Governor Cuomo created a panel to review the flawed rollout of the Common Core. His panel is stacked with supporters of Common Core. The governor invited the public to offer suggestions. Here is one from Jeff Nichols, a parent of children in the New York City public schools and a professor at Queens College and the GraduateCenter of the City of New Yrk:

Professor Nichols writes:

The Common Core Implementation Panel has invited suggestions from the public. Here’s mine, submitted to them this morning.

* * *

My suggestion is very simple:

Withdraw from the Common Core.

No recommendation this panel can come up with will salvage the CCSS, for a very simple reason. Ever growing numbers of parents like me reject the entire concept of federally mandated standards. And when standards are tied to funding, that is a form of mandate.

I consider myself a liberal Democrat. I voted twice for Barack Obama. But I am as offended by the design and implementation of CCSS as the tea party Republicans who oppose all federal interventions in their lives.

Why? The CCSS are expensive, mediocre, redundant and were adopted without due democratic process. They are, in short, a boondoggle perpetrated on the public by politicians who are either ignorant of real educational needs or under the sway of private interests that stand to profit enormously from this initiative.

As a taxpayer, I want the state’s education dollars dedicated to measures that actually improve student learning. The Common Core standards are completely unproven and, judging from early results, ineptly designed — too demanding in early grades, not demanding enough in later ones. Moreover, they come twinned with a new wave of useless and phenomenally expensive standardized tests. My wife and I will opt our children out of all state tests at least until all of New York State has implemented universal pre-K and high quality day care for low-income working families, until every child has the opportunity to learn a musical instrument and has access to the kinds of libraries, gyms and other vital faculties that children who live in affluent communities take for granted.

Our position is not going to change because NYSED acknowledges some errors in its implementation of CCSS. We demand the return of control over curriculum and teaching methods to educators, parents and local communities. The state can feel free to issue recommendations for curriculum, but not the kinds of mandates that have been flowing from CCSS.

All my wife and I want is for our children’s teachers to have the same intellectual freedom to practice their profession according to their best judgment as that enjoyed teachers in the exclusive private schools attended by the children of Barack Obama, Arne Duncan and John King.

That was the reality in my own childhood, growing up attending locally controlled rural public schools in Indiana. In that not-so-distant time and place, high-stakes standardized tests didn’t exist prior to the SAT — and that was optional. Teachers assessed children; principals, fellow teachers and parents assessed teachers. It worked a heck of a lot better than the test-based, wasteful and counterproductive accountability systems of the NCLB era.

The Common Core, like all assaults on democracy, is the product of fear — in this case, that our children will fall behind in the global economy. But what those of us who are actually raising the next generation of Americans understand is that the way to address that fear is not to cede control of our children’s schools to David Coleman and Arne Duncan.

Americans of all political persuasions know that the only thing we should fear and fight against is the erosion of our democracy. A pluralistic, locally governed and free public school system is the bedrock of that democracy, and it will be restored — not by state and federal bureaucrats, but by families like mine.

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.”

###