NEW YORK (PIX11) — The education debate on the Common Core State Standards continued Tuesday night in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Parents, community members and educators were invited to speak at a forum at Medgar Evers College.
It was a heated debate at times, one that included people for and against it.
As one speaker said, “In my professional opinion, the common core will not close the achievement gap.”
The New York State Education Department has described the Common Core as a new set of standards. It’s a new way of teaching Kindergarten through 12th grade. Students are held to a higher standard and tested at one as well.
The testing is what really bothered parent and former teacher Kevin Jacobs. “The way that they want to measure this is through high stakes standardized tests which are extremely damaging,” Jacobs said.
New York State Education Commissioner John King responded to the criticism. “We are committed to smarter testing as well as our work on the common core,” King said.
Tanicka Boyd of the organization Students First New York said the Common Core creates an equal learning environment across New York City.
“It’s important for our parents and communities like Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and Brownsville to have the same set of standards that they have on the Upper West Side or even in Park Slope.”
Anyta Brown, a grandmother to middle school and high school students in Brooklyn, said she supports it. “They find it a little challenging but we need to change the basic way of educating our children.”
