Having been the first state to leave the Common Core, the final draft of Indiana’s new K-12 content standards has been published and it will be brought to the State Board of Education on April 28—ten days from now—for the final vote. Some reviews of this draft have been already published (e.g., here, here and here) but they focused mostly on the English and Language Arts (ELA) piece. I will focus on its mathematics and I will start with some general observations.

The drafting was done under a serious time pressure. There were only 12 weeks allocated for the standards-writing process that typically takes many months or even years. The writing panels should be commended for significant improvement of its early drafts, yet—as we shall see shortly—the final result is far from satisfying for Indiana, whose prior (pre Common Core) standards were highly praised as the best in the nation.