Last week the National Governor's Association Center for Best Practices in collaboration with the Council of Chief State School Officers released the proposed national K-12 education standards in english/language arts/literacy (ELA/literacy) and mathematics designed to provide a clear and consistent framework for preparing students for college and the twenty-first century economy. NGA’s director of education, Dane Linn, said,

these standards build upon the goals articulated in the college- and career-readiness standards released last year and will ensure our students are prepared to compete and succeed in a global economy.

One challenge with ELA/literacy standards in general is how to show the accumulation of skills and content over time with specificity. Many state standards are very explicit about which content skills should be acquired at the end of each grade level (i.e. “students should be able to identify prefixes and suffixes”) but struggle with the subtle differences between how a fourth grader should interpret main idea and details vs. an eighth grader. In addition, the lack of specificity makes it increasingly difficult to measure any sort of progress or gain of skills ability in a way that shows actual, quantifiable growth.

I applaud the recently released ELA/literacy standards by NGACBP because I believe this set to be more explicit with these subtle differences specifically on the skill development side. Next steps for districts will be to personalize these new standard sets with tangible examples from their students and give educators access to these models – building a repository of exemplar student work. Through a common lens of what these standards look like in practice, educators can really begin building a common understanding of how to measure change against these new standards in their students. While very qualitative, this data will enable educators to make more targeted instructional choices specific to each student.

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