 Good afternoon everyone, this is Dr. Bill Fisher with the School of Information at San Jose State University and I'm here to moderate our colloquium session today. Our speaker is Dr. Mary Ann Harlan who's a lecturer with the School of Information at San Jose and her topic today will be the Common Core in Introduction for Libraries. Dr. Harlan has an MLIS from San Jose State that she received in 1999 and has an extensive background working in middle school and high school libraries. In 2008, she joined the first cohort of the San Jose Queensland University of Technology PhD Gateway program and received her PhD in 2012 being, I believe she was the third person to get her PhD through the program. So let me welcome Dr. Harlan and turn things over to her. Thank you, Dr. Fisher and yes, I was the third person to receive my PhD. So let me get to my starting slide. Here we go, Common Core and what it might mean. So what my plan is today is to just do a really brief introduction to Common Core State Standards. I know that there's been a lot of information around them but I want to sort of maybe just do in the overview, give you a little bit about the history and the development. I'm going to introduce them through the English Language Arts Standards and talk about some of the shifts and the differences in what it means for instruction and specifically around text shifts and then I'm hoping to talk a little bit about what the impacts might be on libraries, particularly public and academic libraries because most of this is very general so I expect school librarians will have a lot of this information already. And it wouldn't, it's not possible to talk about the Common Core without discussing some of the politics and controversy around it because generally the news information that is out there is mostly about the politics and the controversy. So I felt as if it was necessary to at least address some of those particular areas of concern around Common Core and I probably will reference it a little bit throughout but I will go into it in detail at the end. So let me just to give you a little bit of a background about the Common Core. In 2008, David Coleman and Jason Zimba penned an essay for the Carnegie Foundation about state standards and it had grown out of work from the no child left behind data because no child left behind required these summative high state tests at the end of each school year which were generally standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests. And they were determining that what those tests were telling them from the standards is that it told you a lot about what a child might know but not a lot about how they were learning. And certainly not, it had some limitations in trying to understand what students could apply beyond of their knowledge. So they wrote this essay that called for fewer and clearer standards that were focused on work skills that were focused on informational text, real-world learning and less rote memorization which is where Nickel B had somewhat taken us through the way that the law was being implemented. At the same time, the Council of Chief State School Officers which is an organization of people who are state superintendents of schools or public school officers of each state and the National Governors Association were sort of thinking about the same types of questions. You know, what does this really tell us about what students are learning? And they read the Carnegie essay and contacted Coleman and they began developing the common core standards in 2009. Much of this was funded by the Gates Foundation. They're not the only funders but a tremendous amount of it has been funded by Gates and this is important because this is part of the conversation around the politics and controversy of it. And so the actual writing of the standards and the way the standards were developed was funded by Gates and then this implementation piece is also being funded pretty heavily by the Gates Foundation as well. There were some goals that were attached to the common core standards. The one would be that they were the same standards that were adopted nationally. That they emphasize process and skills rather than specific content knowledge, although content is still included. And that they help students develop critical thinking skills and student learning opportunities. And in education we tend to say that this is a guide on the side model versus a sage on the stage which is what I'm doing right now, right, lecturing to you. So, and they were also emphasizing non-scripted curriculum. This is key because this is one of also one of the components of complaint around what's happening with common core in regards to scripted versus non-scripted curriculum. Nick will be for students that were struggling often put curriculum in front of the teachers that said in order to teach the standard, this is how you teach it, this is what you say, this is how long you take, this is what the students do and then you move on to the next thing. And so teachers weren't necessarily developing their own curriculum. And common core was hoping to do away with that. So these were these like kind of lofty goals that were attached to the common core standards. Sorry, tried to PowerPoint it. So, broadly and quickly common core was adopted. Right now it's 43 states. That's actually down a little bit because it was this intense, amazing, speedy adoption and many states adopted common core and some states adopted it and ran with it. A good example of that would be the state of New York which adopted, implemented and tested within two years whereas California has been a little slower. Last year they piloted the tests. They're sort of moving slowly into actually doing the sort of assessment that they rounded and doing the rollout of common core. There are some states, those are those little yellow states that have an adopted common core. Texas, Virginia and Alaska have been very, very clear that they're not interested. And because of the size of Texas, that is somewhat significant to the conversation as well. So that's the way, this is what it looks like