This week’s news is frustratingly familiar: A new round of international tests finds American students stagnating in reading and math even as other countries improve.
Students in the U.S. ranked 20th in reading and 30th in math on the Program for International Student Assessment, which was administered in 65 countries. And while poverty pulls down performance, even the most affluent quartile of U.S. students ranked only 28th among its peers.
The results signal once again our need for revamped standards, curriculum that transforms rote knowledge into informed problem-solving and instruction that builds lifelong habits of learning.
Thanks to the Common Core standards, New York and other states are moving toward all of that. Schools have worked since 2010 to make this fall’s statewide launch of the new standards a success — led by our amazingly committed teachers and school chiefs and supported by many of New York’s political leaders.
Unfortunately, Gov. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t seem to be among them right now.
The man who memorably called himself “the lobbyist for the students” has been painfully absent as the state’s top educators struggle to make a case for the standards.
Irrational alarm over the low (but meaningful) scores on last spring’s state tests — the first to be aligned to the standards — continues to grow.
Teachers unions are digging in to prevent student performance on harder tests from informing teaching evaluations. And a few loud parents’ haranguing of State Education Commissioner John King at town hall meetings has become a staple of evening newscasts.
Opposition won’t kill the initiative, but it could well set it back. That would mean tens of thousands of students will continue to be tested against standards that don’t tell them or their families whether they are prepared for college. They would continue to receive the higher test scores they are accustomed to and, as ever, would need remediation when they get to college.
Only a small percentage will ever complete remediation, let alone earn a degree. Under the old standards, we insisted students receive threes and fours — knowing full well that they would be more likely to fail in the future.
The governor owns the biggest pulpit in the state and needs to use it to deliver this message. Instead, he was silent when the state’s largest teachers union called for a three-year “moratorium” on using the Common Core for high-stakes decisions.
He was silent when King rightly described the moratorium as a bad idea, a “distraction” — for which the commissioner has been predictably repaid with protests calling for his dismissal.
And Cuomo has been silent as King and the Common Core are pilloried by aggrieved audiences across the state.
The governor said in October that he didn’t think King should step aside. But he added: “I don’t think it’s my place to say if he should resign or if he should stay. I don’t appoint him, as you know.”
A second paltry defense followed a few weeks ago. “There’s no doubt that there are significant elements, at least in the transition, that are problematic,” the governor observed.
“[The implementation] is something we’re watching very closely, and it’s something that might be the subject of legislative changes next year . . . It’s not anything that I control, so we are watching it.”
In sum, at a critical moment in its rollout, the governor has reacted to the most promising school reform in memory by leaving its chief advocate in New York twisting in the wind, criticizing its roll-out and introducing the idea that the Legislature might modify it — presumably to accommodate grown-ups who want more time to get used to it.
These actions are especially disappointing because Cuomo has led aggressively on school reform in the past. He inherited a deadlocked negotiation over teacher evaluations between the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers that exposed the state to the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds.
Investing loads of political capital, he twice won legislative measures to leverage a deal, ultimately giving King authority to impose a solution.
It is not too late on Common Core. The governor needs to stand forthrightly beside King and Regents Chair Meryl Tisch and against misconceptions and delays.
He needs to refocus the debate on what’s at stake for students. Namely: The standards we have been using for years prepare only 37% of state graduates for college, including only 21% in New York City and only 13% of black and 15% of Hispanic students.
We have an opportunity to change this system. Nothing justifies waiting while we fail more students.
New York students need a lobbyist who can get those messages heard.
Brown is founder of the Parents’ Transparency Project.
