In June of 2014, the NEMA Education Professional Affinity Group presented a full-day workshop entitled “Create/Adapt: Common Core for Museums.” The workshop quickly sold out and because of the high level of interest, Elisabeth Nevins and Janey Seney, co-chairs of the PAG, were asked to condense the day into a session for that year’s NEMA Conference. Sara Egan, the School Partnership Manager for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and I were invited to revise our workshop presentation as part of the conference session. That our room was full again is a testament to the importance of the Federal Common Core State Standards to the practice of museum educators.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were released in 2010, and states began implementation as early as 2011. According to the Common Core website, by June of 2014, 43 states, the Department of Defense Education Activity, Washington D.C., Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands had adopted the CCSS in ELA/literacy and math. That number includes all six of the New England states.

As a museum educator, I find the programmatic possibilities embedded in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts very exciting.  Naomi Coquillon, Manager, Youth and Teacher Programs in the Department of Education and Interpretation at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), best expresses why in a post on the American Alliance of Museums Future of Museums blog:

“Common Core Standards emphasize the use of original sources, close examination of text and other materials, and exploration of multiple perspectives.  They encourage student-centered, inquiry-based learning in which students formulate and articulate independent responses to prompts. This focus on informational literacy skills and argumentation is central to the work of historians, who read a variety of texts across various media, and compare conflicting accounts in order to create an argument about the past.”

Historic New England has offered school and youth programs for the past 30 years, growing from one program based at the Otis House Museum in Boston, which served 300 people, to over 60 programs based out of 13 properties throughout New England which collectively served just under 50,000 young people in 2014. During that time, our staff has seen various education trends, standards and curriculum, and standardized tests come and go.

Some programs have weathered the storm with minor changes, including that first one, Unknown Hands: Everyday Life of Bostonians in 1800. Designed as a program for students in eighth grade, it is now a better match for fifth grade students and we have adjusted our materials accordingly. Thirty years on, it remains popular and relevant, with about 2000 students, primarily from the Metro-Boston area, participating in it each year.

For other programs, the road has been bumpier. Some have been retired altogether, while others have just barely survived. One of the latter is The Case of the Empty House, a program at the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which was developed in conjunction with area teachers (as all of our programs are) and introduced in 1987. The program places emphasis on critical thinking skills. Students must investigate various types of primary sources - documents, photographs, artifacts, and spaces - to create hypotheses about the lives of the Codman family. As the pendulum shifted in schools from process to content, the program fizzled out. The time period of the house and the stories of its inhabitants did not fit into the curriculum and years at a time would go by with no participants.

However, every 4 years the program was revived for the Framingham Public School Schools’ gifted and talented program, which serves students in grades two through five and where the emphasis has always been on creative and critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, in 2014 the high cost of buses and other factors made it impossible for the students to come to the property for the program. Kim Nadell, the Historic New England Education Program Coordinator for Otis House and the Codman Estate, was determined to hold on to the program. She created an outreach version that she brought to each of the eight Framingham elementary schools. Reflecting on the success of the program, one teacher said, “The students were really able to put into practice many of the thinking behaviors for powerful learning that are part of the foundation of the gifted and talented program pull-out classes. The lesson objectives fit well with the Common Core State Standards, and required students to use the higher level thinking skills of analyzing and evaluating. By collaborating with partners, they were challenged yet again to listen to others and accept other points of view.”

In another example, in 2010, before the Maine State Learning Results were amended to incorporate the Common Core, I worked with the seventh grade English Language Arts teacher at Wiscasset Middle School, Linda Cailler, to adapt a historic fiction writing program in use at one of our other properties for Castle Tucker, an 1807 house a short walk from the school. We knew that the many fascinating Tucker family stories would draw the students in and spark their imaginations during their short story writing unit.

We did not change the program at all when Maine adopted the Common Core. I asked Linda last spring, just before she retired, if she thought there were any adaptations we should make. She responded, “I don't think anything needs changing with the adoption of the CCSS.  The project fits in well with the narrative writing standard - to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured series of events.  If anything, it strengthens the teaching of the narrative standard because it provides authentic details for the students to weave into their stories.  Of course, it also fits the standards relating to the writing process and English conventions.”

The Common Core State Standards reflects the pendulum swinging back to an emphasis on critical thinking skills including observation and analysis. This gives new life to programs like Case of the Empty House and allows for additional school program possibilities at sites whose time period and/or history do not fit easily into the social studies curriculum requirements.

Of course, we are not working in a vacuum, and no discussion of the merits of the Common Core can ignore the overwhelming negative publicity around the standards, their implementation, and the impact of the new standardized tests created to measure student progress and, in some cases, evaluate teacher performance.

Some of the criticisms can be dismissed as political posturing, but others are quite valid. For example, the National Association for the Education of Young Children issued a white paper in 2012 titled “Caution and Opportunity for Young Students.”  In April 2015, they issued an updated paper, “Developmentally Appropriate Practice and the Common Core State Standards: Framing the Issues,”  which reiterates the earlier paper’s stance that while the standards themselves have merit, it is important that educators and administrators understand that the Common Core covers only English-Language Arts and Mathematics, but that the curriculum must include more than just those two subjects.

The largest and most visible controversy surrounding the Common Core State Standards are the tests. Currently, there are two consortia of states, each with a different test. In New England, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are using the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, while Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont are part of the Smarter Balanced test consortium. A quick Google search shows similar negative publicity around each test, and on May 18, 2015 the Maine Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee approved a bill to withdraw from Smarter Balanced, and that bill will now be considered by the full Legislature.

Massachusetts has yet to fully commit to the PARCC tests. In the 2014-2015 school year, school districts could choose between administering PARCC or sticking with the existing MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) exams. Just over half (54%) chose PARCC. In the fall of 2015 the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will decide whether to formally adopt PARCC. Students in grades three through eight take the tests, as do students in at least one grade of high school. This year, testing took place within two time periods, one in early spring and one in late spring, and students each spent about 10 hours total on the tests.

Setting aside issues of student stress, the availability of required technology for these computerized tests, the pressure on teachers to adequately prepare students, and a host of other issues, time spent preparing for and administering tests is time that cannot be spent on field trips to museums. Combined with the unusually high number of snow days throughout New England in February and March of 2015, it became even more difficult for teachers to arrange days out of the classroom. Over one two week period in February, Kate Hooper, the Education Program Coordinator for Historic New England’s Pierce House in Dorchester and Quincy House in Quincy, rescheduled 24 different programs, cramming most of them into the same off weeks for testing, while testing weeks remained wide open.

In May, the PARCC board voted to both shorten the total amount of time students spend testing by about 90 minutes, and to change the schedule, so that instead of taking the tests once in early spring and once in late spring, there is one testing window towards the end of the school year. Hopefully, this will give teachers more flexibility.

The Common Core, and the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, may not be here to stay. The pendulum will continue to swing. As museum educators, I believe it is our job to stay up to date with trends in classroom learning in order to provide the highest quality programming. We must maintain our existing relationships with schools and do our best to create new relationships. We must be conversant in the Common Core State Standards and know how our existing programs can help teachers achieve the goals of the CCSS.

However, I would also urge caution. As I mentioned in the introduction, our initial workshop was titled “Create/Adapt” and I very firmly come down on the side of adapting. Whatever type of museum we are, if our programs inspire students to use their brains and hearts, we can find connections to their school curriculum, whichever way the pendulum is swinging.