right now and this map is evolving and it's probably going more yellow than green these days. But it is basically where we're at in terms of what states are doing it. So you will see that there is somewhat of a national movement attached to what's happening around common core adoption. So I mentioned I'm going to focus on the English language arts standards and I'm going to do that rather than the math standards because there's a component and addition in the ELI standards that reaches out to other subject areas but this is where the types of things that we are interested in, libraries where our role in common core sort of plays out. It's much more so in English language arts than in math because of the reading and the research components of the ELI standards. So they're actually broken up into four areas, reading, writing, speaking and listening and language and then additionally reading is broken down even further and this is significant because of some conversation around this between literature and informational texts and then they have foundational skills, which are the types of reading skills that translate between literary analysis and informational texts. Additionally and this is new compared to what Nickelby did, they have literacy and history and social studies, science and technical subjects and writing. So they've added these sort of, I'm sorry, writing is actually part of the science and technical subject and history and social studies. So they've added these areas in. One of the things that had occurred under Nickelby was a focus on reading and writing and a focus on math and what you lost was especially in elementary schools, you lost things in science, you lost history curriculum and so this is brought back in and it acknowledges that there's literacy skills that take place in those subject areas and that everybody in the school is responsible for those particular things. So it's just helpful to see the way the standards are laid out. You've got the four areas but you also have a second subsection of standards which is in literacy and history and social studies, science and technical subjects. So some of you may have seen there's a thing called, there's six shifts from Achieve the Core but really what the Common Core Group does on the corestandards.org site is to acknowledge three shifts. They are regular practice with complex text and in context academic language. And I'll talk a little bit about what a complex text is in just a minute. But they're also reading and writing and speaking needs to be grounded in evidence from those texts, both literary and informational. So a return to the text when you're writing or speaking in order to emphasize a point or to make an argument and that we build knowledge through content-rich nonfiction. And so there's a real shift movement into nonfiction and informational text and I think that's probably what libraries have heard the most about. And so you can see those three shifts if you visit thecorestandards.org. I wanted to bring out an observation that I've made which is that compared to previous standards I would suggest the Common Core emphasizes learning from diverse sources in an active manner much more so than previously. One of the things that were written into the Common Core is that we're not teaching teachers or we're not telling teachers how to teach and that we want students to be active learners and that they are not to learn specifically just from the teacher but from a variety of different texts. Now how this is being implemented is of concern and of question but it should be noted that in the actual document themselves this is what they're emphasizing, is this learning from diverse sources in an active manner. So I want to talk a little bit about text shifts. I've read the first round, first draft of the Common Core standards in early 2010 and I was a little disturbed because there was a real emphasis on text and it didn't acknowledge media in any other way, shapes or form. And I made that comment in public discussion and apparently I was not the only one because one of the things that the Common Core standards has managed to do is to acknowledge and include the idea of a non-print text. It actually writes in visual literacy and media literacy and to the actual standards themselves. It still feels like an overlay rather than a really rich way of working with those texts but it is there. It also emphasizes real world complex text. So there's a difference between a considerate text and the best example of that is a textbook and a complex text. So a considerate text is the type of informational text that you open and it has headings and it has subheadings and often times unknown words are in bold because you know you're going to be able to find them in the glossary and their, the definition is when it's first introduced is right within the text of the statement. Almost always the thesis statement of a paragraph is the first statement that you see and it's very straightforward. That is a considerate text. Almost all text, almost all textbooks are considerate text. In fact, that's the perfect example of what a considerate text is. A complex text is the type of text that we use in real world. My personal example because I have such a hard time trying to decipher it is a tax code but there's different other types of complex text, policy briefs, argument papers. A good example of one of the complex texts that you can use that is a speech. That's a nonprint text would be the Obama race speech in the 2008 election. That's a complex text or even Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is a much more familiar sort of thing. So the idea is that you use these types of texts in order to teach history or to teach rhetoric or even to teach science. So if you're teaching science or you're using a peer reviewed article, which even though it's considerate has some complexity to it, right? And then there's an emphasis on informational text. And early on in the Common Core this received a lot of focus. What it is is that it recommends that by the time kids are in upper elementary school, fifth