Superintendent: New Education Standards Will Have 'Very Little' Effect on Brookline Schools

Superintendent Bill Lupini expects the state's shift toward uniform national education standards will have little effect on what is taught in Brookline's classrooms, saying the standards are just one tool Brookline educators use to shape the town's curricula.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to adopt the new standards, called Common Core, for mathematics and English language arts last week, saying the new guidelines would require a higher level of academic rigor from students than the state standards already in place. All school systems in Massachusetts are expected to align their curricula with new standards by the the fall of 2012.

But Lupini said he expects the changes to have "very little" effect on how Brookline develops its own classroom curricula, noting that Brookline school officials already take a variety of national guidelines into account, along with state standards, when decided what and how children should be taught.

"What we do is more based on approach than knee-jerk reaction to a document," he said. "I view it, at worse, as adding one more document to that conversation."

Lupini also noted that state Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester has told local educators that Massachusetts will be allowed to deviate from the Common Core curricula by up to 15 percent, though it isn't clear how that would be quantified.

And though the Brookline Schools use state education standards as a guide in developing town-wide curricula, Lupini said local schools are not required to follow them exactly. The only time that would be come an issue, he said, would be if the town's students were found to be underperforming.

The Obama administration has encouraged state to adopt common guidelines in an effort improve educational equality across the country. By adopting the national standards, Massachusetts will improve its chances of collecting federal funding for schools.