Wednesday, March 11, 2015

 

Spearman Announces Adoption of New ELA and Mathematics Standards

Columbia, SC: State Superintendent of Education Molly M. Spearman announced that South Carolina has adopted new, high-quality standards for English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics.

“I am proud of the new homegrown, South Carolina college- and career-ready standards that we have adopted,” said Spearman.  “This is an important day for our state.  We have developed a set of high quality standards written by our own South Carolina teachers and certified as college- and career-ready by our own institutions of higher education.  This process was truly a team effort and I want to thank the thousands of parents, teachers, community leaders, and business men and women who all played an integral role.”

Last June, a record 365 educators applied to serve on the ELA and math writing teams.  To review the initial drafts of the standards they submitted in October, the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee (EOC) and the South Carolina Department of Education each convened separate task forces of parents, business men and women, community leaders, and special education teachers.  Both task forces totaled nearly 100 people selected from across the state, and each was charged to carefully review the drafts.

Public review of the draft standards resulted in nearly 18,000 comments being submitted.  Both the EOC and State Department of Education then convened joint teams of reviewers to work through several versions of the drafts from December 2014 through January 2015, before submitting final versions for review and adoption to the State Board of Education and EOC.  The State Board unanimously approved the ELA standards in January and the Mathematics standards in February.  The EOC voted by a margin of 11-1 to adopt both the ELA and Mathematics standards on Monday, March 9.  The State Board unanimously passed its final approval of both sets of standards today.

Additionally, the State Department of Education has established a survey for continued public input on the standards. To learn more about the process taken to establish these new standards and to access the survey, please visit the Department’s Standards Web page here.