and sixth grade, that they're reading 50-50, 50 fiction, 50% fiction, 50% nonfiction. And that by the time they reach high school in secondary levels, they're reading 80% informational text and 20% fiction text. What should be noted about this is that that's 80% of the reading that they do in school in Toto, not just in their English class. So even though we see these as English language art standards, when they talk about reading 80% of their of the text in school, 80% of that should come from social studies, science, English, art, even math, all of those types of different areas. So those are the informational text that you see. So it's not 80% of your English curriculum now becomes informational text. It's 80% of the overall curriculum. And I think that's an important note because otherwise it all falls on the English teacher which isn't fair. So this is this emphasis on informational text and getting teachers to move away from just relying solely on the textbook. So one of the things that the Common Core does is they have anchor standards. And they have anchor standards in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. And I'm really just going to focus on reading and writing. And each of these anchor standards have like substandards below them. Each of these anchor standards have substandards below them. So they've gone undergone a task analysis that says that in order to actually meet these anchor standards, you have to do this. And they're what's called spirals. So they build upon each other from K to 12. But I want to talk about what those anchor standards are and relationship to what it means to us in the library. So for ELA literacy, reading standard one, read closely to determine what the text says to explicitly and make logical inferences from it. Site textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions is very much what we do when we write a research paper as a student. We read closely to determine what the text says. We make some decisions about how that fits within our research project. And we cite that specific textual evidence. So for school librarians that are teaching, this particular standard is very much embedded in our information literacy standards. And so as students, school librarians have an opportunity to sort of contribute to this and they see themselves as a space within common core, the standards, not implementation. They see themselves in space with common core. But I think you'll see that this will helpfully help in the academic world in terms of articulation as students move outside of the school and into college, which is the idea. And academic librarians will see them more prepared. But also you might see some impact in the public libraries as well. So you can see there's some other standards I'm not going to address them. I wanted to pull out the ones that I thought were most significant. In craft and structure, assess how a point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text if we're talking information literacy. This is the evaluation of information, identifying bias and how that might impact the text. I also want to point out this idea of content and style of the text. So we talked a little bit about using complex real world texts. So a point of view might shape the way you present a graphic novel, for example. Is it or we're even looking at things that are, is it first person or third person? Even this will impact the text. And so as you're working with students or who are standing in front of you, you may have this opportunity to talk about these types of things. The third section is integration of knowledge and ideas. And all of this, by the way, is also going to show up in writing you're going to see. So this idea that we integrate and evaluate content and diverse media, I mentioned that there's this at least acknowledgment of other media and formats. And the delineate and evaluated argument and specific claims in a text is very much tied to research projects, as students are working on research projects. And then down at the bottom, it's a little hard to see. So let me just bring it out really quick. There's this range of reading and level of text complexity. So read and comprehend complex literary and informational text independently and proficiently. So there's this key piece down here where public libraries are really going to live because they provide independent reading often. So that's a key component for you guys right down there and the range of reading and level of text complexity. So you have these four separate areas and these 10 anchor standards and they can be broken down into little pieces. It looks the exact same thing in writing, right? So we have the text types and purposes. So this idea that there's different genres of writing that we engage in. One thing that the Cotton Core does maybe to a fault is focus on the idea of writing an argument. So this idea that everything is an argument. And so everything that they do is focused on that. But that's really good for libraries who are interested in the ethical use of information and using information to understand. So writing text that use valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. And if you're going to use relevant sufficient evidence, you need to cite it. That you write text that are through effective selection, organization, and analysis of content. So this is about how we organize our writing and present it to others, right? So you can see in terms of the text types and purposes that it really relies heavily on this idea of argument which is very closely tied to research papers as kids write them. Production and distribution of writing. And this is one of the places where it's really interesting because there's some challenges and some interesting opportunities here that probably to this point have been somewhat ignored. Which is this use of technology to produce and publish writing and interact and collaborate with others. One of the things that this does is it allows us to open up our world so that it's not just happening in the school. So that public libraries, if they're participating in any type