Introducing Standards Reference by Authority Pages

[NancyHadley]

As someone serving Academic Benchmarks’ customers since 2008, I’ve witnessed a lot of changes in standards over the years. In the years before Common Core, we expected that states would change about 20% of their standards when they made revisions. When Common Core was introduced in 2010, everyone wondered if that would be the catalyst to standardize what students needed to learn across our great nation. Almost all states adopted Common Core and some of them used the “15% rule” to modify the standards in some way. For a few years, standards in Math & ELA didn’t change much. NGSS was introduced and Social Studies standards remained stable. Many content publishers developed products around Common Core and didn’t put much effort into aligning to the state specific versions.  They may have included Texas in the development of their product, but beyond that Common Core was the golden rule.

Fast forward to 2022 and most states have developed new standards that may or may not be related to common core but certainly don’t follow the “15% rule.”  The “common” in Common Core has become uncommon and content publishers are now required to show their alignment to the state specific standards. 

Other trends we’ve seen are that states have started to put an emphasis on non-core subjects like Social Emotional Learning and Personal Financial Literacy.  At Academic Benchmarks, we’ve adapted to the changing landscape over the years, adding these new subjects to our list of standards our customers can license and making sure our customers have a way to see where state standards are similar to and different from Common Core and NGSS. 

Now, we are able to help our customers self-serve by providing key details about standards in each state and authority that we support.  At the end of this month, you’ll see a new tile on the Academic Benchmarks Instructure Community Page, “Standards Reference by Authority”. Listed below is the type of information you might find on each authority page:

• the titles for the core publications
• where you can find documents like SEL and PFL standards that are sometimes found in differing subjects
• what subjects are currently in the revision process and should be adopted in the next year
• a table showing you where data relationships exist between documents
• a Publications Table showing the Authority, Subject, Publication, Document Title, Grades, Adoption Year, Revision Year, and Implementation Year
• a table showing which standards have recently been moved to obsolete status by the state

We hope you can find the answer to most of your standards questions on these pages, but the Support Team and I will always be available should you not find what you need on these pages.