Parents in the Hudson Valley of New York are outraged by Cuomo’s commission to review the Common Core standards and tests.
This is a region that encompasses both high wealth and high poverty. It had some of the highest opt out numbers in the state.
Here is a large sample:
After conceding that “evidence of failure is everywhere”, Governor Cuomo recently announced his fifteen member 2015 Common Core Commission. Billed as an opportunity to cure an “implementation” problem, the commission is notably lacking in any representation of elementary school parents, let alone critics of the Common Core. Parents across the Hudson Valley reject yet another pointless commission that ignores the concerns of parents and educators.
“A panel of advisors hand picked by Chancellor Tisch made recommendations about the Common Core Learning Standards to the Regents in February 2014 and the Governor himself was responsible for putting together a Common Core Implementation Panel who made recommendations in March 2014. Now, over a year and half later, the Governor admits that “failure is everywhere”. The Governor keeps asking for time to make common core work but my children have no more time to give. Their most formative years are being wasted and abused by this deeply flawed and developmentally inappropriate education reform which focuses on standardized testing and eliminates authentic teaching” said Joanne Tumolo, Mahopac public school parent and co-founder Putnam, Northern Westchester, Southern Dutchess Refuse the Tests.
Failure of the experimental Common Core Learning Standards comes as no surprise to the 220,000 families of public school children who chose to refuse NYS Common Core tests in the spring of 2015. While state education officials claim that the appointment of new test maker, Questar will address the public concerns, parents know that this is simply more of the same. Until New York State takes action to scrap the Common Core Learning Standards and halts the invalid use of discriminatory test scores to evaluate schools and teachers, opt out will grow.
Christine Zirkelbach co-Administrator of Hudson Valley Parent Educator Initiative said: “The Governor continues his charade of listening to the parents of New York State students by appointing a commission to review Common Core State Standards where the majority of the members are not professional, life time educators at all. Parents are not going to be appeased by another commission or rebranding of CCSS. Parents will continue to advocate for our public schools until local control is restored and the Governor and NYSED no longer mandate the corporatization of our children’s education.”
Bianca Tanis, Ulster County Public School parent and co-founder of New York State Allies for Public Education said “While the task force includes business leaders with no pedagogical knowledge, it does not include a single parent of an elementary school child. And of the 15 person panel, there are two teachers, only one of whom is an elementary school teacher. The panel is a sham and disgrace. Union leaders and politicians claiming to support the best interest of children should refuse to participate until the parents and teachers of the young children harmed by these experimental learning standards are represented.
“The Governor’s selected panel is very disappointing. There is not a single member who is an expert or a teacher of Math or English. The exclusion of parents of Special needs students and Special Educators is alarming. This task force is a farce and it’s another failed attempt by the Governor to mend a system that is failing miserably” said Suzanne DiAngelo Coyle, Rockland County public school parent and administrator of Stop Common Core Rockland County.
Who on this commission will actually do the work of reviewing the standards and the tests? This appears to be yet another “Cuomo commission” that has lots of sound and fury, amounting to nothing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
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Thank you!
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I hate to say this, but it is only a matter of time before Cuomo gets legislation passed that will mandate ANY school district in New York State that has less than a 95% rate of test participation to be placed into receivership.
I can almost guarantee that this eventually and ultimately will not affect ONLY struggling schools.
When that happens, there will be a cacophony of protest, and a tsunami of people holding if not stalking their elected officials.
Democracy and justice used to be for everyone, then it was primarily made into something for the rich to engage in. Now, not even the upper middle class professional class of doctors, attorneys, and proprietors of mid-sized successful companies may participate in it through local control of their schools.
Local control is OVER! Hello Eli Broad.
State government wants to strip LEAs of local control, and they will succeed until enough lawsuits are won and enough political pressure is put upon the overclass to back down and go back to their yachts, mansions, and Gucci boutiques . . . . .
Sorry rich McMansion suburban homeowners who love their schools and teachers and whose kids perform well; you have no jurisdiction over your child’s education. Your child is a ward of the state the minute he steps foot into that school building. Fight it or get used to it, but don’t expect anything less from Governor Cuomo.
