Teaching Profession

AFT Will Award Grants to Help Affiliates Revise, Critique Common Core

By Stephen Sawchuk — July 11, 2014 1 min read
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Los Angeles

The American Federation of Teachers will announce today that it plans to give out grants to analyze, critique, and even rewrite parts of the Common Core State Standards.

The grants will go out from the union’s Innovation Fund, first rolled out in 2009.

In a background statement, the AFT said that members embrace the standards, but believe aspects of the initative need reform and that teachers’ voices haven’t been represented enough in their development or implementation.

This is interesting for a few reasons. It’s yet another example of AFT qualifying its support of the common core. And of course, rewriting parts of the common standards means they run the risk of not really being “common” anymore. It’s also a change for the Innovation Fund, whose prior common-core grants were focused on implementation.

Both the NEA and AFT have a complicated relationship with the standards. They’ve previously been steadfast supporters of the standards themselves, but critical of implementation. But both are now saying that parts of the standards may need to be rewritten.

The grants will go out sometime this fall.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Teacher Beat blog.