Sandra Stotsky

The Massachusetts Legislature should require the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to reinstate passage of the U.S. history MCAS exam as a high school graduation requirement and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education should provide teachers in grades 6-10 with examples of specific texts that could be assigned to prepare students to read a seminal historical text such as Federalist #10 in grade 11 or 12, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

State and local education policy makers in the 46 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards should emphasize the literary-historical content that already exists in the standards and add an additional literature-based standard to address Common Core’s lack of literary content.

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/04/23/why-states-should-hop-off-the-national-standards-bandwagon/ When “states signed on to common core standards, they did not realize…that they were transferring control of the school curriculum to the federal government,” said Sandra Stotsky, 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education...

http://educationnext.org/the-battle-over-common-core-math-standards-will-a-larger-federal-role-help-or-hinder-curriculum-improvement/ CAMBRIDGE, MA – More than 40 states have now agreed to adopt the Common Core standards in English Language Arts and math.  In a forum released today on the website, www.educationnext.org, former U.S. Department of Education official Ze’ev Wurman and Johns...

Essay Review of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland by Pasi Sahlberg (NY: Teachers College Press, 2011) Author(s): Sandra Stotsky — Publication date: 2012-03-05 Category: Education Abstract: About four decades ago, Finland introduced major reforms to...

First-Class State Standards Are Better than Third-Class National Standards Author(s): Ze’ev Wurman and Sandra Stotsky — Publication date: 2010-02-23 Category: Education Abstract: The case for national standards rests on more than the need to equalize academic expectations for all students by remedying...