The Georgia Board of Education has decided to get rid of their Common Core math standards. But what will these changes and new standards mean for students and teachers at Chamblee?

“They’re changing the standards to give teachers more freedom in the classroom, and trying to do away with Common Core altogether,” said analytic geometry and coordinate algebra teacher Nathaniel Berryman. “We’re finally getting used to the changes that they made a few years back, as opposed to having the Common Core, we have the Georgia Professional Standards which are based on Common Core, but we are finally getting used to the new regulations and requirements of that curriculum.”

Standards are changing constantly because the Board of Education keeps trying to improve them. 

“Hopefully this will be the one of the last changes we have for a while,” Berryman said. “It is just frustrating just because the math requirements seem to change every few years, and teachers are having a tough time to adapt and find plausible data to analyze and make the right decisions for our upcoming students.”

Many teachers believe that the standards did need to be updated, but the students are still going to remain their priority.

“As long as [the new standards] go in line with what we’re doing and what our kids need at the time, [they will work],” said Mallory Clark, a coordinate algebra and AP calculus teacher at Chamblee.

Many teachers also agree that the old standards aren’t the best option for the students.

“I taught precalculus, a lot of the precalculus topics went into advanced algebra. And I think that it makes advanced algebra extremely difficult, because they just have so much information to get through. […] I’m hoping that’ll start to level out a little bit, and then it’ll give our kids more of an opportunity to really master the material if they don’t have a million things to try to accomplish in the year,” said Clark.

The new standards may also allow students to focus on topics that are more important to their learning in math classes.

“I feel that students are being required to know things that are no longer necessary. And the information that they are required to know seems to be outdated and obsolete. So, in that aspect, yeah, I guess I am very happy and I thought the change was necessary,” Berryman said.

Overall, these changes probably will not affect the current Chamblee students much.

“The only way it’s going to affect students is, in the long run, it might actually be beneficial to their overall education,” said Berryman.