Are Teachers Prepared to Implement the Common Core State Standards?

The Common Core State Standards lay out a common set of expectations for what students should know and be able to do in order to be prepared for success in college and career. But in order for the standards to truly inform practice, teachers have to be ready to implement the standards in their own classrooms. How can we tell if teachers are prepared? Recently, the Arkansas Public School Resource Center (APSRC) launched an initiative to assist teachers in Arkansas’ rural and charter schools with the transition to these new standards.

As a way of evaluating their efforts, APSRC partnered with Basis to develop a survey to learn about teachers’ knowledge, resources, training, and practices related to Common Core implementation. By administering the survey to educators who had taken part in the APSRC training as well as educators who had not taken part, we were able to provide specific answers to APSRC questions about the effectiveness of their training initiative and Arkansas teachers’ readiness to implement the new standards.