Governor Andrew Cuomo released a statement blasting the Regents for seeming to delay the tough teacher evaluation that Cuomo wants.
Common Core has turned into a giant mess. The Regents and Commissioner John King want to appear to compromise without compromising.
The governor condemns them for compromising.
Here is the Regents’ statement.
This is the report of the Regents Working Group that came up with tweaks.
The governor said this:
Andrew M. Cuomo – Governor
Statement From Governor Cuomo
Albany, NY (February 10, 2014)
“Today’s recommendations are another in a series of missteps by the Board of Regents that suggests the time has come to seriously reexamine its capacity and performance. These recommendations are simply too little, too late for our parents and students.
“Common Core is the right goal and direction as it is vital that we have a real set of standards for our students and a meaningful teacher evaluation system.
However, Common Core’s implementation in New York has been flawed and mismanaged from the start.
“As far as today’s recommendations are concerned, there is a difference between remedying the system for students and parents and using this situation as yet another excuse to stop the teacher evaluation process.
“The Regents’ response is to recommend delaying the teacher evaluation system and is yet another in a long series of roadblocks to a much needed evaluation system which the Regents had stalled putting in place for years.
“I have created a commission to thoroughly examine how we can address these issues. The commission has started its work and we should await their recommendations so that we can find a legislative solution this session to solve these problems.”
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
What is it about politicians that makes me want to throw up? Cuomo is clueless, the Regents are clueless and John King is clueless. Talk about the blind leading the blind…..
Reading the regent’s statement was quite nauseating, indeed. Delay but same ol same ol. Oh, they “knew” there would have to be some tweaking. Such brilliant minds.
And that doesn’t begin to address Quasimodo, no can’t do that to Quasimodo, Cuomo’s response!
Governor Andrew Cuomo: “However, Common Core’s implementation in New York has been flawed and mismanaged from the start.”
Reality check: An informed, aware, and caring public, made up of educators, parents, and other involved community members aren’t buying the “edu-reform” propaganda.
Let the Governor, the Regents and King all turn on each other. No one trusts anyone: Teachers, admin, politicians, appointed officials. Survival of the fittest…what a great environment for children, teaching and learning.
Yes, of course it creates an excellent environment for teaching and learning.
It IS all about the kids.
Yes, definitely .
All about the little buggers.
🙂
Today is another example of the damage control that needs to be done following the posturing and puffing buffoonery of a governor that attacks from cover of popular opinion (instead of leading on principle), combined with the covert attack of big money and swirling appointment/positioning campaign support promises. Get lost Cuomo. You are more transparent than you want to be.
So true!
Cuomo…doing anything to push through his agenda…which includes the selling out of our children for power and profit…his mantra of full speed ahead on a failed policy.
Shameful!
It is hard, maybe impossible, to run for president without Wall Street $$$, and you can’t get it without supporting charters.
Which Cuomo said that?
Wait a minute… Let me get this straight. In November, Cuomo made it very clear that he does not control the State Education Department. And now he is in essence saying that he does. Anyone else confused? http://wamc.org/…/cuomo-appears-distance-himself-common…
Apparently someone in their office has read Sun Tzu.
”
“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
and
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
WE MUST USE ANOTHER QUOTE:
“Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?”
Well, he has also said he’s the one person in Albany that cares about students, he’s a lobbyist for the students, involved publicly in the ramming of common core tests and evals upon our public schools…I think he saw the rocks flying, jumped behind the right side and is now is in disguise and pretending to join the villagers storming his castle.
So he admits it’s flawed, but we still need to go ahead with (the evaluation) it.
He even says it was flawed from the start.
Wasn’t there a Pickett’s charge that’s sort of like this?
Yep, “Doing the Wrong Thing Righter”
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) did when he noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
It’s all about teacher evaluations, can’t have one (CCSS) without the other (current teacher evaluations).
Thanks for this, Diane. It definitely puts the good name “Cuomo” in a new (and not so historically pleasant) light. If this were 200 years ago, the Governor would be blasting the “regents” of New York medicine for refusing to spend additional dollars on the gallons of leeches necessary to ensure the evaluation of doctors. Wasn’t that the “data driven” version of “medical science” back then? Or maybe he would have screamed because some agency refused to provide any further budgets to collect the skulls necessary to further the science of Louise Agazziz and those who had proved the superiority of the “white races” by measuring cranial capacity. The fun with history provided by this guy’s arrogance is wonderful to behold…
Satire. We are getting there, but far from fast enough to keep up with such pontifications as this Cuomo nonsense.
“…as it is vital that we have a real set of standards for our students…” Help me out here, New Yorkers: didn’y NYS already have a ‘real’ & possibly even superior set of stds before CCS?
Yes, and he knows it. Don’t buy his BS for one nanosecond. What a bloviating ignoramus he is. How on earth does this shameless demagogue have a 65% favorability rating?
Look, Cuomo just wants all teacher’s to be fired so that the state won’t have to pay for their pensions and benefits, just like his father who went after the pensions of all dedicated government employees. Then he can say what a great job he did and how much money he saved the state and tax payers. But, if it came to him reducing his salary and his benefits please don’t even go there and never mind if his scheme destroys the lives of millions of children and dedicated teachers.
CUOMO NEEDS TO BE VOTED OUT PLAIN AND SIMPLE!
WOULD NYSAPE PLEASE START A CAMPAIGN TO RID US OF THIS HYPOCRITE ANYBODY IS BETTER THAN HIM !
