One crucial difference is the new standards place less reliance on fiction (and even literature) and much more reliance on “Informational Texts” in English to compare and analyze in order to develop critical thinking skills needed for college. There is a greater requirement to think critically and use evidence to support your positions in writing.  There is a greater emphasis on reading-writing-speaking literacy across all subject areas. Given that over 20% of students in K-12 have a first language speak other than English, California has also adopted English Language Development Standards that require teachers of every subject to stress academic vocabulary and speaking skills to aid in literacy.

The new math standards place much greater emphasis on problem solving skills and encourage students to work out a problem using graphs, charts and formulas and to show how they arrived at their answers rather than rote memorization of facts, figures and formulas.

The new common core standards cover fewer topics at each grade level but require a much deeper understanding of each topic. You may recall from The Common Core Blog Part I that this was the main goal of David Coleman – one of the founders of common core - that learning should not be “spread a mile wide and an inch deep.”

The approach to testing is quite different under the new standards. Unlike the CST, SBAC tests are done electronically and this has been phased in over a multi-year period.  Moreover, SBAC uses an approach known as “adoptive testing” where each test question gets progressively more or less difficult based on how the student performed on the previous question. “Adoptive testing” is designed to hone in on what a student knows versus what they don’t know while at the same time coming up with comparable proficiency scores.