The state Board of Education on Thursday adopted the Arkansas Mathematics Standards for grades kindergarten through 12, which constitute a revision to the multistate Common Core State Standards that are now in place.
The revised, newly named math standards will be introduced in classrooms in the 2016-17 school year and will be fully in use in the state's approximately 1,100 public schools by the 2017-18 school year.
"We believe this raises the bar for math education," Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key told the board in praising what he said was an unprecedented, very transparent revision process that included public surveys and live-streamed meetings.
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"Our main goal was to give Arkansas teachers a document that is very clear on the intention of the standards," said Stacy Smith, the Arkansas Department of Education's assistant commissioner for learning services.
The revisions -- affecting about 65 percent of the current math standards -- are the work of nearly 200 math teachers, content specialists and higher-education faculty members who last fall began reviewing each of the currently used standards along with the comments and concerns about them as expressed by educators and community members.
Committees of elementary, middle school and high school educators rewrote the math standards that needed elaboration or clarification so that they can be interpreted similarly by teachers regardless of where the teachers work in the state.
Thomas Coy, public school program manager, said the content of the new standards is largely unchanged but the individual standards have been reworded, divided into parts or supplemented with notes to help teachers better understand what is expected in classrooms, particularly in the earliest grades.
The revised standards place more emphasis on telling time and counting money at the elementary level. Logic, different kinds of polygons and Venn diagrams also have more emphasis in the standards. Statistics, however, were largely extracted from the standards for algebra II and are being reserved for a new high school course.
Arkansas was one of more than 40 states that adopted the Common Core State Standards in math and English/language arts in 2010. The standards, which were phased into classrooms over three school years, were intended to be more challenging and better prepare students for college and careers. But some teachers and parents in Arkansas and other states criticized the Common Core Standards as being inappropriate for students at certain grade levels.
The Common Core Standards were the focus last year of a task force created by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and led by Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin. The task force concluded that the state Department of Education should review and revise the math and English/language arts standards and make them Arkansas' own -- with a name change that reflects that.
The new standards keep the same numbering and labeling system that is used in the Common Core Standards. That 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 reasons for having a multistate set of education standards was the availability of teaching resources from beyond the state's borders.
Board member Diane Zook of Melbourne asked whether the new math standards will create a lot of curriculum changes in school districts. Coy said there will be tweaks rather than new work.
Board member Vicki Saviers of Little Rock asked whether the rigor of the existing standards is being lessened.
"Not at all," Smith responded.
Ouida Newton, Arkansas' 2015 teacher of the year and an ex-officio member of the state Education Board, said she is proud of the revised standards.
"These standards are strong," Newton said. "We are going to ask our students to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers. Students are going to have to take skills and apply them to the real world and do it at a level where they will be competitive in the job market ... in the state and nation."
Board member Jay Barth of Little Rock asked whether the standards were adjusted in anticipation of the state administering the new ACT Aspire exams in grades three through 10.
Coy said there were additions made in geometry and some shifting of standards from pre-calculus to algebra II to accommodate the new test.
Barth also asked whether a move to allow students to substitute a computer science course for a math course will cause students to miss out on critical math instruction.
"I feel good about all the content students will get if they go through algebra II," Coy responded.
Metro on 04/15/2016