Editorial: Big step for level school standards
Published: Monday, Jun. 14, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 15A
Americans moving from state to state face a patchwork of 50 sets of English and math standards for K-12 schools, of widely varying quality. So, more than a year ago, 48 states (including California) took it upon themselves to draft a common set of standards.
Skeptics rightly worried that this might result in a "lowest common denominator" approach. Amazingly, this hasn't occurred and skeptics should be pleasantly surprised by the elegant clarity of the final product. After a March draft and 10,000 comments, revised Common Core State Standards were released June 2 (see www.corestandards.org).
Now California and other states will decide whether to adopt them. Certainly, after 13 years in place, California's existing standards deserve a new look.
Under a law passed by the California Legislature and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in January, a 21-member Academic Content Standards Commission will study the Common Core State Standards and make a recommendation to the state Board of Education by July 15. The state board, in turn, will take an up or down vote by Aug. 2.
The fundamental question for the commission has to be: Do the Common Core State Standards match or exceed California's existing standards in rigor?
The Sacramento region is well-placed on the commission to answer that question. It includes Greg Geeting, currently on the Sacramento County Board of Education; Mark Freathy, math teacher in Elk Grove Unified; Deborah Keys, former principal in Natomas Unified; Matt Perry, principal at Sacramento's Health Professions High School; Scott Farrand, math professor at Sacramento State; and Jim Lanich, executive director of the Center to Close the Achievement Gap at Sacramento State.
With some exceptions, the Common Core State Standards have been well-received nationally.
For example, E.D. Hirsch, well-known author of "Cultural Literacy," "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" and "The Knowledge Deficit" concludes that they mark "a real advance on even the best of existing state language-arts standards."
In math, the Common Core State Standards address two interconnected issues: The states, including California, cover too many topics in the early grades in too little depth, and achievement drops off in late middle school, where algebra begins.
This bears out in California, where the success rate of students taking algebra has been disappointingly low – only 28 percent test proficient or above. The Common Core streamlines topics to build a foundation for algebra, relying on the work of the American Institutes for Research and the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. A main focus, rightly, is fractions.
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