ATLANTA — Georgia has adopted a set of national benchmarks that detail what students should learn in each grade and what they should know to graduate high school.
Georgia joined about 20 other states Thursday in signing on to the Common Core State Standards. The sweeping education benchmarks released in May aim to replace a hodgepodge of academic goals varying wildly from state to state with a uniform set of expectations for students.
Under Common Core, a third-grader should know how to write a complex sentence and add fractions, no matter if they live in Georgia or California. And an eighth-grader should understand the Pythagorean theorem.
“This is a major step in helping the state of Georgia graduate more students not only from your institutions but also from mine and the technical college system,” said Willis Potts, chairman of the Georgia Board of Regents overseeing the state’s public colleges and universities. “We’re not only interested in post-secondary access, we’re interested in post-secondary success.”
Potts joined leaders from the state Department of Early Care and Learning, the Technical College System of Georgia, the Georgia PTA, the business community and others in commending the state Board of Education for adopting Common Core.
Education department officials will spend the next year training teachers on the new standards, which nearly match what the state already has in place. A study by Achieve, a Washington, D.C.-based education nonprofit, shows that Georgia’s current standards match 90 percent of Common Core in math and 81 percent of them in English language arts.
The standards will be in place for the 2011-12 school year.
