State School Boards Raise Questions About Standards

This from Education Week:

States that adopt proposed common academic standards must use the entire document word for word, leaders of the initiative said this week.

Answering questions from state school board members at a meeting here, representatives of the two groups leading the effort to design common standards said that states may not revise them or select only portions to adopt.

“You can’t pick and choose what you want. This is not cafeteria-style standards,” said David Wakelyn, the program director of the education division of the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices.

“Adoption means adoption,” said Scott Montgomery, a deputy executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is organizating the common-standards endeavor with the NGA.

Mr. Wakelyn and Mr. Montgomery sought to clarify an element of the agreement that 48 states signed last year in pledging support for the Common Core StandardsInitiative. It said that the common standards, which are being written for English/language arts and mathematics, must represent “at least 85 percent of the state’s standards” in those subjects....