Faced with a widespread parent rebellion against the Common Core testing, the New York Board of Regents declared they have no intention of making any changes. It’s full steam ahead!
Stay tuned. Rough waters, unseen obstacles, captain not at the helm.
The blog known as Perdido Street notes that Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of New York’s Board of Regents, took control after her hand-picked State Commissioner John King stumbled. Tisch announced 16 parent forums to explain and build support for the Common Core. There will be no back-tracking! The Regents will not be moved, no matter how much parents or teachers object to their plans to rush the implementation and testing of the Common Core.
Perdido Street notes that Tim Daly, now running Michelle Rhee’s New Teacher Project (now called TNTP, as in “The New Teacher Project”), likens all opposition to the Common Core as Tea Party-inspired. This, of course, is a smear intended to silence those who think that the state and the nation should move with all deliberate speed, not simply plunge ahead without forethought.
What is it about the Common Core that makes for so much heat and so little light?
We have noted in the past that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, served as treasurer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst during its first year of operation. Another member of her three-person board was Jason Zimba, who wrote the Common Core math standards. (Zimba is a professor at Bennington College, where Coleman’s mother is president.) The third person on Rhee’s board was an employee of David Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners.
What is the synergy between Common Core and Michelle Rhee’s campaign to destroy teacher tenure and collective bargaining and to promote charters and vouchers? Is Common Core developmentally inappropriate on purpose? Is it intended to make American students look bad?
I hope we will learn more about the relationship between Coleman and Rhee. I hope to learn what part of her agenda he supported and did not support during the time she started to collect millions to advance her attack on teachers and public education.
Alright, boys and girls, time for a standardized test.
Sharpen your #2 pencils.
There is a time limit. There will be no accommodations for those with disabilities.
If you do well, your teacher gets a bonus.
If you fail, your teacher will be fired and your school will be closed.
Good luck!
When faced with public demands about how Common Core would be implemented, about professional development and student privacy, the state board of education in Louisiana passed the problems off to local district. They ducked.
Fact is, they don’t have a clue what to do, but they do know that Governor Bobby Jindal wants Common Core. He wants more evidence of failure so he can justify more vouchers, charters, and entrepreneurs getting public money.
We have heard numerous calls for NY’s Commissioner of Education John King to resign. He disrespects parents. He brooks no dissent. He accuses them of refusing to engage in dialogue after they sit patiently through his hour-plus monologue. And when they boo and hiss him, he storms away and cancels all future scheduled meetings with parents, fearing, no doubt, the same humiliating response.
This blogger, Teacherbiz, has a fresh look at the whole sorry episode. She sees the event presaged in “Hamlet” and demonstrates how literature helps us to understand life (with apologies to David Coleman, who may find greater meaning in “informational text”).
Having been thoroughly embarrassed by his haughty showing in Poughkeepsie, where parents booed him as he lectured them and brushed off their questions, Commissioner John King and the State Board of Regents want to prove they are not afraid to meet parents. They have scheduled 16 meetings across the state.
With only one exception: there are no meetings scheduled in New York City, where 1/3 of the state’s children are enrolled.
Has he learned to listen? We will see?
Has he learned to treat parents with respect? We will see.
Will we find out why he is skipping the state’s biggest district?
Maybe it was an oversight.
The New York Board of Regents has demonstrated that they are out of touch with the people they serve.
One of the few independent-minded Regents, Harry Phillips of Westchester, said recently that the Regents would not fireccommissioner John King despite his arrogant, dismissive treatment of parents at a community forum in Poughkeepsie.
Leave arise for the moment that nearly half the principals in the state have put their name on a petition objecting to his half-baked, destructive educator evaluation plan. The other half were not willing to stick their necks out, in a climate characterized by fear and intimidation emanating from Mr. King.
The issue at hand is that Mr. king announced five public meetings at which he promised to engage in dialogue with parents and listen to their concerns. What happened in Poughkeepsie was no dialogue. Instead, Mr. King lectured parents for over an hour, then gave them two minutes each to respond. He frequently interrupted parents to disagree with them. When the meeting degenerated into boos and catcalls, Mr. King stalked off, claimed that the meeting had been captured by “special interests,” and canceled the four other scheduled meetings around the state.
Many parents have stepped forward to say that their “special interest” is their child, and the only person trying to manipulate the meeting was Mr. King, who clearly had no interest in hearing from parents unless they agreed with him. He made the mistake of thinking he was in North Korea, but he was in Poighkeepsie, where parents rightfully believe that the state commissioner is a public servant, not their supervisor or boss.
