Illinois raises, unifies standards
States are moving toward one nationwide standardized test
Illinois education officials in the last week set new expectations for what every public school student should know in math and reading, joining a national push to create one set of standards.
The change could affect local classrooms as soon as this fall, officials said.
The move sets the stage for new standardized tests to measure students from state to state. Education officials said a new exam won't be ready until 2014.
State leaders and educators created the grade-by-grade guidelines by starting with a key question: What do today's high school graduates need to know when they walk onto a college campus or report for their first day of work?
They then worked backward to determine the skills students should master at every grade level, down to kindergarten. The common standards aim to be clearer, fewer and higher than what most states now require.
Here are a few examples of what Illinois now expects high schoolers to know before graduation:
MATH
Number systems: Explain why the sum or product of two rational numbers is rational; that the sum of a rational number and an irrational number is irrational; and that the product of a nonzero rational number and an irrational number is irrational.
Algebra: Solve quadratic equations in one variable.
Geometry: Prove that all circles are similar.
Statistics: Understand statistics as a process for making inferences about population parameters based upon a