That’s just the way it is . . .
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Here in the once proud and progressive state of New York it has come down to one simple question regarding our once great public school system.
Exactly how much irreversible damage can Cuomo inflict over the next three years before we toss him out for good?
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Robert
The sky is falling!!!
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And watch out that it does not land on you to make you go “splat!” . . .
I don’t have enough soap and disinfectant to clean up that mess . . . .
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Just like the Moreland Commission.
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Ms. Ravitch here is our super’s reply (a contributor here) to the receivership threats (also posted in comments on the 9/28/15 : Do you really think that the state has the capacity to manage all of these schools? They cannot even manage the revised evaluation plan. That’s their immediate problem. Their other problem is the potential increase in opt outs. The new commissioner has cited addressing this as a priority. First, she needs to better understand why there are opt outs and that it is not just about teacher unions. It is so much more complex.
Those schools in receivership are in the most impoverished communities in the state. The state will have its hands full addressing their needs. If a district, such as X & X, goes into receivership because of scores affected by opt-outs, the state’s credibility, and the governor’s, will sink to even lower depths.
Also, expect more appeals, lawsuits, and procedural entanglements because of the poorly designed evaluation systems.
This ‘new’ Common Core commission will roll out some broad recommendations and will perhaps make changes to language in the standards and topics; however, if they did it right, there would a very strong research-based review with experts – not generalists – but researchers who have studied the standards movement and the relationship between learning standards (not high expectations) that drive curriculum and student outcomes; experts on early childhood and adolescent cognitive and emotional development; experts on learning environments with a look at the science of addressing needs of students with cognitive disabilities and children learning a new language. Finally, there can be no real understanding of the Common Core unless there is a frank discussion of how a punitive testing system is corrupting learning environments across the state.
The work of the American Educational Research Association, The American Statistical Society, and other research organizations should be carefully studied. These are apolitical organizations in search of truth and accuracy of effective teaching and learning, not about ways to find efficiencies and garner public approval for pseudo-accountability measures.
Don’t get me started. 🙂
I hope this helps.
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Mom of one different learner,
The state has the right to turn the schools over to private management, and/or cover them to charters . . . . It’s not the state that will be managing them per say, but those that it privately contracts out to do the job.
NOT a good plan at all.
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They could compromise and dump the stupid VAM component and probably diffuse the opposition but as we know compromise is impossible in ed reform, as is admitting error.
Those public servants should fight on until they CONQUER those public school parents!
God almighty, talk about winning the battle and losing the war.
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Cuomo is only fueling the fire…opt out will significantly increase this year
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Thank you for this post. People who live in Westchester County, reading the following account of Cuomo’s commission, in The Journal News, may come away with the impression that teachers and parents are being included at the table and think the “problem with the Common Core” is solved. Especially when they read that administrators, teachers and parents from local school districts have been offered a seat on the panel.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2015/09/03/common-core-panel-testing-cuomo/71655760/
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Typical of the Journal News! Mr. Rendo, I am working hard to reassure parents that their school won’t be put into receivership – I get there are other forces at work but as our Super states “NY has enuf on their plate”…………parents need to keep up the pressure!
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From Journal News – Another Super: “I find (Cuomo’s) statement a complete contradiction to the punitive and punishing Common Core-based new teacher evaluation law he pushed through the Legislature,” said Pleasantville schools Superintendent Mary Fox Alter.
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“Billed as an opportunity to cure an “implementation” problem, the commission. . . ”
Any and all “implementation problems” can be traced to the fact that the whole educational standards and standardized testing regime is based on epistemological and ontological errors and falsehoods, complete with psychometric fudgings (pseudo mathematical attempts at making the results say what the buyers of the tests want them to say). Those fundamental conceptual problems render any results/outcomes, no matter what the implementation is, COMPLETELY INVALID.
I doubt that commission will be interested in finding out the real/true/correct/veritable issue of educational standards and standardized testing. Can’t go there, way too dangerous.
To understand why read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted total destruction of those educational malpractices in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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