http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/nyregion/new-york-state-school-standards-andrew-cuomo.html 2016-09-22 03:33:56 Cuomo Called for ‘Reboot’ of School Standards. Officials Propose Tweaks Instead. After more than 130 parents and teachers reviewed the standards, education officials proposed mostly minor changes for the state’s version of the Common Core. === More interactive lessons for the youngest students. Reading more fiction. Delaying teaching the order of operations in math until the fourth grade. Those are some of the changes New York State public schools may see in their classrooms, under revised standards proposed on Wednesday by education officials. The state adopted the standards six years ago as its version of the Common Core, a body of knowledge that was supposed to unify and improve American education. But the Common Core quickly became a lightning rod, with opponents saying, among other things, that it stripped localities of some of their autonomy and its expectations were not age appropriate. A year ago, Gov. But the changes proposed on Wednesday by the State Education Department do not go that far. Many were tweaks to language, or clarifying examples. But the broad concepts that students were expected to master in math and English from prekindergarten through the 12th grade were left unchanged. Learning standards are like goal posts for what a student should be able to do at a given grade level. To learn a broad concept like Phonics and Word Recognition, for example, in a standard that is not changing, a Education officials suggested changing 60 percent of the English standards and 55 percent of those in math. Some of the changes involved moving a learning goal from one grade to another, erasing some and adding others. “Ultimately, this is like a map,” MaryEllen Elia, the state education commissioner, said of the standards. “It’s important for them to understand what the destination is, however. That’s one of the things we think has come out of this review, and is extremely helpful.” State tests will not reflect any changes to the standards until the 2018-19 school year, Ms. Elia said. To come up with these changes, review committees, which comprised more than 130 teachers and parents, looked over each standard and decided whether it should be changed, removed or left the same. A task force convened by Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, Kim Namkoong, a former technology manager for hospital systems and the mother of three children in the Bethlehem Central School District near Albany, was on the committee for geometry standards. She described her group’s revisions as relatively small. “Over all, I think we changed more language than anything else,” Ms. Namkoong said. Fewer than 10 percent of the standards she worked on saw “significant content changes.” She is also a volunteer with The public can comment on the proposed changes until early November on the Education Department’s The Board of Regents, the state’s highest education body, is expected to consider the changes early next year. One alteration that several states have made has been to Ms. Elia suggested that a name change was likely in New York, too.