In what California Board of Education President Theodore R. Mitchell called a “historic moment,” California on Monday joined with 33 other states and adopted new national education standards. The standards, named “Common Core”, were approved because they supposedly will better prepare students for college and career after high school graduation. There’s only one small problem – students will not benefit from these new and improved standards for four to six years.

“The Common Core State Standards have been internationally benchmarked, are research-based, and are unequivocally rigorous,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said in a statement. “They are designed to be relevant to the real world, and reflect the knowledge and skills that students need for success in college and work.”

Educational goals are nothing new in California and the state has a pretty comprehensive system of standards/assessment. It is through this system, for example, that we are able to compare California schools – and Los Alamitos Unified usually does pretty well. See related articles below.

But, according to Dr. Gregory Franklin, Superintendant of the Los Alamitos Unified School District, the state’s standards greatly exceed what can be realistically taught to the students from kindergarten through high school graduation. That’s only 13 years and Franklin told OC180NEWS, teaching all the standards would take more like 23 years of instruction.

So, the district decides which of the standards to focus on and which to skip based on what the state tests. “There isn’t any juice to implement the new standards until it’s the new standards they begin testing,” Franklin said.

That is years away. “It will be several years before the Common Core standards are fully implemented in California,” Hilary McLean, Communications Director, California Department of Education, told OC180NEWS. “State Superintendent Jack O'Connell has directed the Department of Education to develop a timeline for implementation, which will most likely culminate between 2014 and 2016.”

Why does it take so long? "Adopting Common Core standards is just the first step in the process of integrating them into the classroom,” said McLean. “We must now thoughtfully approach the task of developing frameworks, instructional materials, teacher professional development programs, and assessments that are all aligned to the Common Core standards. It is a big task, but we have a logical process for reviewing and updating each of these components of our standards-based system. Now we just need to get more specific with our timeline and implement it.”

“The Common Core standards build upon the best of California’s rigorous standards with the best of what other states and high-performing students offer their students,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction O’Connell. “I congratulate the State Board of Education for taking this historic step to improve our English-language Arts and mathematics standards by adopting the Common Core Standards.”

Historic or not, don’t expect your kid’s education to ramp up to the new standards anytime soon. “We’re not going to change anything in our instruction away from what those exams test,” Superintendant Franklin told OC180NEWS. “If they change the exams, we’ll change what we’re teaching. It would be counterproductive for us to move away from teaching the standards that the CST measures because the CST’s are what we’re held accountable for.”

At this time, the state has not even set the deadline by which the implementation plan must be completed. Off the record, one official indicated it would be within weeks. Stay tuned to OC180NEWS as we continue to monitor this emerging story.