Core Ready Schools

Get Ready for the Journey!

Core Ready Schools is a tool designed to assist you in benchmarking implementation efforts in your school against a comprehensive roadmap for fully implementing the Common Core State Standards (or your state’s college- and career-ready standards).

Core Ready Schools – A Tool For Easy Implementation of CCSS

DeyProject Health Care is delighted to be partnering with Core Ready Schools to extend our services to wider avenues. Core Ready Schools is a tool designed to be a springboard for the easy and complete implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Core Ready Schools has already helped hundreds of schools and their stakeholders to easily transition to the CCSS. This unique tool is designed to help identify where you are in the CCSS implementation journey and to support continuous improvement regarding its implementation.

The mission of Core Ready Schools as an organization is to help schools all over the States to overcome the great difficulties and translate the goals of the CCSS into results for the students and drive forward to the next level of success for teachers and students. Dey Healthcare hopes to help and support Core Ready Schools in this effort by partaking in their mission.

Together, we envision a future where all the schools in the nation are equipped to achieve the ambitious and inspiring goals of the CCSS.

A Tool to Guide the Transition

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) articulate inspiring, ambitious goals for student learning. The CCSS elevate what educators have always known to be good instruction, including development of critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills. But in most schools, translating these goals into results for students will require significant shifts in instruction, professional learning, and school leadership.

This tool and the accompanying resources are designed to help you identify where your school stands in the implementation journey – and how to progress to the next level of success for teachers and students.

What is Core Ready Schools?

Core Ready Schools is

A springboard to support continuous improvement regarding implementation of CCSS, and a vehicle for organizing reflection and planning.
A core set of practices and processes that are foundational to a school’s ability to make progress on improving instruction. The self-assessment highlights the deeply professional, collaborative nature of the work to implement the CCSS within a school.
Part of a multi-year endeavor: Meeting the goals of the CCSS requires schools to invest in and monitor efforts across multiple school years, and this tool is designed to support that work over time. The self-assessment results should be revisited (and the self-assessment taken again) in six months, a year, two years, and so on.

Core Ready Schools is NOT:

A tool for accountability or evaluation.
A compliance exercise or turnkey solution to implementation challenges.
Separate from, or an add-on to, your school’s ongoing improvement efforts. We urge your school’s instructional staff to think about the self-assessment results in the context of existing school improvement plans, frameworks, and processes.

Who Should Use Core Ready Schools?

Each school’s principal and leadership team should carefully consider how the self-assessment and planning processes are introduced to the school community. The tool is designed to be used by a variety of stakeholders in a school community, from the principal to classroom teachers.

The optimal way to sequence participation in the self-assessment will vary by school. For the first administration of the self-assessment, your school may want to start with just the principal and leadership team, adding other educators in later cycles. Or, if standards implementation is well underway in your school, you might begin by engaging the entire staff from the onset.

At the very least, the school principal and leadership team members should complete the self-assessment to support discussions about what implementation of the CCSS means and how to formulate next steps, including the decision of when to engage other instructional staff members.

Using the Core Ready Schools at the School Level

The goal of this tool is to facilitate honest assessments of your school’s progress over time against the seven indicators described in Implementation of the Common Core State Standards: A Transition Guide for School-level Leaders, and to organize your thinking about how to move forward with implementation efforts.

School leadership team members may want to consider taking the self-assessment individually as well as collaboratively. Once the leadership team and other school staff have completed the self-assessment, the team should carefully review responses, taking particular note of aggregate scores, areas of consensus or disagreement, and patterns across grade levels and subjects.

An individual’s assessment rating of their school’s work may be the result of classroom observations, professional learning taking place in the school, and/or a review of student work. You will receive a customized report that indicates your self-assessment results and includes links to CCSS implementation resources that can help you plan next steps.

A Note of Guidance for Districts

This self-assessment and planning tool is designed to facilitate candid reflection of CCSS implementation efforts at the school level. We encourage any district interested in sharing the tool with its schools to reiterate that the self-assessment is a springboard to support continuous improvement, not an evaluation of the school’s work.

Schools participating in a district-wide administration of the self-assessment should view the experience as an opportunity to share the results with their district as a means of communicating what they need to successfully transition to the CCSS. The results may also serve as a springboard for sharing effective practices across a school system.

Districts should also think carefully about how they might link the CRS self-assessment results with existing school improvement efforts (such as school improvement plans, professional learning for instructional staff, and check-ins with principals) to ensure that CCSS implementation plans are fully integrated into each school’s ongoing efforts to advance teaching and learning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Have more questions? We’ve collected answers to many of the most frequently asked questions to help you better understand the tool and how it can work for you.

Where did CRS come from?
What if school faculty or leadership team members sign up for CRS on their own?
Who determines the next steps in the planning template?
What is the purpose of the Core Ready Schools (CRS) self-assessment tool?
How long will it take to complete CRS?
How will the results be displayed?
Can I access resources before completing CRS?
What information will be shared from CRS and how will it be used?
Can I look at the percentage of teachers who answered similarly in my school?
What if my state uses its own college- and career-ready standards adapted from the Common Core?

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