of connected learning activities that are helping kids who use technology to produce and publish, then they're participating in common core standards themselves. And then academic libraries, the same thing. So it's one of those places where on the sun you've opened up the space. Now this might be a little risk-colored glasses for me. I know that there's people who would be really critical of that idea. But it's definitely exists. And additionally, one of the things that's sort of in that task analysis that's not clear there is the idea of how we do that ethically while protecting our privacy. I'm producing our identity online. Something that librarians think about quite a bit in terms of privacy protection. So I think this is a really key and really interesting standard that is often overlooked or ignored. Not many people are talking about this because they're so focused on how to teach writing. And but it's certainly a place where libraries can engage within the types of the common core activities. So there's the production and distribution of writing. The next one is all us. And this is something that you're going to see really clearly at the academic library level is that hopefully if we are good at teaching our students at the K-12 levels, it'll make it easier for you. You won't have to start all over at the very beginning. But one of the things that they do in the anchor standards is this short and more sustained research projects. And so there's a focus on doing research in common core that didn't exist in the other standards. And so it's very much there. It's a very front and center. It obviously anybody who has any ideas working with anybody doing research, you know you understand that there is a lot of tasks involved in this. And that if you look closely at the ACRL standards that you will see that there are a ton of things that actually are required if you're going to do a short or sustained research project with focus questions, blah, blah, blah. Gathering relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assessing the credibility and accuracy, and integrating the information while voiding plagiarism. That's what we do in academic libraries when we teach information literacy. Certainly what we do in school libraries, if we're lucky enough to have a school librarian who's teaching information literacy. So it's very much where libraries live. And then drawing evidence from literary informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. This is pretty much all the same thing. These can all be broken down in certain ways that these all relate back in to information literacy, to the accessing, the evaluation, the use, and the creation of information. And then finally, you have the range of writing, which is they're looking for you to write over an extended time frame or for a shorter time frame for different tasks and purposes and audiences. So what does this mean for public libraries? And I've mentioned this a little bit throughout, but specifically let's get down to brass tacks. What is it really going to mean if you're a public librarian in a state where Common Core is being implemented? There's going to be some collection and curriculum needs that may shift for your public library, specifically depending on how your community, what type of school library support you have in your community. So you always should have a collaborative partnership with your school. Not everybody does, but it's a good practice to have a collaborative partnership with your school in order to help them with this, because you might be finding that they need help around some of these topics and areas. The emphasis on nonfiction, my guess is, and you're starting to hear from some public librarians, this is happening, that their summer reading list is now has more nonfiction on it, especially narrative nonfiction on it when the kids show up and say I need to read a book before school. The list will see, you will see more nonfiction. You may receive requests to have more nonfiction on your, on the types of reading lists that you might put together for summer reading lists. You will probably no longer, I mean, you will still have the parent that's standing in front of you telling you that they need an accelerated reader book for their students or for their kid, but there might be, you might now see people coming in and saying, I need a nonfiction book for a book report for my class, so in times of thinking about that around collection and curriculum needs, you might see a shift in terms of the nonfiction. I suspect you should also see an uptick in the usage of your databases, both by students and potentially by teachers. You know, if you really want to form a great partnership with your school, teaching teachers how to use the databases because it's really difficult to find complex texts or common core, so that's one of those places. I'm also, public librarians are great at modeling reading skills, right? They do this all the time with story, story time. So when you're reading to a group of student, young ones from their parents, a lot of times you're modeling for their parents, but you're reading to little kids, you're like oh, what do you think is going to happen next? This is modeling prediction or you'll say now what just happened? That's modeling like a summary and so you will still be doing that, but you might find yourself needing to model evidence and I just mean by that, like where do you see on this picture that this is happening and having kids point on the picture if you're doing a picture book? Those types of modeling where you're looking for the evidence in the text and getting kids embedded in this idea of where the evidence is in the text that you're reading in the terms of story time modeling and it's going to take practice to make that natural, but I suspect that's where it's going to happen. You're also going to need technology support and there's one of the big problems with Common Core is an assumption that youth are digital natives and not because they're digital natives they know how to do things online and there's that's a huge assumption