The ed-tech startup LearnBoost has become the first gradebook and lesson plan software to fully integrate the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core State Standards, and their relationship with the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top funding competition, have become one of the top issues in education recently. As more states over the past few weeks have announced support for a national set of curriculum standards, LearnBoost hopes implementation of the standards will help it pick up adopters when schools resume this fall.
LearnBoost’s gradebook will be released early this month and has already garnered substantial praise for its ease-of-use and design. Today’s news follows on the heels of LearnBoost’s announcement last week that it had secured seed funding.
Education Reform, Education Technology
The Common Core Standards, while not mandatory, are not without controversy. States that adopt these curriculum standards by August 2 will get a share of the $3.4 billion from the Race to the Top initiative. Pressed for funding, perhaps, the standards have been adopted by the majority of states. And while some researchers insist that these new curriculum standards will be higher than those that exist in most individual states, many educators express concerns these standards are simply a reformulation of previous assessment goals and offer little in the way of innovation or education reform.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers says in an interview with eSchool News that she hopes states offer the funding and resources to help implement these standards. “I’m already watching the ravages of the recession cutting the muscle out of efforts to implement standards,” she said. “If states adopt these thoughtful new standards and don’t implement them, teachers won’t know how to meet them, yet they will be the basis on which kids are judged.”
LearnBoost & Open Sourcing Education
LearnBoost’s prescient move to integrate the Common Core into its gradebook software will help teachers implement and track these curriculum standards. “Our users win all around because of our integration,” says company co-founder Rafael Corrales. “Teachers and schools who use LearnBoost’s free software are keeping track of grades, assignments, and lesson plans with the most current standards.”
Committed to open sourcing education, LearnBoost says it will share the standards it has manually transferred from the Common Core Standards website to other education software providers so that they too can begin to integrate them.
