This month, the New York State Board of Regents released a “Path Forward” for implementation of Common Core standards. Though the report posed as a course correction, it is little more than a Trojan Horse.
Fundamentally, despite promising a kinder, gentler rollout with a few delays and tweaks, the document reflects Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch’s simplistic dependence on test-based evaluation of students and teachers.
So it was astounding when, within minutes of the document’s release, Gov. Cuomo went ballistic. Cuomo charged that the “recommendations are another in a series of missteps by the Board of Regents that suggests the time has come to seriously re-examine its capacity and performance.” He continued his denunciations last week.
What’s going on here? Everyone’s jockeying to pretend like they’re listening to the intense anti-Common Core backlash that’s underway across the state — while proceeding to go about business as usual.
This is not acceptable. But in New York today, education politics is about politics, not education.
In the week prior to the release of the Regents plan and in a rare show of bipartisanship, Republican and Democratic legislative leaders issued admonitions to the State Education Department calling for a “minimum two-year delay” in using Common Core-based tests in high stakes student, teacher and principal evaluations unless parent and educator concerns were addressed.
That would be a serious, meaningful, concrete change of course.
Yet while “Path Forward” pretends to respond to critics, its substance is more of the same.
High school grads will not have to pass English Regents Exams aligned to the Common Core until the Class of 2022, with phased-in Math requirements, but their teachers can still be fired based on inadequate student performance unless they prove district failure to provide “necessary [Common Core] supports” between 2012 and 2014.
What a double standard: Student accountability will be delayed because the Regents lack confidence that kids can meet new measures — but teachers can suffer for the same scores, resulting in just as much teaching-to-the-test and test prep as before!
And bizarrely, that wasn’t what Cuomo decided was devastating. Instead, he railed that “Path Forward” might prevent teachers’ test-based firings in cases where districts could be proven to have botched the rollout.
Only Cuomo knows for certain what his motives are, but it looks like he’s playing a cynical game here. His remarks, I believe, were meant to further undermine the Regents’ credibility as the primary state education policy-making body, a role the governor himself would prefer to play.
But under the state Constitution, the governor is subordinate — since the Regents are appointed by the Legislature with no direct gubernatorial input. Cuomo doesn’t appoint Tisch or the state education commissioner, now John King.
Through her P.R. campaign, including a fingers-in-ears listening tour, Tisch is trying to defuse widespread criticism of the Regents’ curriculum standards, testing, data gathering, community outreach and a host of other missteps. But Cuomo’s political ambitions require that Tisch not be forgiven so quickly.
By publicly demeaning the Regents and demanding that we “seriously reexamine its capacity and performance,” Cuomo was not just questioning a single policy. He was re-launching his own campaign to be our “education governor,” perhaps building support for a constitutional amendment replacing New York’s unique legislatively-appointed board with a more traditional State superintendent appointed by the governor or, at least, direct representation through his own Regents appointees.
He has a heavy lift. This week’s Sienna College poll says New Yorkers, by an overwhelming three-to-one margin, trust the current Board of Regents over the governor as our primary education policy-makers.
As state and city officials increasingly use schools as their arena for one-upsmanship, we will see more of these fights over pre-K, charters, curriculum, accountability and similar issues. As a result, the public must become more aware of Trojan Horses that hide political ambition within empty displays of supposed instructional progress.
Bloomfield is professor of urban education at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College
