Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, NY, has read the Common Core standards. The 2005 Néw York standards, she concluded, were superior.
Parents and educators are outraged.
Does State Commissioner John King care?
Burris writes:
“”Hit the delay button.” That was the message New York’s senators sent to state Education Commissioner John King during last week’s hearing. Education Committee Chairman John Flanagan made it clear that if King did not act, senators on his panel would. Senator Maziarz observed that the only Common Core supporters remaining are “yourself (King) and the members of the Board of Regents.” To make his position crystal clear, Senator Latimer emphatically smacked the table while calling for a delay, likening the rollout of the Common Core to “steaming across the Atlantic” when there are icebergs in the water.
“The defiant King refused to acknowledge the icebergs, and remained insistent on full steam ahead. He let the senators know “you’re not the boss of me” by asserting that standards are controlled by the State Education Department and the Regents, not by the legislature.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The old standards were empty and pretty vapid too. Get rid of standards and standardized education. A bunch of BS.
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precisely so
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I do think there is something to be said for some sort of basic standards, especially in the case of areas of the country where they want to teach that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, that evolution is “just a theory”, that slaves were “just unpaid interns”, etc.
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I have to disagree. Our country is more like the Balkans than, say Europe. The USSR was able to put a lid on Balkan ethnic disputes via brute force for 75 yrs. When the centralized govt fell apart for economic reasons in 1989, the ethnic battles took up where they’d left off in 1917. What we re going through now is similar: many southern states’ cultures were stifled by fed imposition after the Civil War & again after Civil Rights laws. Each state is going to have to work to bring its culture into the 21stC.
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I’m thinking we were doing ok in NC just fine without Common Core or the DOE overstepping their bounds.
(Other than needing the $400 million RttT promised to deliver).
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It’s funny. I did my Master’s thesis on the folk singing of the Balkans. I immersed myself in the variety of cultures that comprise it and I never once compared it to the US.
But I see your point.
I like your point.
Thank you for a new way of looking at our country!
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Exactly. People want to legislate what actually has to be worked out by communities themselves, over time. We now have state standards and frameworks throughout the country that include teaching of evolution. In many places, these are ignored.
Having mandatory standards has too many downsides, including dramatic negative effects on curricular and pedagogical innovation. They ossify received and often false ideas.
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A lot of confusion arises because people don’t distinguish between “some sort of basic standards” and the “standards” of data-driven accountability to corporate oversight in education.
So I disagree with Burris here. We know now the Common Core $$ are worse, but the 2005 New York standards still aren’t “superior”.
Maybe that’s a zen riddle.
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At least the NYS Standards were a guide that could be lived with that didn’t come with a scripted curriculum.
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I say we start a pool to see when King “resigns”. My guess, April 1st, 2014.
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I say the appropriate date of March 13th…. but any day before then is JUST FINE.
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oops thought this day fell on a Friday (NOT.. falls on Thursday). Oh well.
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I think during Cuomo’s Governor Race, sometime in October.
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I asked a veteran teacher down East (NC) who teaches middle school social studies if she liked the Common Core and she paused and simply said, “what we were doing was working.” And she sighed.
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I’ve waited all day to share King’s link to the NYS high school curriculum, which is specious, at best, but the link has suddenly disappeared, and all I get is “access denied.” Were they afraid New Yorkers would be upset at The Communist Manifesto as an alternate anchor text for 11th grade English or Song of Solomon in 10th would awaken the wrath of upstate? Twain, Dickens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Poe all missing! But novel and informational text EXCERPTS abound. Also something called “agnostic texts” for pseudo, “bootstrapped” research type projects. Look for updates on engageNY. So is CC$$ are standards, what is this?
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Elucidate, please?
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FYI:
The New York State Regent’s Exam in ELA is supposed to be changed to a Common Core Regents Exam for the June 2014 Exam. We are all curious to see what it will look like.
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If
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NYSED listed core texts for English for grades 9-12, apparently so that districts could buy full length texts for grade levels if they didn’t already own them.The text (by module-newspeak for unit) was there since Friday, but has vanished tonight. The extensive list published last spring is still accessible.
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Can’t wait to see if the full length texts have been updated or are still inappropriate for the given grade level. I hope they give some choices.
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
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In 2010, Finn and Petrilli of the Fordham Institute graded New York’s math and ELA standards as “clearly inferior” to CCSS (never mind that CCSS has never been piloted).
Fordham also graded California, Indiana, and DC ELA standards as “clearly superior” to CCSS. (Fordham ranks the math standards for these three states higher thst CCSS but labels such “too close to call.”) However, New York’s 2009 and 2011 ELA NAEP scores (4th and 8th grades) are better than DC and California and tie Indiana.
Furthermore, the percentage of students scoring “proficient” in both ELA surpasses both DC and California. Indiana has a slightly higher percentage of students scoring “proficient.” in math.
However, Finn and Petrilli choose to brand New York’s ELA standards as “mediocre” and CCSS as “superior,” and New York’s math standards as “decent” and CCSS math as “:impressive.”
It’s all a game, folks.
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Fordham’s 2010 “grading” of state standards:
Click to access SOSSandCC2010_FullReportFINAL.pdf
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Interesting. Some of the states with the so called “best” standards do not have a reputation of an excellent education system. Texas? Please!
It’s all in the grading system. Points were taken off if the standards were not specific. No points were taken off if the content was inappropriate. If it looked difficult, it must be rigor. So 9th graders reading Kafka must be rigorous.
NYS scored low because districts – schools – teachers were free to make their own literature choices. The ELA standards were just not specific enough. The Math were better, but still “lacking” that special quality.
Therefore – micromanaging was a plus. Inappropriate curriculum – a plus, since that implies rigor. Teacher choice? Horrors!
It’s all in the way you define the rubric.
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2009 NAEP ELA report:
Click to access 2010458.pdf
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2009 NAEP math report:
Click to access 2010451.pdf
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2011 NAEP ELA report:
Click to access 2012457.pdf
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2011 NAEP math report:
Click to access 2012458.pdf
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Correction:
Furthermore, New York surpasses the percentage of students scoring “proficient” in both ELA and math in both DC and California and ties Indiana. (A generalization for both 2009 and 2011)
In math, Indiana has a slightly higher percentage of students scoring “proficient” than New York.
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If it ain’t broke, why fix it.
And if you break down the results by socio economic status, I wonder how the comparisons would pan out.
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I looked at the comparisons and the biggest predictor of how well the state did overall was the percentage of free and reduced lunch students. Taking that into consideration, NYS held it own.
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I spend the better part of my lunch and my prep period every day pulling various resources. It is a time waster. Valuable time I could be using to craft better lessons, is wasted just trying to find practice problems or re-write questions with the new standards. Has anyone seen that copies of old textbooks on Amazon are going up? I think educators, myself included, are scrambling to replace this garbage module hodgepodge with tried and true texts. I refuse to illegally copy because I have respect for authors. I also refuse to “adapt” the modules (as my district has now proclaimed, “Don’t adopt the modules. Adapt the modules!”). I have three children under the age of six at home. I am not going to pour hours of at home time into adapting a broken pseudo-curriculum (b/c it was originally presented as a curriculum, even though this is now denied). I am just pulling old resources (math problems, literature, poetry, science readings, and social studies chapters) and reworking the assessments. Ugh. As one in the trenches, this is a mess.
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King isn’t used to taking criticism. The problem with rubbing elbows with the Masters of the Universe is one assimilates their sensibilities of brilliance.
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We need to clone Senator Latimer:
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Senator Latimer is on his way to understanding the problems inherent in the system. I hope his voice makes a difference.
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