Common-core instructional materials have made their way into all states, including the four—Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia—that never adopted the standards, as I wrote last week.
One issue I only briefly mentioned in the story is that there are also three states that have repealed the common standards—Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina (which you can see in the handy map below). But teachers in those states are also using common-core materials.
In fact, more than 230,000 of the common-core curriculum downloads on EngageNY, or just over 1 percent of the total, came from those three states. And about 2 percent of traffic on the Student Achievement Partners website, which also provides common-core materials, originated in Oklahoma and Indiana.
But it’s tricky talking about those states and common-core materials for a couple reasons. First, they were originally adopters, and only repealed the standards within about the last year. And second, at least two of those states (Indiana and South Carolina) ended up adopting new standards that look a lot like the common core.
So, especially when looking at download and website traffic numbers in the aggregate, it’s hard to say whether teachers in those states were using common-core materials because they hadn’t switched to the new standards yet, or because they had switched and the new standards were just like the common-core standards.
And in another interesting tidbit that didn’t make it into the story, nearly all the materials providers I spoke with mentioned that their resources were also being used internationally. BetterLesson, an online lesson-sharing site focused on the common core, said about 11 percent of its traffic comes from outside the U.S. For Student Achievement Partners, about 2 percent of traffic is from outside the U.S., from countries including Canada, India, Australia, and the Philippines.
Considering the writers of the common standards have said they were informed by “the highest international standards,” it shouldn’t be a surprise that common-core materials are getting some traction in countries other than our own.