and it's a false one and it's based on a myth that is problematic. So the youth that are coming in are going to need help searching databases and effectively searching the web especially if you're working in an area where there is no school support for this, for no school library and support for this because teachers have struggled, a lot of teachers struggle with this as well, so especially the older teachers who didn't go through college using databases. So this is going to be one of those places where public libraries may find themselves. It's not your job to teach the kids really, that's not the purpose of the public library but you may find yourself filling in in those types of places and then I want to point out this is one of the concerns around Common Core is that the assessment piece of this is on a computer, it's online, which means kids need to know how to navigate online and for some kids the public library is the place where they learn how to do that. They don't have computers at home, they certainly don't have internet access at home so just even filling some mouth sometimes is very difficult for them and so this is one of those places where public libraries may find themselves contributing to the development of Common Core skills. In terms of the academics, I think the academic library may find it's going to take a generation of students in other words to say it's going to take 6 to 10 years before you start seeing students that come into this, into your libraries who are well-prepared but hopefully you will see students that are coming in to your libraries that are well-prepared and you can see in the red where I sort of pointed out some things. The ACRL are adopting new standards and they are adopting threshold concepts are part of this and so I just pulled out the threshold concepts and so this idea that scholarship as a conversation remember that we are emphasizing in Common Core multiple sources and the integration of those sources and so what we're talking about here is that recognizing that people have different contributions to an idea and that that's what happens in these sources and scholarship. This idea that authority is constructed and contextual again there's an emphasis on evaluating the argument particularly around validity and how point of view and purpose will shape the text right. This is around the idea of what is authority and how do we construct it and how is it contextualized format is process right that how we select and organize and put together a text impacts the format but also the process of doing that helps us learn. So you can see how the Common Core standards fit within these first three threshold concepts. Sorry, I lost the term there, threshold concepts and to continue one of the threshold concepts is that information has value and this is where these ideas of citing your sources and specifically around evidence and avoiding plagiarism points to the idea that information does have value that it is worth something and that we need to actively engage in the use of information. So interestingly enough with ACRL I think and with college and research libraries and academic librarians I'm hoping optimistically that what you'll see are students coming in that are more prepared to use your libraries. Maybe not the nuts and bolts of it but the actual ways that the library is being used. I would hope that that's going to happen. You also may think about ways that you can help at the secondary level teachers start to understand how students might be able to use the academic library more effectively based on what they're doing. So how can I teach teachers? Again, not really your role, right? And I know you're all very, very busy but these are things that might actually help you in the long run. But certainly Common Core allows us to have a focus on these types of ideas of information having value and scholarship as conversation. These types of things are embedded in Common Core as it's written. So I keep pointing out as it's written because there's a difference between writing something and implementing something and implementation has been of concern. But I want to address some of the controversies because I've painted a very rosy picture and a very positive picture of Common Core and at its core and the standards, I've painted that picture because I believe in it but I do understand that there are some real concerns and I want to address those because I think it's necessary and I think it's helpful to get context for the actual, for the standards themselves. So the first is that the development of the standards was not transparent enough and lacked practicing teachers. And I would suggest that that's likely true. I was well aware of the development of the Common Core standards and I know that they were open to public comment because like I said, I commented on them. But the architects, quote-unquote architects of Common Core, David Coleman being one of them, have never actually been practicing teachers at any level, not just K-12 but at the top as well. And so, and that's true of some of the CC, of the state school officers as well. So there is a concern around that element of that. But I will say they were open to public comment. They did take public comment and they certainly changed from that. The next of it is the money. There's a cynical position that this is a moneymaker. Certainly, there's people who are concerned about the Billionaire Boys Club money that comes into this from Bill Gates. Anthony Cody is very critical of this if you're interested in following up on that. And certainly, we all have reason to be concerned about Pearson's role because Pearson stands to make a great deal of money out of the testing and the implementation piece of it because they're designing one piece of the test and they're certainly designing a lot of the curriculum that goes along with it. And so, it's questionable. Pearson is a publishing company. It's questionable what their role is and why they exist. So it's one of the places where the controversy really exists, which is where the money is coming from to implement