So the Regents will keep John King. Will he take lessons in listening instead of lecturing? Will he learn how to show respect to the parents who care more about their children than he does? Can he pretend humility?
Although John King and Arne Duncan claim that the only critics of the Common Core standards and testing are Tea Party fanatics, we have learned in recent days that the man who is most effective in building opposition to the Common Core in New York is John King himself. Parents have learned that the state does not care what they think, does not care about the damage they see done to their children, and is deaf to their voices.
We will watch with interest to see how the next parent meeting with John King goes, if there is one.
Anthony Codybexplains here why the Common Core standards lack legitimacy.
The developers were in a hurry. They ignored the democratic process. They took shortcuts. Consequently, they lack buy-in and legitimacy.
The democratic process is slow and messy but it works better in the long run than authoritarianism. It gains the consent of the governed. Without the consent of the governed, there is coercion, compulsion, distrust, animosity.
That is why the Common Core is in trouble. That is why it may fail.
Democracy matters.
I received the following comment this morning. I don’t have the answer to everything, and I am not sure what I would do in her place, but this is my advice. Organize the other parents of kindergarten children. Go as a group to the superintendent and tell him this is wrong. Get parents of children in first grade and second grade to join you. Others may as well. Speak on behalf of your child and other children at the school board meetings. Ask to meet your local legislators: the mayor, the member of the Assembly, the State Senate. Do not be afraid or intimidated. You are parents. You vote. Build a strong and united parent group and don’t let the powers that be shut you up. If you don’t advocate for your child, no one else will. Moving won’t solve your problem. You will encounter the same things in other states. Organize, inform yourself. Defend your child’s precious childhood.
She writes:
Dear Diane,
Until September of this year, I only had a fleeting knowledge of what the Common Core was all about because I didn’t have a school aged child. This year we eagerly put our oldest son in kindergarten in our upstate, rural New York district. The uneasy feeling in my stomach started on the first day when the parents were ushered into the auditorium and the principal started preparing us that we would find stressed out teachers. Parents with older children began asking questions about why the kindergartners needed to participate in the dreaded testing. Upon returning to my son’s classroom, I did indeed find a stressed out teacher, saying things like, “we are all going to have to work together if we are going to get through this curriculum.” This is when I first encountered the word “module” as well, as I looked at my five year old’s schedule and noticed that he would be doing ELA from 10:45-12:25 every day. He is in full day kindergarten, and the day is packed with Fundations, Writing, ELA, ELA modules, and Math modules. To say alarm bells went off would be an understatement, but we continued thinking, “how bad can kindergarten get?”
Back to school night was a presentation by all five kindergarten teachers, which quickly turned into, “we know this sounds awful, but we promise are going to remember that your children are little.” Within a month of school starting, we were told that they needed to do away with the children’s rest period because there simply wasn’t enough time for it with the curriculum. The more I heard these comments from school, the deeper I dug into the EngageNY modules and started following your blog.
I’m sure you get letters like this every day. I listened to your Town Hall phone call the other night (thank you for not interrupting the questions like Commissioner King in Poughkeepsie) and heard lots of sound advice about what parents and teachers can do to fight back against these ridiculous standards. My question is more basic: Do I send my son to this school tomorrow?
I read educated assessments of the EngageNY curriculum that find it “developmentally inappropriate.” Why should I subject my 5 year old to this when kindergarten isn’t even mandatory? I have the unique situation of living in New York state on the Massachusetts and Connecticut border. As renters, we have options, and I have already decided that my son will not attend 1st grade in the state of New York. But what do I do about today and tomorrow? I fear that he will fall behind in this intense academic environment, but I also fear sticking with it. What do parents do right now?
Sincerely,
Rosemary XXXX
Copake, NY
Mark NAISON, professor of African-American studies at Fordham University, co-founded the BATs.
BATs are everywhere. They think high-stakes testing is child abuse. They think that evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores is nonsense.
Mark Naison here posts a hilarious parody of New York’s educator evaluation system, untested, being built in mid-air, that old airplane cliche.
If you are angry about high-stakes testing, watch it.
If you are upset about the loss of teacher autonomy and professionalism, watch it.
If you want to laugh out loud, watch it.
If you work for the New York State Education Department, DO NOT WATCH IT.
Be careful, laughter is dangerous.
