IC's ACT Will Help Develop Common K-12 Standards

46 States Commit to Common Standards Push

By Michele McNeil Education Week

Forty-six states—representing 80 percent of the nation’s K-12 student population—have formally agreed to join forces to create common academic standards in math and English language arts through an effort led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The four states not on board, as of Friday, were Alaska, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas.

“This is a giant step,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has been pushing states to adopt common, rigorous standards. “It would have unimaginable, this kind of thing, just a year or two ago.”

As for those states holding out, he said: “I’m not focused on politics, but there’s plenty of time” for them to sign on.

In each of the 46 states, both the governor and the chief education officer signed a memorandum of agreement committing to the process and development of voluntary, common standards—the tangible result of a daylong meeting in Chicago in April. The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have also agreed to take part.

“It’s going to take both the governor and the chief to get this work done,” said Dane Linn, the director of the education division of the Washington-based NGA’s Center for Best Practices. “This is really becoming an economic and a moral imperative. We can’t afford to keep operating in a vacuum.”

The groups plan to pursue their aggressive timeline of getting college- and career-readiness standards—those things students should know by the time they finish high school—in draft form for states and eventually the public to review in July. Grade-by-grade standards—which the organizers are also calling “learning progression standards”—are set to be done in December.

Working groups composed of representatives from the Washington-based group Achieve, the New York City-based College Board, and ACT Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based organization that administers the college-entrance test of that name, will develop the standards.

Both the NGA and the CCSSO plan to create a “validation” committee made up of independent national and international experts in content standards to review and comment on the drafts. The experts will be nominated by states and organizations, but ultimately chosen by those two organizations.

Once the standards are agreed to, it will be up to the states to get them adopted. The signed memo stipulates that the common core must represent at least 85 percent of a state’s standards, and that the common core needs to be adopted within three years.