EDUCATION

Experts rip into final Indiana academic standards draft

Stephanie Wang
stephanie.wang@indystar.com

For Stanford math professor and South Bend native James Milgram, it’s frustrating enough that the new academic standards Indiana may adopt this month seem like a “complete mess.”

But what makes him “doubly annoyed,” he told The Star: “The best I can do is describe this as a purely amateur attempt at something.”

An earlier draft he reviewed for the state had what he called “good bones,” which he says could have led to high standards for Hoosier students. But this week as Milgram examined the state’s final proposal, he found it still to be sloppy, imprecise, disorganized — and, he said, “at points, it is just plain bizarre.”

The final version heads to state education officials Monday. But some experts who provided earlier feedback on the standards continue to rip into the K-12 guidelines slated to replace the Common Core in Indiana.

RESPONSE: Indiana educators deflect criticisms of new standards.

And the criticism is coming from both sides of the debate around the controversial Common Core, a polarizing set of national standards that the state once embraced but now has rejected.

Common Core ignites partisan fervor, with conservatives denouncing it as federal intrusion and not rigorous enough, and some liberals decrying it as an attack on teacher autonomy. Even after Indiana eschewed the Common Core, some worried about how closely the state’s new standards would mirror it.

Milgram opposes Common Core, while University of California at Berkeley professor Hung-Hsi Wu — who said this week the standards appear to purposefully be “an incoherent jumble” — supports it.

They give a resounding “no” on the fundamental question at stake: Are Indiana’s standards going to be the highest in the nation? “Uncommonly high” and “written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers,” as Gov. Mike Pence promised?

In response to the criticism, spokeswoman Lou Ann Baker with the governor’s Center for Education and Career Innovation said, “Our educators have worked extremely hard to craft standards that detail specific, clear and appropriate outcomes.”

Indiana Department of Education spokesman Daniel Altman wrote in an email to The Star: “You will never get all of the experts to agree on this issue. The people you cited represent two different extremes of this debate. Based on their prior stated positions on this issue, we would never get these two academics from Northern California to agree on the best standards for Indiana. However, because we value input from differing viewpoints, we thought their voices were worth considering.”

Danielle Shockey, the education department’s deputy superintendent, said the drafting panels picked the best of the best standards from previous state guidelines — said to be some of the highest in the country — Common Core and other national models.

“If each of those bodies of work on their own were deemed, if you will, the highest in the country, we took the best of those four, and that’s what you have before you in the final draft,” she said earlier this week.

The panels of educators and experts also selected the portions of state-contracted expert reviews they chose to implement: “In some cases, their feedback didn’t reflect the work of Hoosier ideals and Hoosier standards,” Shockey said. “While we appreciate that feedback, the college- and career-ready panel said this is not right for Indiana students, so it was purposefully disregarded.”

But Milgram said the panel lacked the expertise of professional mathematicians — not just math educators: “I realized that there was no way in hell that they were going to be able to make the changes that I had indicated needed to be made with that background. That’s exactly what happened.”

State Board of Education member Andrea Neal said the state made a mistake by only asking for expert opinions on early drafts and not on the final one. Milgram and Wu looked over the final version on their own, with Milgram focusing on the high school math section and Wu examining a few key spots in math.

“This notion that standards have to be written by Hoosiers was faulty by the get-go,” Neal said. “They weren’t written by Hoosiers. They were really more paraphrased by Hoosiers. ... We’re now at a place where maybe we recognize we just need the best standards in the country, and there’s not enough time to get the full feedback that we need.”

Neal said she planned to send a letter to members of the Education Roundtable urging them to reinstate Indiana’s pre-Common Core standards.

The Education Roundtable considers the final proposal Monday. The State Board of Education is scheduled to vote on it the following week. By law, Indiana must adopt its standards by July 1.

In an email to Neal, Wu wrote his concerns centered mostly on how “these standards are at times an incoherent jumble,” written off by the state under the emphasis on allowing local schools and corporations to dictate curricula.

“This is a time when leadership matters, but the writers of the new draft chose to pass the buck,” Wu wrote, denouncing the final draft as inferior to Common Core math standards.

Districts don’t have the needed mathematical knowledge to help students improve, Wu wrote.

Call Star reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.