As soon as April 18th, the state Department of Public Instruction will have draft revisions of high school math courses available for the public. The State Board of Education is scheduled to vote on adoption of the revised courses in June.
The news came during this week’s State Board of Education planning and work session held in Wilmington. On the first day, the board discussed the process for revising the state’s Common Core state standards.
“We are listening, we have listened, and these standards are being seriously evaluated and changed to meet the needs going forward,” State Board chair Bill Cobey said during the meeting.
Revisions on high school math are moving faster than for the rest of the Common Core state standards because the results of the Academic Standards Review Commission as well as DPI’s research has shown that some of the most severe issues lay there.
The plan is for the draft revisions to be available April 18th for public comment. Then in May, the revisions — including feedback and any additional revisions — will be seen by the State Board for the first time. The board will then vote in June on whether to accept them.
State Board Vice Chair A.L. Collins expressed some reservations Tuesday about the timeline.
“I think part of the problem that we encountered with adopting the standards previously is that we had a lack of open, transparent, participatory process,” he said. “And I think an aggressive timeline is going to create a challenge for that.”
He also said he was concerned that he had no idea exactly what would be different.
“I’m still completely at a loss as to what you’re going to change and how you’re going to change it,” he said.
Here are the documents from the meeting:
Standards Review and Revision Update Overview
English/Language Arts Standards Review Update
English/Language Arts Timeline
Standards Review Progress Update for Math
Below are three videos from the Academic Standards discussion:
In this first video, the State Board hears an overview of the Academic Standards Revision process.
In this second video, the State Board hears about the timeline and process for English/Language Arts Standards Revision:
In this final video, the Board hears about the high school math revisions. Part way through the video, the Board was shown a video. During that section, you may click here to watch the video they saw. You will see a prompt to do so.