What Your Child Should be Learning In School

Draft Standards From The State of California Academic Standards Commission

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State of California Academic Standards Commission

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Introduction

Standards are as important in education as they are in all other facets of our lives. When academic standards are adopted in California, in conjunction with assessments, they will have the power to transform schooling. By themselves, academic standards are not a cure-all, but setting them is the crucial first step.

For these reasons, the Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards was created. Its responsibility is to develop, for the first time in California, world-class academic content and performance standards for all students, in all grades, K-12. The draft content standards contained in this document represent the first fruits of its difficult and important work to date. These reading & writing and mathematics standards attempt to define excellence; they challenge all of us to recognize--and nurture--the intellectual potential that all students possess.

Building an "ideal" set of standards in reading & writing and mathematics has meant analyzing and drawing upon the best components from solid standards that have been tested in the field. No single standard model would do. The draft standards in this publication are borne of standards models from California, including the Education Round Table Standards for High School Graduates and Challenge District Standards; state standards from Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Virginia, and Washington; local standards from Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina and Chicago; other standards models such as Core Knowledge, the International Baccalaureate Program, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and New Standards; and international models from Hungary, Japan, and Singapore. As the Commission moves forward, it will continue to benchmark its documents against these and still other state and international models to ensure that California's model is the best of the best.

The following standards represent the draft of the blueprint for what California students should be learning and includes everything from phoemic awareness in Kindergarten to conducting multi-step information searches using local and wide-area networks to probability and statistics in the 12th grade. The depth and breadth of this standard will be of interest to parents nationwide, not just in California.

The public review process in happening during the Summer of 1997 and the standards are expected to be final in the fall. If you have comments on these standards for the authors you may contact them at: comments.asc@ocde.ca.gov

Credits

The Draft Standards were prepared by:

The State of California Academic Standards Commission
The Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards Comments may be addressed to The Commission