Education Interoperability - Discussions

On April 23, 2012, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted a one-day summit focused on the issue of education interoperability vis-a-vis the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. The issue of the granularity of the assignment of the identifiers in the work being undertaken by CCSSO and NGA, in partnership with Student Achievement Partners, has raised concerns and the convening was intended to help identify and chart a way forward to meeting the various requirements of the states and educational content industry. 

In my opinion, there are two primary drivers for the new interoperability dialogue in education: (1) the adoption by the vast majority of states of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and (2) the continued shift to technology-enabled services and applications designed to support the classroom, the back office, and – increasingly – students directly.

I am pleased to share that late last week - at the behest of SETDA and other actors - the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) announced that they would be embarking on a process of developing official identifiers (metadata/tagging) for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and an XML version that can be used consistently across the field. CCSSO and NGA have engaged the standards writers in this process to ensure that the meaning of the standards do not get lost in this technical process.