this. Furthermore, there's a lot of concern about federal interference. When you look at this at a state-by-state level, there are a number of states who feel, and you may have heard this, that these are standards that the feds are forcing us to implement and that it interferes with the local control of school. Actually, you don't have to implement the standards, but what the federal government did is they tied federal monies, which almost all states rely on, to race to the top funding. They tied that to the adoption of common core standards and included in the assessment piece that goes along with common core standards and how we assess teachers as well. So it gets very tied up. And there are the governor of California and the Arnie Duncan from the Department of Ed that had a little set to last year about the way we were doing assessment, and they threatened to withhold money from California. We eventually got it released. Oklahoma right now is facing that because the federal government has decided that their standards are not rigorous enough after they are talking about getting rid of common core standards. So there is some serious concern. You will find in states that have Republican governors and Republican legislatures that they are constantly attacking the common core standards for being a federal overreach. And it's not that the feds have said you have to do this. It's that they've said if you don't do this, we're not funding you. In terms of the implementation, one of the biggest concerns is that these were not piloted. I can paint a rosy picture of these standards, but we don't know anything yet. They were widely wholesale adopted and implemented without us really understanding what it was going to look like, how it was going to work, what types of infrastructures that we were going to need to have in place. And this is probably a legitimate concern about it. Diane Ravich, who is an educational historian, is the most vocal about the fact that these have been implemented without being piloted. Early childhood literacy educators have been very clear that at the K3 level, these are developmentally inappropriate standards. They've written, there's an open letter from a number of them that it's, these are not research based. They're developmentally inappropriate for the younger K3 students, and it's probably true. Certainly they're asking a lot, and so there's concerns around the K3 level of this in early childhood literacy. I did point out with the story time that there's ways you can start to model the ideas embedded in Common Core, but it's difficult, and we need to think about what that means for the littles. And then even though Common Core explicitly states we're not teaching teachers how to teach, because of this assumption that teaching reading and writing is easy, there are some teachers who feel over their heads. So teaching reading and writing is really, really hard, but because we all read and we all write, we think that teaching it is easy, and preparing teachers to teach Common Core at the elementary and then also in regards to subject areas, history, and science is a large undertaking. It's going to be very difficult, and it's based on this assumption that it's easy to do it, because we all do it, and it's a really false assumption. And what's happened, what's come out of that is we're seeing scripted curriculum where it's being handed over to the teacher. Here's what you teach, here's the standard, here's how you teach it, here's what you say, here's what the student does, here's how you grade it, and here's the timeframe that it's supposed to happen on, and it's making, it's upsetting, but it's not what it's supposed to be, it's just what's happening. And so this is one of those concerns that in some districts you're seeing a lot of scripted curriculum and in other districts what you're seeing is a lot of professional development, and frankly where I live some districts are just flat out ignoring it as far as I can tell. So there's that element. And then finally, and this is probably the biggest piece, because you cannot separate the two, and that is the assessment piece of this. There's a real concern about over-assessment. It doesn't get rid of high-stakes testing. It ties high-stakes testing to teacher tenure in a lot of ways that it's being implemented. The idea is supposed to be that you can give your students a test and get instantaneous feedback that you can then use to like determine how you teach, but it doesn't seem to be happening. So one of the things I saw recently is a testing schedule for Miami-Dade that had kindergartners testing in the first week of school. End of August, kindergartners taking a standardized test. If you were a junior in high school, you had three standardized tests in the first month and a half of school, which includes the SAT. But this focus on testing, on standardized testing, and this over-assessment piece of it, and it's really concerning because you're looking at second graders and you're expecting them to take a test. And this is a lot of what you hear out of New York is these sobbing children has to do with this idea of over-assessment. So this is one of the politics and controversial pieces of Common Core. And you hear a lot of it out of New York because the New York Times is huge and it's everywhere, so that's one of the reasons. The other thing is that there's a lack of infrastructure. Because the testing is all done on computers, there are numbers of schools who've had to go out and buy computers in order to make Common Core work. Georgia, as a state, actually realized that this was a problem and backed out of the assessment piece as I understand it because they didn't have the money to A, train their teachers, and B, provide the infrastructure. When you're in rural community, you might not even have the necessary broadband. So this lack of infrastructure is a real problem. And what's happened is that it takes a lot of money to put the infrastructure in place. And what that means is no libraries and no library services. It means no a lot of other things as well, but it's a very big problem. And