The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.
The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.
The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”
The Obama administration hopes that states will quickly adopt the new standards in place of the hodgepodge of current state benchmarks, which vary so dramatically that it is impossible to compare test scores from different states. The United States is one of the few developed countries that lacks national standards for its public schools.
Some compare the current situation to what the digital world would be like if the states used 50 versions of the Windows operating system. Students whose families move from New York to Georgia or California often have difficulty adjusting to new schools because classroom work is organized around different standards. And the problem has become worse, since many states have weakened their standards in recent years to make it easier for schools to avoid sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The new standards were written by English and math experts convened last year by theNational Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They are laid out in two documents: Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, andCommon Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. With three appendices, the English standards run to nearly 600 pages.
Under the new math standards, eighth graders would be expected to use the Pythagorean theorem to find distances between points on the coordinate plane and to analyze polygons. Under the English standards, sixth-grade students would be expected to describe how a story’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes and how an author develops the narrator’s point of view.
“The standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach,” the introduction to the new English standards says. “They do not