The object of years of political tension, backroom posturing and exhaustive examination, the Common Core State Standards are now officially on their way out in Tennessee.
In their place: the Tennessee Academic Standards for math and English language arts, coming to K-12 classrooms across the state in the 2017-18 school year.
The State Board of Education voted unanimously Friday for a second and final time in favor of the new standards, culminating 18 months of review and revisions that began with an order from Gov. Bill Haslam, as he sought to mitigate legislative efforts to scrap the Common Core outright.
After all of the political squabbles, the vote seemed almost anticlimactic as members signed off on the transition with little discussion.
Tennessee is the latest state to drop the Common Core, at least in name. Like Indiana, one of the first states to back out, Tennessee didn’t toss the Common Core out entirely, and in fact used it as the backbone of the new benchmarks.
“The Common Core standards were our starting point, but the revisions we have made our significant, and significant enough that we consider them new standards,” said Sara Heyburn, the board’s executive director. “The formatting is different. We’ve dropped standards, we’ve added standards, we’ve made changes to existing standards.”
Standards are grade-specific and subject-specific learning goals that serve as the foundation on which other education decisions are made — from curriculum to assessments. In Tennessee, there are 1,106 standards for English and 930 for math.
The incoming standards can be viewed online, and state officials say the response has been positive.
“We’ve received a lot of supportive emails,” said Laura Encalade, the board’s policy director. “Teachers are excited.”
The board now passes the baton to the Tennessee Department of Education, which will implement the standards. That will involve teacher training and making sure assessments and textbooks are aligned to the new standards, as well as the state’s teacher preparation programs.
Common Core has been in all Tennessee classrooms since 2012 after being approved by the State Board in 2010 as part of the state’s Race to the Top application. This year’s standardized assessment, known as TNReady, is the first to be aligned with Common Core, and state officials have maintained that adjusting the assessment to the new standards won’t be difficult or expensive.
Presented as a high-quality set of standards, Common Core was developed in a multi-state process spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, with the Obama administration offering incentives to states that embraced them. But in Tennessee and many other states, it became the object of political tension stemming from charges of federal overreach, among other things, prompting Haslam in 2014 to order a standards review two years ahead of schedule.
The Tennessee legislature further modified the review process last spring. In total, the final review included two online public reviews, legislative input, and two panels comprised of mostly educators to work through all the feedback.
During the most recent online review last fall, the board heard from more than 2,600 Tennesseans, mostly teachers. Overall, 82 percent of the reviews indicated that the revised standards should be kept. And in all, more than 200,000 reviews and comments have been considered in the 15-month process.
The revisions range from clarifying word changes to sweeping content changes, such as revised learning goals for high school algebra. In English language arts, there’s a new emphasis on speaking and listening standards to address the gap in the current standards that assumes all students come to kindergarten ready to write words and sentences. But the true test of the new standards will be in the classroom.
Now that the new math and English standards are approved, the State Board is focusing on reviews of science and social studies standards. The board recently selected educators to serve on the science standards recommendation committee, and the first public review of social studies standards concludes at the end of the month.
Encalade says the science standards overhaul is particularly exciting. The state has not updated its science standards since 2009, and those were considered subpar. Unlike with math and English, the board started from scratch.
Are you a math or ELA teacher? What do you think of the new standards? How do you think they will impact your classroom? Tell us in the comments or send us an email at tn.tips@chalkbeat.org.