By Carol P. Bartold     

Mar. 9, 2016:  After facing sharp criticism for not preparing students or teachers for the rollout of the Common Core program, the New York State Education Department and the Board of Regents have developed a timeline to revamp the program's learning and assessment standards.

Within the timeline, school districts will have two complete academic years to develop curriculum and conduct teacher training needed to implement the new standards.

The timeline proposed by the state agencies calls for appointment of committees in 2016 to review the Common Core and revise and establish standards for English and math in each grade.

Public comment will be solicited and voting on the standards could take place in November of 2016. School districts will have the spring and summer of 2017 to revise the curriculum and train teachers to meet the standards.

Testing of the new standards would begin in the 2018-2019 school year.

"I have a positive feeling about the Common Core standards as their own entity," said Dr. Mara Koetke, director of curriculum. "They are rigorous, which I feel is an important thing for standards to be."

Koetke believes that testing of the standards and evaluations of how well students are working toward the standards and how well districts are preparing students to meet the standards should be considered separately from the standards themselves. "It's done in a way now that's causing a lot of anxiety among parents, students, and teachers," she said. She hopes the Common Core revision will keep the standards rigorous and consider more than one mechanism to measure success so that testing does not come with such high stakes in the evaluation process.

"The concepts of the Common Core are great," said Bronxville Board of Education trustee Dr. Mary Giuffra. "The state rushed to get it out too fast and didn't think through all the ramifications." People must be adequately prepared for change, she added, and they were not. In many cases, she said, not only were explanations inadequate, but also teacher and parent information was missing.

Dr. David Katz, middle school social studies teacher and Bronxville Teachers' Association president, agreed. "When Common Core was rolled out in New York State, the implementation was botched, to say the least," he said. "It was rushed, untested, and untried," and it eroded trust between parents, teachers, school districts, and communities. "It's more important we get it right and restore trust than that we rush to meet an arbitrary deadline," he said.

Giuffra sees the Common Core program as an extraordinary idea that democratizes education and will give students the concepts they need to approach and deal with the vast amounts of information and knowledge. Katz feels education should remain under local control and that Common Core represents a step away from that control.

The Bronxville School has a long history of progressive education, Katz said. "We deserve the opportunity to develop standards, curriculum, and assessments that honor our ability to do the good work that we do." He noted that The Bronxville Promise, in many ways, runs counter to the Common Core's standardized curriculum and standardized testing in giving students the opportunity to design more of their own education.

"The Bronxville Promise is our way of doing what the Common Core called for," Giuffra said. "We looked at it in terms of our mission and what we're about and what's unique about Bronxville."

Superintendent Dr. David Quattrone said that in working with The Bronxville Promise, the district has experienced "many points of contact" with the Common Core. He cited the critical thinking needed in the close reading of multiple texts to reach an informed conclusion and the application of knowledge acquired to real-world problems and across disciplines.

Quattrone expressed hope that, going forward, the new version of the Common Core acknowledges the wide variation in cognitive development that exists among students in the primary grades, and he supports the widespread introduction to algebra in eighth grade.

"We welcome the high standards," Quattrone said, "but we will continue to find ways to meet them that support student initiative and responsibility, encourage innovative instructional approaches, and incorporate technology as an essential tool."

Pictured here:  Common Core fifth-grade math book used at The Bronxville School.

Photo by Sarah Thornton Clifford