Common Core Halted
Changes at the federal and state levels to the standards, testing, and teacher evaluations associated with the Common Core have drawn positive, although cautious, responses from educators across the South Fork following the adoption of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which had bipartisan approval in Congress and was signed by President Obama early this month.
The act, which updates the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 14-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, eliminates national academic requirements, such as Common Core. Instead, it requires states to establish their own rigorous sets of learning standards. In short, educators say, it provides more local control. While it requires standardized testing it eliminates penalties for schools that perform poorly on those tests and removes a deadline for students to become proficient in reading and math.
In New York State, a task force commissioned by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to examine Common Core recommended many changes, such as decoupling test results and teacher performance reviews, giving fewer standardized tests and making them shorter, and creating a set of new state standards that would be based on advice from educators and parents. The state’s Board of Regents, which oversees public education, voted on Dec. 15 for a four-year moratorium on using student test scores to rate teachers. The Board of Regents is to vote in February to finalize the moratorium.
Many educators have said the problem with Common Core wasn’t the more challenging curriculum itself, but the way it was rolled out, the way tests were put in place, and the way politicians, including Governor Cuomo, attempted to tie students’ scores on the tests to teachers’ evaluations.
Robert Tymann, the East Hampton School District’s assistant superintendent for instruction, said the direct link between test scores and teacher evaluations “took our focus and energy away,” adding “East Hampton schools will continue to improve the learning experience we provide for our students in compliance with, or despite, fluctuations in state politics.”
“The federal government giving power back to the states is good, as long as the state assures that changes to the Common Core now being proposed do not totally disrupt all of the good work done on the standards thus far in our schools,” Lois Favre, superintendent of the Bridgehampton School District, said. “We have embraced the standards, and always have held high standards for our students, so it’s not the standards that have been an issue in classrooms.”
“I had some deep concerns with how rapidly they were implemented,” said Katy Graves, superintendent of the Sag Harbor School District. “Educators felt good about much of the Common Core standards, they just needed to have some feedback because some of the concerns were at the young, developmental levels,” Ms. Graves said. “I don’t think the good parts, the high standards, are going to go away.”
“The new standards in English language arts, math, social studies, and soon science set a rigorous bar for student achievement,” Mr. Tymann said. “This was always the intent of the reform initiative, but politics distorted the process.” He also said he hopes the state “does not throw out all the good that has come through this with the changes that are needed.”
Some in the area are calling the changes a win for the “opt out” movement, in which thousands of parents across the state asked their children to refuse to take state tests. Others also have weighed in. Claude Beudert, co-president of the East Hampton Teachers Association, and Kelly Anderson, a member of the Wainscott School Board who teaches in the Southampton School District, called the changes a step in the right direction.
“This initial step by the Regents did not happen on its own. It was the result of relentless activism and advocacy on the part of parents and educators statewide which have brought us to this point,” Mr. Beudert said.
Ms. Anderson suggested, though, that the moratorium should be extended permanently. “Any attempt to evaluate individual teachers based on test scores will never be an accurate and comprehensive method as long as the tests are given in only a few subjects. . . . So while the Regents’ decision gives cause for an immediate sigh of relief, it is no guarantee that we will not be in exactly the same situation in four years with shiny new ‘New York’ standards and a new company creating the tests.”
Exactly what the state’s new policies and standards will mean remains to be seen. Administrators here say they are awaiting further information, particularly when it comes to the annual reviews of teacher performance, which most local districts had been in the process of negotiating with their teachers associations.
“The implementation of the curriculum, assessments, and aligning it to evaluations has caused the problems, and we need to disentangle them so we can encourage teachers to move forward and do what’s right for students, not what’s right for the test,” Ms. Favre said. “Hopefully, the moratorium will assist us in focusing on what matters — our students.”