COLUMBUS, Ohio — The state school board will vote next month on several adjustments to state learning standards that shift them further away from the controversial Common Core.
The changes range from asking students to learn about money at younger grades to adjusting statistical analysis expectations to bringing back old expectations that students draw upon personal experiences and apply those to literature they read in class.
Some changes, like those above, affect what students are expected to learn and when. But most are just refinements of the language to add clarity or context.
How much Ohio’s standards will differ from the Common Core standards that Ohio adopted in 2010, even after the changes, is still being debated. But Ohio Department of Education officials say the changes aren’t intended to be a re-write, just an adjustment based on what teachers have learned through using them.
State testing director Jim Wright said the standards will be reviewed and adjusted regularly, not shelved for years until someone decides to throw them out and start over.
“We’re making improvements,” Wright said. “We’re making clarifications. As people use them, they figure out ways to improve them.”
He added: “We’re trying to make this a system that can grow.”
The department had two public surveys about revisions last year and collected feedback from several education organizations, including both major teachers unions in Ohio and the Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts and the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
See below for a full comparison of all of the old standards to the new proposed ones.
Highlights include:
• Instead of leaving all discussion of money to second grade, kindergarteners will use pennies as a counting tool. They will add dimes and learn the names and values of both in first grade.
• Students will learn the metric system first, starting in fourth grade, because it reinforces the base 10 number system. The usual American measurements — ounces, gallons, miles — will come in 5th grade.
• More details of how early stages of statistical analysis will start in 6th grade. The changes call for teachers to use the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education from the American Statistical Association.
• Setting a new plan for how several geometry concepts are presented over time.
English Language Arts changes include:
• Adjustments to how students are supposed to identify and describe themes of literature and present summaries.
• Better distinguishing between “point of view” — whether something is written in first-person or third-person — and “perspective” — a person’s position or approach to something.
• Asking students to “activate prior knowledge and draw on previous experiences” to compare two texts or to compare the text to students’ own experiences.
Ohio students used to be asked to relate what they read to their own life, but the Common Core de-emphasized that. The standards, until this new adjustment, focused on having students write about what was in the text, not their own lives.
The changes don’t have unanimous support, with some complaints centering on them not going far enough to ease the expectations on young students.
Board member Sarah Fowler, whose district includes all or part of Geauga, Lake and Portage counties, said she still considers some expectations to be inappropriate for the youngest grades. She particularly objected to asking kindergarten students to write instead of focusing on reading.
“There’s a huge emphasis on the students being able to compose writing, as opposed to learning how to write — as in drawing the letters,” she said.
And she objected to one kindergarten standard asking students, with adult help, to write and publish their work.
“It isn’t just using an app to learn letter sounds and being interactive,” she said. “Its asking a student to perform several higher level functions.”
Elyria teacher Dawn Neely-Randall, who attracted some national attention with anti-testing pieces in the Washington Post, said she considers the updated standards little different from the Common Core.
She said she is most bothered by how many writing requirements students have by third grade to quickly pull together multiple sources and cite portions of text to defend answers to questions.
Since the standards will serve as the basis for state tests, she said those expectations are unreasonable for young children.
“The new standards are like the old,” she said, “only with some new requirements morphed up to demand failure.”
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