Acknowledgements

Common Core and I, personally, have many people to thank for their support of and contribution to this mapping project. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s support of these Maps was central to their creation. Jamie McKee and Melissa Chabran deserve our deepest thanks. Dane Linn from the National Governors Association encouraged this project all along. David Coleman and Sue Pimentel of the Common Core State Standards ELA writing team have become wonderful colleagues in the course of this work. Our expert advisors—Russ Whitehurst, David Driscoll, and Toni Cortese—provided crucial guidance. And Checker Finn, Pat Riccards, and Andy Rotherham each offered well-timed counsel that was always on target.

We are tremendously thankful to the American Federation of Teachers members, Milken educators, National Alliance of Black School Educators representatives, and the many other teachers and administrators who reviewed our Maps with care, thoroughness, and honesty. I am grateful for the wise guidance and unwavering encouragement of Common Core’s trustees. Extra thanks to trustees Pat Forgione, Jason Griffiths, and Carol Jago, who each played a key role in this work. I’m grateful to research assistant Stephanie Porowski, her predecessor James Elias, as well as interns Meagan Estep and Denise Wilkins, each of whose investigatory skills were surpassed only by their ability to keep track of the nearly 200 documents that comprise these Maps. Thanks to Ed Alton for converting our Maps into a navigable—and now interactive—digital feast. And to Shannon Last, Laura Bornfreund, Kathleen Porter-Magee, and Stafford Palmieri for making countless improvements. Diana Senechal, Melissa Mejias, and Leslie Skelton each made important contributions to our high school Maps.  Many thanks to Jack Horak, Ed Spinella, Donald Holland, Christine Miller, and particularly to Stephen Griffith, for keeping our increasingly complex affairs in order. 

We’ve made many new friends as a result of this work as calls and emails have poured in from nearly every state. Very special thanks to Buddy Auman and Teresa Chance, formerly of the Northwest Arkansas Educational Cooperative, who have helped us to see our Maps in action. Julie Duffield from WestEd introduced us to twenty-first-century outreach. Donna Perrigo, Karen Delbridge, Linda Diamond, Joe Pizzo, Julie Joslin, and Laura Bednar have helped to spread word of our Maps in Arizona, Wyoming, California, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Arkansas.  Many others from those states—and from New York, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah, in particular—deserve our gratitude.

Lastly, the teachers who wrote the Maps deserve the utmost thanks. Each of our lead writers brought deep dedication, along with years of experience, to the project: Sheila Byrd Carmichael, our project coordinator and lead writer of the high school Maps, is an expert on education standards and former leader of the American Diploma Project; Ruthie Stern, who, in addition to her work on the high school Maps, led the writing of the seventy-six sample lesson plans, is a longtime New York City Public Schools teacher and a professor at Columbia Teachers College; Lorraine Griffith, lead writer for the elementary grades, is a fifth grade teacher in Asheville, North Carolina, coauthor of numerous books on reading, and a Common Core trustee; Cyndi Wells, lead writer for the middle grades, is a teacher and fine arts facilitator in Charlottesville, Virginia and our project’s jack-of-all-trades; and Louisa Moats, author of our pacing guide for reading foundations, is a writer of the CCSS in reading and a true leader in her field. These women stuck with this project as it grew, wonderfully, beyond what any of us originally had imagined. They did all of this despite the challenges of the school schedules, motherhood, book deadlines, family vacations, and much else. It was an honor for me to have the opportunity to work alongside these teachers as they drew on their wealth of knowledge and experience to forge what we hope are tools that their peers nationwide will enjoy.

Lynne Munson

President and Executive Director, Common Core
July 12, 2011
Washington, D.C.