Mike Pence: New academic standards will challenge Indiana’s students

I have long believed that education is a state and local function, and that decisions about our schools should be made closest to the parents and communities that depend upon them. That’s why Indiana became the first state in the nation to withdraw from Common Core and write our own academic standards.

Thanks to the hard work and expertise of more than 150 Hoosier educators and faculty from our institutions of higher education, we have developed new academic standards that will challenge our students while putting decisions about textbooks and curriculum in the hands of parents, teachers and schools.

Here in Indiana, we will use our own standards, we will use our own assessment, and our schools and teachers will choose their own textbooks and curricula.

We have proven once again that Hoosiers are best served by Indiana solutions.

Our classroom teachers, administrators and higher education faculty who developed these standards took their task seriously. They applied Hoosier common sense to clarify the language in the standards, and they raised the bar for our students.

The academic standards they developed are unlike those in any other state, and they will prepare our students to compete nationally and internationally in college and in the workplace. They were developed through a comprehensive, transparent process that included public comment from more than 2000 Hoosiers. And the end result met the guidelines I set out at the beginning: Standards that are written by Hoosiers for Hoosiers and are uncommonly high.

When the prior academic standards were in place, approximately one-third of Indiana’s high school graduates required remediation upon enrolling in college. That is unacceptably high. Our new standards will better prepare our students. While previous standards included standards for algebra I, algebra II and geometry, these new Indiana standards include trigonometry, finite math, probability and statistics, pre-calculus and calculus.

I am genuinely grateful to those Hoosiers who knew that Indiana could do better than Common Core and insisted that we take the steps that have brought us to this important moment. I also want to thank the members of the Education Roundtable, the classroom teachers and the higher education representatives across Indiana who committed their time to this process and created standards that they believe will equip our students to excel in Indiana classrooms and on entry to college.

I know that some evaluators from outside our state have criticized our new academic standards. But, for my part, I trust Hoosiers. I trust our teachers and professors and business leaders who worked in good faith to craft standards that will serve to guide our schools and challenge our students.

Adopting new standards is just the beginning. Now parents and communities need to work with their local school districts where the critical decisions about textbook selection and curriculum occur. We need to be vigilant in making decisions the Indiana way to ensure the quality and content of the education taking place in our classrooms.

Because of the hard work of our educators and parents, Indiana is leading the way on state academic standards that will challenge our students, guide our teachers, and give parents the confidence that our Indiana standards reflect the high expectations Hoosiers have for all our schools.

Pence is governor of Indiana.