Indiana leaders on Monday dumped Common Core State Standards math and English educational standards that will be followed by most other states, instead choosing to adopt Indiana’s own standards. Those standards will now go to the Indiana State Board of Education for a vote on April 28.
On Monday, the Indiana Education Roundtable, which includes Gov. Mike Pence, voted in favor of new English and math benchmarks.
Presumably, if the board approves the Indiana standards, those benchmarks will be adopted by Indiana schools as guideposts for what Hoosier children should be learning at each grade level. Meanwhile, schools in most other states will be educating children under Common Core.
In fact, some critics of Indiana’s new standards contend that those standards are not that different from Common Core. According to Associated Press, some analysis shows about 90 percent of the standards were either directly taken from the Common Core or edited versions of those standards. They say those benchmarks were used to develop Indiana standards.
Despite controversy, Gov. Pence was proud of the results.
“There‘s no question that, by far, this has been the most transparent and the most open process for the development of standards since Indiana embarked on developing statewide standards back in 1999,” he said.
Pence said the reason Indiana did not return to its original standards in place before the state adopted Common Core in 2010 is because of the number of students who needed remediation when they enrolled in college.
From a story by Courier & Press staff writer Chelsea Schneider, Pence said “As we looked at prior Indiana standards that when you have 10,000 students that go to colleges or universities in your state that require remediation before they can begin their college academic careers, your standards are not at the level that they need to be. These new standards address that and improve upon prior Indiana standards.”
That was one of our concerns with the state again drafting its own standards, instead of going with Common Core. Too many Indiana young people, following the state’s own standards, demonstrated mediocre performances after learning under the state’s own standards. Pence now sees the new standards as providing a higher level of performance for Indiana students. Let’s hope so.