Governors and state school chiefs gave their final recommendations for what students should know in English and math. Now the question is: How many schools will adopt the standards?
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.
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.
What all students should know
The new standards were written by English and math experts convened last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They are laid out in two documents: Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, and Common 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.
"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 -- indeed, cannot -- enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum."
In keeping with those principles, the English standards do not prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short stories, novels, and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of texts that students should be able to master. On the list of exemplary read-aloud books for second and third graders, for instance, is James Thurber's "The Thirteen Clocks."
Standards made accessible for teachers
Five English texts are required reading. High school juniors and seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and one Shakespeare play.
William McCallum, a professor at the University of Arizona who was lead writer on the math project, said he and his collaborators had reorganized the March draft with the goal of rendering the final standards more accessible for teachers. But they tried to keep them sufficiently "focused and coherent" so as to be an improvement on the current standards, Dr. McCallum said, because the standards many states use now require teachers in each grade to introduce so many concepts that there is insufficient time for students to master any.
In a joint letter, Joel Klein, the New York Schools chancellor, and 54 other big-city superintendents who are members of the Council of the Great City Schools urged adoption of the standards. "Not only will this help schools focus their efforts on one set of high standards, it will undercut the temptation by individual states to lower their standards or dumb down their tests," the letter said.
Just how many states will adopt them remains unclear. Texas and Alaska declined to participate in the standards-writing effort. In the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition, states that adopt by Aug. 2 will stand a higher chance at a piece of the $4 billion in federal grant money to be divided among winning states in September.
Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education, said: "I'm hopeful that a bunch of states with crummy standards will end up with better ones this way." But the Obama administration is pressing states to adopt them too fast, he said. His recommendation to states: "Don't rush to judgment."
"The standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach," the introduction says. "They do not -- indeed, cannot -- enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum."
In keeping with those principles, the English standards do not prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short stories, novels, and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of texts that students should be able to master. One play cited as appropriate for high school students is "Oedipus Rex," by Sophocles.
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.
Five English texts are required reading. High school juniors and seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Also, said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who was lead writer on the English standards, "Students have to read one Shakespeare play -- that's a requirement."