Grant for the Achievement Standards Network

JES & Co. is excited to announce that they have received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to sustain and continue development of the Achievement Standards Network (ASN) and to expand the ASN’s services. The Achievement Standards Network provides access to machine-readable representations of learning objectives published by education agencies and organizations. The National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officer’s (CCSSO) released Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in Mathematics and English Language Arts. The ASN contains the Common Core standards and as part of the grant, JES & Co. will enable searching by alternate codes published by CCSSO using existing ASN technical services.

As part of the Gates Foundation work in education, JES & Co.’s ASN data will play a key role in describing and then “connecting the dots” between learning objectives and education resources. By using the ASN, the Gates Foundation initiatives will help teachers develop personalized learning strategies, meet the Common Core State Standards goals, and track students’ progress.

“Widened distribution of the ASN data and the development of new ASN services are critical to the success of today’s changing face of the education market. The open source nature of the ASN data will help publishers and content providers correlate more resources to the Common Core State Standards and develop new applications that can use the standards,” Brandt Redd, Senior Technology Officer for Education Programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

“The ASN is important to several Gates initiatives. JES & Co. has dedicated many years to helping education stakeholders use learning objectives in meaningful ways. The Gates Foundation is pleased to help them meet their goals,” continued Redd.

JES & Co. has made using the CCSS less expensive by publishing the standards as open source data and making a suite of tools and services available for both publishers and states to use. “Helping teachers transition from state standards to Common Core State Standards is one of our goals,” explains Diny Golder, Executive Director of JES & Co. “And JES & Co.’s new services will help publishers make relationships between their resources and the new CCSS. In the current environment of shrinking budgets, it is critical that content providers have economical ways to make alignments and pass the savings down to their customers,” said Golder.