I also mentioned a little bit earlier that it makes an assumption just that teaching and reading and writing is easy is that every kid knows to how to sit down and navigate a computer, how to use a keyboard, how to use a mouse, how to click and drag, and it's not a functional reality. So some students are actually not doing well on the test, not because they don't understand the material, but because they don't understand the format of the test. They don't understand the computer, and this is problematic for them. So this is another one of the concerns, is this idea of all kids know how to be on a computer, and not all kids know how to be on a computer. And the idea of teaching technical literacy skills to youth is not embedded in Common Core. So there's no money, there's no funding, there's no focus on that. While we're very busy trying to teach them how to read and write in ways that we want them to read and write with Common Core, we're not teaching them this. And so this is one of those other concerns, and certainly a place I mentioned with the public library where they can contribute, but it's not going to solve it. So that's what goes on. Those are the, mostly when you hear people criticizing Common Core, it's based on something on this list, either the way it was developed, the K3, the, mostly it's around the assessment piece and what that assessment actually means and what the problems are with the assessment. And they're all legitimate concerns, and they're all things that need to be addressed. So what's happening, because it's education is a state by state decision, different states are handed in different ways. Some states are looking to back out of the Common Core, like Indiana, Alabama is consistently trying to back out of it that they haven't been able to yet. Other states have just renamed the standards, so it's not the Common Core standards, it's the Iowa state standards, but they look exactly the same. Other states have determined not to get involved. Virginia is looking at it and saying our standards of student learning are adequate and rigorous enough, and we don't need to adopt Common Core, and it's, so it's happening in various different states. And so despite the idea that we have a national set of standards, it's not happening for a number of different reasons, and it looks different in different ways, but it's still kind of trying to move towards that goal. So, I mean, I would hope that in a few years what you're going to see is that we've answered all of those questions and we've figured out the implementation problems, and that academic libraries are going to see kids come in and know how to research, which I know is not happening now, but we'll see how that plays out. So that's pretty much what I have as far as an overview of it. I hope you found it useful, and I'm here if you have questions. Great. Thank you, Mary Ann, for that very enlightening presentation. If anybody does have a question, you can either put something into the chat box, you can raise your hand, you can simply grab a microphone, because we have a set up for multiple speakers, and while you're thinking of something, Mary Ann, I don't want to put you on the spot, but are you aware of any other countries besides the United States that have done anything like this, and have they been, if you know of something, have they been more successful, less successful than what's going on in the US, especially with the apparent adoption of these things and now states trying to back out? Well, this is an interesting thing, right, because we like to point to other countries all the time and say, well, we want to be as good as Finland, or we want to be as good as Singapore, or, you know, and these are countries that have national standards, but they also have contextual components that are part of that conversation that need to be taken into account. So, for example, the way teachers are treated, the expectations, the value of a K-12 teacher, the fact that, like, so Finland is a really good example where they have pretty much national standards, they test off the charts on their standardized tests, but one of the reasons why that is, is that teachers are actually allowed to teach. Nobody's giving them scripted curriculum, so that's part and part, component of it. Additionally, one of the other contextual pieces of it, and this isn't just an excuse, but we need to actually put this into the conversation if we're going to talk about it, is that if you compare, if you do a regression analysis of students in the United States based on socioeconomic status compared to the socioeconomic status of the students in Finland, we actually test higher than them for the same level of socioeconomic status. So, it's when you bring in, so poverty really is an issue. And one of the things that educational reformers like to say is that it's all about high expectations and it's not really about poverty. And Common Core doesn't address poverty, but poverty is an issue and it isn't just about high expectations, and we have numerous and overwhelming amounts of research to that point, and so it is problematic. So, I know it's happening in other places, but there's contextual components in regards to the way we treat preschool and healthcare and those types of things for our youth that actually are important in this conversation. So, you can't just overlay a set of standards, no matter what Michelle Rhee would like to have us think. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from our participants today? It doesn't look like we have any. So, again, let me thank you, Mary Ann, for your presentation, and we have the recording you see there will be available. And then we will also have this done on YouTube version, and we will make that available for everyone and get that out on the Information Schools message to students when that version of the presentation is available. So, again, thank you, Mary Ann. Thank our participants, and have a good rest of the day. Thank you, Bill, and thanks, Randy, for your support, and Lindsay, for tweeting like a mad woman. I was seeing it come up on the side.