“A verb is a verb is a verb. No matter what.”

That’s what Janet Scott says in part to the criticism that Indiana’s proposed replacement for the Common Core State Standards is too similar to the set of national academic standards, which the state was both one of the first to adopt and the first to opt out of.

The Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp. director of grants and special projects served on a team that crafted the draft standards that spell out what students are to learn at each grade level.

“A lot of standards overlap. You can’t just come up with things out of thin air,” Scott said. “(We) were just trying to craft the best language standards.

“Sometimes, it was Common Core. Sometimes, it was a mix” of other sets of standards.

Scott was one of seven members of a state evaluation team for sixth- through 12th-grade language arts standards.

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