Reading Sage: CCSS Vs. STAAR TEKS

CCSS Vs. TEKS (STAAR) State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness | Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

Both the (CCSS) Common Core State Standards and (TEKS) Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills are based on the American Diploma Project.

“To say that Texas can’t participate in Common Core standards when there is so much overlap between the Common Core and the TEKS, it doesn't really make any sense,” Randy Bomer Ph. D,

Randy Bomer is Professor and Chair of Curriculum & Instruction at The University of University of Texas at Austin, He is a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English

4th Grade Math TEKS and CCSS Comparison

The Texas Attorney General | The 4th grade TEKS says: “The primary focal areas in Grade 4 are use of operations, fractions, and decimals and describing and analyzing geometry and measurement. These focal areas are supported throughout the mathematical strands of number and operations, algebraic reasoning, geometry and measurement, and data analysis…”

Common Core, on the other hand, says that 4th graders will: “focus on three critical areas: (1) developing understanding and fluency with multi-digit multiplication, and developing understanding of dividing to find quotients involving multi-digit dividends; (2) developing an understanding of fraction equivalence, addition and subtraction of fractions with like denominators, and multiplication of fractions by whole numbers; (3) understanding that geometric figures can be analyzed and classified based on their properties.”

The TEKS has many overlapping standards that it shares with the CCSS, 80% overlap depending on the grade. TEKS differs from the CCSS on clarity due to initial development and revisions that included more educators and input from a wider group of experts. TEKs standards are developmentally/pedagogically aligned to students needs and learning readiness according to critiques! Both critiques and supporters say they share about 60-70% of the same standards! Both the TEKS and CCSS are rigorous and meet the college and career readiness goals.

Background of the CCSS and the new TEKS
In the 1990s, the "Standards & Accountability Movement" began in the U.S. as states began writing standards outlining (a) what students were expected to know and to be able to do at each grade level, and (b) implementing assessment designed to measure whether students were meeting the standards. As part of this education reform movement, the nation's governors and corporate leaders founded Achieve, Inc. in 1996 as a bipartisan organization to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability in all 50 states. The initial motivation for the development of the Common Core State Standards was part of the American Diploma Project (ADP)

This study compares alignment of the ACT and the American Diploma Project (ADP) national college readiness standards sets with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English language arts and reading (TEKS ELAR) standards for grades 9-12 and analyzes their cognitive complexity. It finds that a majority of the content in the ACT and ADP standards sets is addressed to some extent by the TEKS ELAR standards and that the TEKS ELAR standards demand higher levels of cognitive complexity than do the other two standards sets.

Publication Type: Issues & Answers Online Availability: