Common Core Standards release delayed again

I just discussed the pending release of these much-anticipated national standards with Kara Schlosser at the Council of Chief State School Officers today.

Per Ms. Schlosser, due to a very large number of comments on the January 15th draft of the standards, the final versions of both the K to 12 and the College and Career Readiness Standards are not going to be released until March or even April.

That could create some issues here.

The Kentucky Department of Education was planning to meet with the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and the Educational Professional Standards Board to approve the standards on February 10th. I guess that can’t happen if the standards are not even finalized.

Which leads to another concern – Kentucky’s educators seem all fired up to be the first to adopt these standards. I don’t understand that.

Even when finalized, the standards may not be exactly what we need. In fact, we can still honor our agreement to adopt the standards even if we add another 15 percent to them. Clearly, it will take time to review the final standards and determine what, if anything, additional is needed.

In line with that, I just found a proposal from New York about how they were going to handle the approval of the Common Core Standards.

New York is planning a very orderly adoption process, with a full review of the standards and time to add that potential extra 15 percent material, and even a public comment period. The final package isn’t going to be presented to the New York State Board of Regents for final adoption until late July 2010.

Why are we rushing? Given the fact that the Common Core Standards have now been delayed multiple times due to comments, perhaps they are not going to be the magic answer to everyone’s problems, and we need to be more wary about jumping on a bandwagon that might still need a fully functional set of wheels.