A draft of newly revised math standards to be used as the basis for instruction in the state's kindergarten-through-12th-grade classrooms is now available online for public scrutiny and comment.
The proposed Arkansas Mathematical Standards, the work of some 170 educators including teachers, content specialists and higher education faculty members, will go to the state Board of Education for approval, probably in March. The draft math standards are a change from the Common Core State Standards that more than 40 states -- including Arkansas -- adopted in 2010.
A link to the draft standards and a survey about the draft standards is available at the Arkansas Education Department's website: www.arkansas.gov.
Elementary school math skills related to telling time and counting money are given a greater emphasis in the newly revised, proposed standards, Arkansas Department of Education leaders Stacy Smith and Thomas Coy said earlier this week.
Logic, regular and irregular polygons and Venn diagrams also have a place in the proposed standards.
Statistics, however, are largely extracted from the proposed standards for Algebra II and are being reserved for a new high school course.
In all, 65 percent of the existing math standards have been revised or clarified in the new draft standards. That percentage ranges from 45 percent of the standards in first grade to 95 percent of the standards for math in kindergarten. Sixty-two percent of the standards for high school math were revised or clarified.
"You will see -- and this is where I think the teachers did a really good job -- they rewrote the content standards in a way that will be helpful to classroom teachers all across Arkansas," said Smith, the Education Department's director of curriculum and instruction. "So it doesn't matter if you are in a classroom in Nashville, Ark., or if you are in Northwest Arkansas, we are hoping that two teachers will interpret the standards in the exact same way."
Smith is adamant that the math committees for elementary, middle and high school standards did more than "re-brand" the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core standards were criticized by some teachers and parents in Arkansas and nationally for reasons that included being inappropriate for the students at certain grade levels.
The Common Core State Standards were the focus last year of a task force created by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and led by Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin that concluded that the Arkansas Education Department should undertake a review and revision of the standards for both math and English/language arts.
"You are going to have some people who will look at this document and say that these are the same skills, that there is not a change," Smith said about the draft math standards. "My answer to that is before we ever had Common Core and we had our Arkansas standards and when they did a [comparison] of those Arkansas standards to the new Common Core standards, you had 90 percent or so correlation. Math is still math and reading is still reading. The content is still there."
Smith said the revision committees of Arkansas math educators started late last year with the Common Core standards and with results of teacher and parent surveys about those standards. The committees went grade by grade and standard by standard in their work, she said about the revision process.
"A lot of times the content is the same but they reworded it, broke it up or added teacher notes to it for clarification to support the teacher in the classroom," she said.
Coy, public school program manager at the Education Department, said the math committees took current standards that were "weighty and very long" and broke out individual skills. It "unpacks the standards" as a way to save time and confusion, he said.
He said the committees didn't want to specify how teachers should teach the standards.
"But one of the things we really tried to capture, so that the standards are implemented more consistently across all our schools, is some guidance for teachers," Coy said. "We didn't want to step into dictating curriculum but we wanted them to understand what is the true intent of the standard."
"Some of the criticism about the Common Core has been over the assignments that go home," he added. "We are hoping that with some of these notes and clarifications, the teachers ... will pick really good lessons or good homework on which parents will actually be able to assist their children."
As an example of the changes in the standards at the kindergarten level, the current standards call for children to count to 100 by ones and 10s. The revised standards would require children to count by ones, fives and 10s.
An addition to the third-grade standards calls for students to understand that the four digits of a four-digit number represent amounts of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones.
The proposed standards retain the same system for labeling or numbering the standards that is used in the Common Core math standards, Smith said. The same nomenclature will enable Arkansas teachers to continue to draw on the state and national resources, including lessons and projects, that have been developed to help with teaching math. One of the advantages cited earlier about the Common Core set of standards was the wide availability of teaching resources beyond a state's borders.
The Education Department is asking teachers and the general public to review the proposed standards and answer a survey about them. There were more than 2,100 survey responses to the survey by midweek, Smith said. The survey will be open into early February.
Education Department staff members are monitoring the results to find proposed standards that are not receiving a 90 percent approval rating from the survey responders. Those standards will be subject to further study and possibly thrown back to the committees of educators, Smith said.
The draft standards, once finalized and approved by the state Board of Education, would begin being used in the 2016-17 school year but fully implemented in the following 2017-18 school year.
Ouida Newton of Leola, Arkansas' 2015 Teacher of the Year, has been a math teacher for more than three decades. She was an advocate for the Common Core State Standards and their focus on rigor and higher-order thinking skills. But she has served on the middle and high school math standards committees and said that the committee work has made the standards clearer.
"There were some standards that when we looked at them, we weren't sure what exactly they wanted," Newton said Friday. "We clarified the standards and we put in some examples of what a standard was trying to get the student to do. And we put in some notes for the teachers as far as teaching strategies or ways they might put two standards together and teach them at the same time."
Newton said the revised standards do not take away from the rigor of the Common Core math standards.
"We have looked at the foundational skills that the students are going to need and we've made sure that the critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills are still there for the students," Newton said.
NW News on 01/25/2016