The Common Core is coming, and Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago will be ready. In fact, they will be more than ready, and go beyond the Common Core, said Dominican Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, the superintendent of Catholic schools for the archdiocese. “I’m always just going to call it beyond the core, beyond the core, beyond the core, because that’s the goal,” Sister Mary Paul said. While there has been some hand-wringing among everyone from pundits to parents about what the Common Core State Standards mean, Sister Mary Paul said, it’s important to remember what the Common Core standards are, and what they aren’t. What they are is a statement of what students should know and what they should be able to do at various points in their academic careers. What they are not is a curriculum, according to Mary Kearney, associate superintendent of Catholic schools. “A curriculum includes what is taught, when it is taught, how it is taught and what materials to use,” Kearney wrote in “Going Beyond the Core,” a blog posted Aug. 22 on the Office for Catholic Schools website. “None of these items are included in the Common Core State Standards. For Catholic schools, all of these elements will continue to be determined by diocesan superintendents, principals and teachers working to meet the needs of their students.” Rather, the Common Core standards, which were developed by hundreds of educators working under the auspices of a consortium of state governors, give schools a way to see if they are measuring up in providing the skills students need. In any case, Sister Mary Paul said, no one can know how the Common Core will actually work until tests are developed to show how well students measure up. “The Common Core initially began at the university and business level,” she said. “The whole idea was as if to say, ‘Our standards are not strong enough. Look at us against Singapore in math. Look what they’re doing in Norway and Sweden. Look what they’re doing in Japan. What about our kids? How can we increase the rigor of our courses so that they are college and career ready?’” Catholic schools take a longer view of student success, Sister Mary Paul said. “Of course, our goal is for them to be successful in college and in life and in heaven,” she said. That’s why Catholic schools are going a step further, also working with the Common Core Catholic Identity Initiative, which calls on Catholic schools “to implement the Common Core standards within the culture and context of a Catholic school curriculum” and “to infuse the Common Core standards with the faith/principles/values/ social justice themes inherent in the mission and Catholic identity of the school,” Kearney wrote. Schools in the archdiocese have long embraced standards, with its current curriculum framework largely based on the 1997 Illinois Learning Standards. Now the state is embracing the Common Core standards, and Catholic schools are moving with them, and beyond them, Sister Mary Paul said. “We always felt in two ways we would continue to go beyond the core,” she said. “We would go beyond the core in rigor and in insisting on the use of primary sources, not just, ‘Hello, you learn it because it’s in a textbook.’ The second piece that was very important for us to go beyond the core is to integrate those things that are appropriate with our Catholic tradition. “The two areas we are concentrating on as we start to do this are English/language arts — the patrimony of the church is really in the richness of language and critical thinking and writing — and the second thing is the math.” This fall, Kearney will audit math programs in the schools to make sure everyone’s ready. “So we’re doing a lot of things that are beyond the core itself. All we care about is that our kids get the very best we can give them, in the way we teach and what we teach. We always are in that state of continual improvement; that’s a hallmark of a Catholic school. But this is giving us that opportunity to re-up and together look at that and say, are we doing well everywhere?” said Sister Mary Paul. The controversy over the Common Core has in part been political, with people protesting what they see as over-involvement by the federal government, when the Department of Education made adopting the Common Core part of its Race to the Top funding process, Sister Mary Paul said. Since Catholic schools are not eligible for Race to the Top funds, that’s not an issue for the archdiocese. The other controversy has to do with the way some schools have implemented the standards, she said. “A lot of people who put in the common core did not attach the rigor to it; they put in this kind of ‘less is more’ teaching,” she said. That’s not how Catholic schools will do it, she said. “The common core does really want to encourage critical thinking and main ideas, but it also wants to do things that I think we’ve done very well as Catholic schools,” Sister Mary Paul said. “It does critical reading, what they call close reading, argumentative and persuasive writing. In the math curriculum algebra would be taught much earlier, taught in the grade schools, so we felt the need to be responsive to that, even with our own rigor. We keep adapting ourselves.