Democrats need to primary him. And teachers, parents, and administrators need to vote against him. Of course, all the horrible things he is doing is to gain the presidency with the help of his plutocrat friends. He doesn’t really care about students or public employees. Or New York.
300,000 teachers and administrators plus another 200,000 disgruntled parents. That’s half a million votes he is losing in this fiasco another poster so aptly dubbed, “CUOMOCORE”
Unless the Republicans get a reasonable candidate, Cuomo will win. I can’t see people voting for Trump or Paladino.
Agreed. Maybe this CUOMOCORE fiasco will motivate the repubs.
They fear him. Cuomo makes Christie look like Mr. Rodgers.
He is no Democrat.
This is too rich to believe. They can’t get the evaluation system together because the common core is a huge disorganized mess, and the only ones who desperately require any evaluation are the people who created the mess and the politicians who support it. The only qualified, hardworking sane bunch among you all are the teachers. No evaluation is really necessary.
Isn’t there a considerable amount of Federal money that is contingent on compliance with RTTT? I thought I read that about two billion dollars was going to NYS. Implementing the common core and teacher evaluations based on student test scores is a big part of RTTT.
This must be informing, and deforming, education policy decisions in the Governor’s office, and at the Board of regents.
NY “won” the maximum award in the RTTT contest: $700 million.
The problem is that to implement all of the requirements, districts spend @10 times as much.
My district slice of the pie was $17K – that’s $13 per student. We would have been better off running a car wash.
These recommendations change nothing about APPR. Cuomo’s creating an artificial threat to his signature law so his “commission” gets the message loud and clear: don’t mess with APPR. His press release seeks to curry favor with parents by bashing Common Core while suggesting that teachers are standing in the way of change. Cuomo refuses to acknowledge that APPR and Common Core comprise the same suffocating web. He’s using the same old tactic of pitting the public against teachers while ensuring that his commission recommends even less than the Regents did today.
After a close read of Cuomo’s statement, it is quite evident his ‘independent commission is not so independent. Amazing how Prince Andrew knows what they are going to recommend before they even meet. Time to search for a new candidate for Gov.
Has anyone heard from Iannuzzi on this?
Cuomo blast Regents for bad implementation of CCSS. Well how was the implementation botched? That’s right it was RUSHED.
And who was responsible for fast-tracking it? Cuomo.
So Cuomo throws the BOR under his presidential campaign bus. He is a political low-life.
He threw New York’s children, their parents, and professional educators under the bus…now he will do the same to the Board of Regents…and called himself the “lobbyist for the children”.
This is a prime example of what happens when one sells his own soul…may the name Cuomo be added to Webster’s dictionary for words of 2014…
a CUOMATIC – one who sells those who have trusted him or her, for personal motive, gain, or profit.
I think it’s ironic that seventh and eighth graders in advanced math who are taking the Regents exams will be exempt from the 8th grade math assessment. Now nobody will be left to get a four – all the good math students will have been “weeded” out.
Many districts do not want the best math students skimmed out of their data and will require accelerated 8th graders to take the April CCSS math assessment as well as both June math tests. That’s 10.5 hours of math testing alone. Add another 7.5 hours for ELA and science and the top students in grade 8 can look forward to EIGHTEEN HOURS of state testing this spring.
Add in local summative exams in all their other courses and insanity is redefined by CCSS/APPR. Parent wake up and stop the madness.
Correct me if I’m wrong – but it’s the more reasonable local assessments which are bolstering a teacher’s APPR score? If they are eliminated, than the CCSS exams will have more teeth and more teachers will fail.
The Regents will offer the ELA exams in a students native language for the first two years, yet they don’t have translated exams available. How are they going to get this done by June?
I can’t wait to see what an exam in “Karen” looks like. It’s an oral, not a written language.
And what does that 1% testing time mean?
So how does this flip-flop impact all the new NYS teacher certification tests ( ALST, EAS edTPA) that have been scheduled and paid for this spring based on the common core standards? I’m sure Pearson gets paid either way this mess goes.
Cuomo is clueless to the education and keeps changing his mind about everything!!This is the problem people when you have a lawyer (cuomo is an lawyer) in position such as governor….You see the problem with most of our politicians is that they are all lawyers and lawyers are combative, argumentative and always think they are right – just look across the river and see fat boy lawyer christy.
Spit on all these corrupt education reform idiots like students first michelle rhee piece of sh** who seem to be a thorn that you can’t remove off your foot or something. All they do is fuel confusion in this case applauding cuomo for coming out on something he absolutely knows nothing about. .These organizations fuel peoples anger as they are literally like a pain in the ass…..students first is an organization filled with orangutans in a cage who just make noise but know nothing about what the hell is going on….the people in these reform organizations are people who go to the toilet, eat and sleep and just wait to see who they can aggravate or any given day..they are corrupt as can be just ask michelle rhee about what happened in DC when she was chancellor…..
Ellen
Did you hear about the 2s?
NTTeach – What are the 2s?
Student score groups: 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s
A student score group. As in 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s
Oh yes – a 2 is now an acceptable grade. So they’ve raise the bar and lowered the standards. Just like the Regents – a 56 will get you a 65 on the Living Environment Regents. So much for “rigor”.
Ultimately, these exams are whittling away at the quality of education, resulting in the exact opposite of the promoted rigor.