The biggest curriculum change in more than a decade is underway as schools put the Common Core State Standards into effect. The curriculum, which gives new standards for secondary level students in the subjects of English and Math, will affect school districts in 46 states including Ohio. These standards include assessments that will be instructed for the first time in the 2014-15 school year. New standards for science and social studies are currently in the making.

Educators say that the curriculum alteration will transform the way students learn in school. The goal of Common Core is to “provide a clear road map that allows districts to focus on the skills that allow college and career readiness for all students” according to director of secondary education for Hamilton City Schools Keith Millard. “It will specifically define the knowledge, skills and habits children need to have in the interconnected world of the 21st century,” he said. “The Common Core increases the level of academic rigor expected of all students.”

These new standards promise to change the way classrooms are managed and how knowledge is attained and put into effect. “The curriculum maps outline the standards and sequences for a year’s worth of instruction and provide guidelines, but there is certainly room for the teachers to use their professional judgment in working with individual students,” Millard said.

The previous state curriculum has been criticized as being too broad. The new Common Core Standard provides a learning sequence that focuses on areas of instruction specifically in order to go deeper and analyze more. “We’ve been teaching way too much at every grade level,” says Denise Griffin, curriculum director for Edgewood City Schools.

While traditional instructional techniques used by teachers included providing facts and information and testing students on how much knowledge they retained, Common Core contrasts by encouraging students to be lifetime learners and critical thinkers.

More reading, research, and debate will be encouraged in the language arts subject. With this change students will be expected to be able to enquire questions, find evidence to draw conclusions, and be able to analyze and write more.

In the past students transferring from state to state might have to spend precious weeks or months preparing for a new curriculum, but because this is a near-nationwide initiative, everyone will be working on the same basic subjects simultaneously in every grade level.

The initiative for the new curriculum was funded through private grants and sponsored by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve; a nonprofit organization created at the 1996 National Education Summit by the nation’s governors and corporate leaders.

The Common Core plan developed from Achieve’s American Diploma Project and a 2004 report called “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts” which determined that “current high-school exit expectations fall well short of (employer and college) demands.”

Achieve released a national poll this summer which concluded that 68 percent of teachers who have heard about the Common Core initiative are behind it.