 curriculum directors responded to the department’s survey. WDE acknowledged the response rate was low, but the information is helpful.
“We hoped to learn about what are the needs out there and if there’s anything that we as the Department can do to support the districts with implementation,” said WDE Chief Policy Officer Brent Young. “And we’re seeing some of that in these responses.”
More than a third of English teachers said students don’t have the background knowledge needed to meet the new standards. All the curriculum directors who responded to the survey gave answers suggesting that professional development for statewide assessments is lacking.
Teachers also indicated they were using a variety of classroom materials to teach to the standards—some from their districts and others developed on their own.
Young says, overall, the survey results show that teachers and administrators are growing more familiar and comfortable with the Common Core standards, but his agency needs to beef up support.
“The goal of the Department and the State Board is really to develop a coherent support—where everything’s tied together, we’ve got goals, everyone’s communicating what the vision is,” Young says. “We’ve got a lot of folks out there doing a lot of work—including the districts themselves. We’re just looking to bring a little coherency and kind of bring that in to a centralized support system.”
The struggle with the new Common Core standards was reflected in this year’s scores on the Proficiency Assessment for Wyoming Students—or PAWS. The standardized tests were first aligned to measure students’ knowledge of the new standards last year. But proficiency rates dropped between 2014 and 2015 across most grades and content areas.
