INDIANAPOLIS — A draft of new academic standards to which Indiana students, teachers and schools will be held was unveiled Wednesday as the latest step in the state’s move away from the controversial Common Core State Standards.
Tipton High School English teacher Brett Stoker was one of 28 members of the standards evaluation panel that helped draft the new standards with input from the state board of education and the Indiana Education Roundtable.
“It was hard work, but it was good work, I think,” said Stoker, who has been teaching for 31 years and focused on English standards for grades six through 12 in the panel review process. “I think it was a good process. It was a pretty intense two days of looking at all those standards. There were some arguments, but they were good arguments about what Indiana students should be able to do.”
Public input on the draft, which would replace Indiana’s implementation of the Common Core state standards, is welcomed until March 12 when the state board will meet again to discuss the standards. Three public hearings on the topic will be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Members of the evaluation panel were trained on how to review the standards earlier this month. They evaluated the 2009 Indiana state standards, Common Core standards and National Council of Teachers standards, marking each component with a plus, minus or zero depending on whether they believed the benchmark should be kept, eliminated or revised.
When the panel met last week, members re-examined their feedback for each component, this time with the names of the standards removed. The resulting draft is a hybrid of what educators agreed were the important parts of each set of standards, not simply the Common Core under a different name as some Common Core critics worried.
“It’s different in the sense that it’s a combination,” Stoker said. “We really didn’t concern ourselves with the source of the standards. We looked at what we believed should be on there.”
“To me, the difference between the Common Core and the [2009] version of the Indiana standards is the Common Core is clearer,” he added, noting the difference stood out after he had carefully read and evaluated each set of standards. “Having said that, there were issues with all of them that we liked and issues that we didn’t like.”
Indiana adopted the Common Core standards in 2010, joining 44 other states in implementing the academic benchmarks for what skills students should master at each grade level. The Common Core standards were developed by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers with input from teachers and administrators across the country.
When put into practice, the standards have sparked controversy as critics say Common Core is too demanding for younger grades and adopting nationally standardized benchmarks undermines local control.
Indiana hit the brakes on Common Core in 2013 when legislators passed a bill “pausing” implementation of the standards to allow more time for review. In the 2014 General Assembly session, SB 91 proposes a deadline for the review process.
The bill calls for the state board of education to adopt Indiana college and career readiness educational standards by July 1, when any previous academic standards would be void. Authored by Sen. Scott Schneider, R-Indianapolis, and Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, who is chair of the Senate education and career development committee, the bill also provides for a new version of the ISTEP or a comparable assessment aligned with the standards to be administered in the 2015-16 school year.
“After receiving much public input, many lawmakers, including myself, are confident that Indiana can do better than Common Core by utilizing school standards written by Hoosier education leaders,” Kruse said in a statement.
Senate Bill 91 passed the Senate 36-12 Feb. 4 and has been referred to the House education committee.
Whatever academic standards the state adopts have important implications for students, teachers and schools as a whole. How students measure up to those standards impacts their ability to graduate, teachers’ evaluations and the state’s review of schools and corporations.
The IDOE has established a timeline for finishing the standards review. The state board of education will meet March 12 to discuss the standards evaluation process. On March 31, the Indiana Education Roundtable will meet with the goal of adopting proposed college and career readiness standards, and the state board will do the same on April 9.