BUFFALO, N.Y. — The end of the Common Core teaching standard isn’t as close as some might believe.
“The short answer is no,” said Sam Radford, president of the Buffalo School District parent coordinating council. “The Common Core name is being phased out, but not the Common Core standards.”
He said reports of the demise of the controversial Common Core learning standards are widely exaggerated.
"This conversation that's going around about the Common Core being phased out by 2021, what you really have is a misunderstanding about what the Common Core standards are,” Radford said. “The Common Core standards are just simply standards. They were standards before Common Core, now we have standards that are going to come after Common Core.”
Changing the name from Common Core to something else might end up being the biggest difference.
"What we know as Common Core standards now has been changed to New York's New Generation Standards,” he said. “They're still the standards. A lot of the same standards that were in the Common Core continue to be in the New Generation standards and some of the same standards that came before the Common Core.”
“What has happened is there’s been a re-examination of the standards,” agreed Buffalo Teachers Federation President Phil Rumore. He believes the old system was implemented too quickly and over-tested students.
“There’ve been a group of teachers and people have sat down and tweaked, looked at the Common Core and said, alright, let’s try this,’ but we’re not going to implement it until 2021 to give people an opportunity to develop the curriculum and train the teachers so everybody knows what they’re doing,” he said.
Radford said while he agrees with some of the changes, the bottom line is to maintain a core set of standards so all students have a chance to succeed.
"Standards are not being phased out,” he stressed. “The word Common Core is being phased out. The new term New Generation Standards are being phased in so it's still standards, different name," said Radford.