The long-awaited, much-anticipated draft of grade-by-grade common standards for K-12 education will be coming out for public comment next week, an education official at the National Governors Association said yesterday. The word came during a panel discussion hosted by the nonprofit group Achieve pegged to the release of a new report on state progress toward advancing the so-called “college- and career-ready” agenda.
“You’ll see those standards released next week,” said Dane Linn, the director of the education division of the NGA’s Center for Best Practices. “We’ll open them to public comment, much like we did with the college- and career-ready standards.” He added: “If the career- and college-ready standards are any indication, we will probably have more than the 1,100 [public comments] that we received from the first set.”
My colleague and co-blogger Catherine recently wrote an EdWeek story about some of the criticism the K-12 standards have encountered (plus this still more recent blog item).
They cover English/language arts and math at all grade levels, and literacy skills that students in middle and high school need to apply to the study of history and science. The standards are designed to build on the college- and career-readiness standards released for public comment last fall, which describe the knowledge and skills students need by the end of high school for good jobs or higher education. Those standards are still undergoing revision. Once that process is finished, they will apparently be released for another round of public comments.
The common-standards initiative, as many of you already know, is being led by the NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Forty-eight states have signed on to support the standards effort.
“We have really spent a significant amount of time vetting these standards with the states,” Linn said yesterday in discussing the K-12 standards. The effort has tapped the expertise of many educators and various national organizations. In fact, he said the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers helped to convene meetings with teachers around the country to get their feedback. Among the others he identified yesterday that have been consulted are content-oriented groups such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Council on Education, a coordinating group for higher education institutions.