New education standards can help Georgia students achieve greater success
EDITOR'S NOTE:
TODAY'S GUEST EDITORIAL IS FROM THE ALBANY HERALD.
Recently, Georgia joined 20 states in adopting a set of standards for what students should be expected to know at certain points in their education.
Known as the Common Core State Standards, the benchmarks supersede the various educational goals the different states in the group have set. The standards will be incorporated in time for the start of the 2011-12 school year.
Under the standards, for instance, a fifth-grader in any of the participating states should be able to classify two-dimensional figures in a hierarchy based on properties, while an eighth-grader should have a firm grasp of the Pythagorean theorem. ...
While Common Core has drawn concerns of a "nationalized standard" for education, the standards were not created by the federal government. ...There will be some adjustments for Georgia, but an analysis of the state's current standards by Achieve, a nonprofit education organization based in Washington, shows that our state's current standards meet 90 percent of Common Core ones in math and 81 percent in English language arts.