When Georgia set out to adopt new curriculum goals for students in 180 school systems, state leaders and educators wanted to make sure they would match what students were getting in classrooms across the nation.
After a year of studying the new goals, Georgia last week joined 19 other states in adopting what's called the Common Core State Standards as part of an initiative to ensure states maintain rigorous and consistent classroom standards for what every student should know in math and English.
Across Georgia, teachers may receive training on the new standards beginning this school year, but because the goals closely mirror the state's existing curriculum standards, daily instruction isn't expected to change much, school administrators say.
"I didn't see a lot of difference," said Mark Tavernier, director of the Office of Teaching and Learning for the Clarke County School District. "By and large, they're aligned."
The biggest change may center on how teachers decide to pace their teaching throughout the year, Clarke County administrators said.
State governors, school chiefs and educators in 48 states - except for Texas and Alaska - participated in the development of the common standards in an effort make students more competitive compared to their peers across the globe.
"People have been complaining one of the reasons we seem to be behind in a lot of international exams is we don't have a common curriculum, and this is an effort to do that," said Jeremy Kilpatrick, a regents professor of mathematics at the University of Georgia who helped review the common standards.
Each state's education department must choose whether to adopt the common standards, but critics argue that it strips authority from individual states to decide how best to educate students.
Proponents argue the standards will provide better comparisons for how well students are learning from state to state and allow families to move with less fear that their children will be ahead of or behind their new classmates.
Common standards are only one part of a larger plan to solve the country's lagging academic achievement.
To make a complete turnaround, teachers will have to know how well students are meeting those high goals, said Jim Marshall, a professor of language and literacy education in the UGA College of Education who also reviewed the common standards.
"Standards are really only as strong as the measures we use to asses them," Marshall said. "We can say we have the highest-quality standards in the world, but if we don't have the highest-quality assessments, than we won't really know whether our students have mastered them or not."
Two national groups, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortia and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, are competing for more than $160 million from the U.S. Department of Education to develop the assessments over a four-year period.
To date, schools can use only a few assessments, like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, to measure how students are performing, but that test only takes into consideration a representative sample of students, according to Matt Cardoza, spokesman for the state Department of Education.
"What a common assessment would do is give you that better grade level assessment for all kids in all states," Cardoza said. "Right now, you don't necessarily know how your child is performing compared to the nation; you just know as a state, so that's where this will be advantageous to us is to compare our progress to other states'."