Standards committee advances a string of copy‑edits and structural fixes to foundational literacy draft

The State Board of Education’s standards committee spent its session primarily revising the wording, punctuation and structural layout of the K–5 foundational literacy standards, adopting a set of consistency edits and a recommendation to split a previously combined cornerstone into separate items.

Committee members mapped and approved multiple copy edits intended to make the standards easier to read and implement. Changes recorded in the meeting included: consistently hyphenating modifier phrases such as “grade‑appropriate” and “grade‑level”; replacing “which” with the restrictive “that” in parent standards when the clause is essential; removing some commas that broke lists awkwardly; and using semicolons to separate long listed performance criteria. Members also asked staff to normalize references such as…