Oklahoma’s state school board has approved new standards for public school students that focus, in English, on such skills as phonics, cursive writing, basic grammar, and writing research papers; and in math, on counting money, patterns, ratios, and proportions.
The standards replace the Common Core State Standards that state lawmakers repealed amid concerns by mostly grassroots conservatives that it was an attempt at a federal takeover of state education. The common-core standards focus on higher-order thinking skills.
The proposed new standards, which are to go into effect at the start of the 2016-17 school year, must be approved the legislature.
