Yielding to mounting pressure from Gov. Cuomo and state legislators including state Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel, as well as dissenters within their own ranks such as Regent Roger Tilles, the Board of Regents seems to be retreating somewhat from the heavy-handed implementation of Common Core that has caused such distress for parents, students, teachers and school administrators.
The State Board of Regents P-12 Education and Higher Education committees introduced recommendations for changes (expected to be adopted by the full board) that call for delaying the impact of Common Core-related state assessments on educators and students, and reducing the level of local school district testing associated with the new teacher evaluation law and higher standards for teaching and learning.
Under the changes, the class of 2022 will be the first to face the new higher graduation requirement to pass Common Core-based Regents exams at the college and career ready level – 12 years after the adoption of the standards in 2010. Also, “to ensure that students are not unfairly penalized by the transition to higher standards, the requirements for Academic Intervention Services (mandatory tutoring for struggling students) will be adjusted and guidance will be issued to districts making clear that the State Education Department (SED) neither requires nor encourages districts to make promotion or placement decisions using student performance on state assessments in grades 3-8, but if districts choose to do so, they should make adjustments to ensure students are not negatively impacted by the Common Core transition and should use multiple measures – not grades 3-8 state assessment results alone.”
The board also showed its willingness to tackle the biggest complaint: over-testing.
“The Board recognized that a variety of pressures at the state and local level may have resulted in students in some districts being tested more than needed or rote standardized test preparation that crowds out quality instruction,” education Commissioner John B. King Jr. said.
The measures approved by the two committees will reduce local testing by:
Increasing flexibility for districts to reduce local testing used to inform teacher evaluation
Creating an expedited review process for districts that propose to amend their teacher evaluation plans to reduce local testing
Eliminating local traditional standardized tests for K-2 used to inform teacher evaluations (The state does not administer traditional standardized tests in K-2.)
Capping at 1 percent the instructional time that can be used for local assessments used to inform teacher evaluations (The federally required State assessments in grades 3-8 English Language Arts and Mathematics account for less than 1% of instructional time.)
“We have listened to the concerns of parents and teachers,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch said. “We’ve heard the concerns expressed at the hearings and forums, and we regret that the urgency of our work, and the unevenness of implementation, have caused frustration and anxiety for some of our educators, students, and their families. This report is designed to make significant and timely changes to improve our shared goal of implementing the Common Core.
King said, “Any major shift – especially one involving 700 school districts, more than 4500 schools, and millions of students – is going to require adjustments and course corrections along the way. The implementation of the higher standards has been uneven, and these changes will help strengthen the important work happening in schools throughout the state. As challenging as implementation has been, we have to remember one important fact: the old standards were not adequate.”
So what actually will the recommendations mean for Great Neck?
Great Neck Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Dolan stressed that the district does not have any problem with the higher standards of the Common Core curriculum – in fact, the district embraces them.
The problem has been the testing regimen and the artificial way in which the Board of Regents set the “cut score” – the score at which a student is deemed to have failed, with implications of being left back or requiring Academic Intervention Services and impacting teacher evaluation – were artificially set high.
Here in Great Neck, where 98 percent of our children graduate, go on to college and successful careers, 30-40 percent of our students were deemed “nonproficient” under the new regimen (the results coming well after the term when they might have been used to fine-tune teaching). “Nonproficient” means that they are in jeopardy of failing to make the grade for college and career, when generations of successful Great Neck students, contradict that conclusion. (What, in fact, were the tests measuring?)
“Kids got the answers right, but they set passing rate so high – government believes that raising the bar is the way to get students to jump higher,” commented Robert Schaeffer, public education director, of FairTest, a Boston-based organization that has opposed the overuse of high-states testing.
The board of regents may now admit to the error of the way the tests were rolled out, but they do not admit to the fact that they set the “cut score” after the results were in – meaning that the failure rate was pre-determined.
Students may be widgets to the state bureaucrats, but they are people who came out of this experience traumatized.
A 13-year-old seventh grader in Glen Cove, accustomed to getting 4s on her exams and under a lot of pressure from her parents to excel at school, went home from the first day of the three-day ELA test and “fell” out of a window to her death.
There are real consequences of playing such games with people’s lives.
“Kids are living with stigma,”Dolan commented. What is more, the district, which had to cut millions out of its budget last year to stay below the cap, “had to find $200,000 of unbudgeted money for AIS this year, and though the state was quick to say ‘You don’t have to,’ in Great Neck we feel we have obligation if a child doesn’t do well on a test to bring him up to snuff.”
The education department is giving districts the choice of administering an Algebra test written to Common Core standards (on June 4), or the Algebra Regents (at the end of June), or both.
“Great Neck will do the Common Core exam,” Dolan said “We are confident that our kids have been exposed to Common Core for three years now. We went all in on math instruction in Common Core and our principals and math chair people agree that is the right test for our students.”
And while a lot of school districts are administering both tests, Great Neck will only administer the one, to do something about over-testing, which is another problem of the Accountability Movement at the core of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and is at the heart of the problem.
The Regents may have retreated somewhat on administering the test, but the question is how will they set the passing grade.
Last year, the cut score was manipulated to insure a certain number of failing students. The cut score will not be set until after the test score is administered.
“I do not think the State Education department is stupid enough to invite another disaster,” Dolan said candidly, in a tone that sounded like, “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I have no problem with the Common Core curriculum,” he emphasized. “I endorse it.”
The problem has been the high-stakes testing that was attached to it and Dolan is hopeful that the statements by the Board of Regents suggest that “the tests we will see in the future will, will be less punitive in nature.”
“You can test the common core standards, but all I ask is you test fairly, at the appropriate grade level. Some of the mistakes were tests that were written at far too difficult a level.”
Students with learning disabilities were tested – and assessed – based on their chronological age rather than their instructional level, and English Language Learners had only one year’s grace before they were expected to perform on a test involving long complicated reading passages, as if they were native speakers.
To correct these problems, the regents said they were seeking to renew the state’s waiver from No Child Left Behind and as part of the waiver, would ask USDOE to allow students with severe disabilities who are not eligible for alternate assessments to be tested at their instructional level rather than their chronological age level, and allow English Language Learners to be tested in their native language for their first two years of assessments.
These are steps in a right direction but hardly correct the assault on public education, particularly local control of education.
“I am not satisfied,” Dolan reflected. “This is not a return to the basic element of quality education, and that is local control. I still believe communities know best what is best for their community and Great Neck is an outstanding example of a village that has taken care of its children.”
Indeed, the Common Core Curriculum and high-stakes testing form one stage of assault against public education; squeezing financing is another.
The governor’s two-year freeze on property taxes effectively raises the stakes for school districts and municipalities to stay below the tax cap in order for the State to pick up the difference, and Cuomo has upped the ante by attaching provisions designed to force school districts to consolidate.
“This year, we will stay under the cap but there is a $2 million gap that we will need to make up in budget reductions and use of other revenue” such as prior year’s fund balance and tapping into reserves, both of which are finite and not sustainable.
Realize that Great Neck gets a scant 3 percent of its budget funded from state aid – and the governor has yet to restore funding that was cut during the fiscal crisis, from three years ago. At that time, the governor cut state aid by $1.8 billion – the amounts divvied up by district (and equal, now to the proposed budget surplus the governor has been touting in order to fund tax cuts). Great Neck’s shortfall is $1.5 million – almost all the amount that Dolan says still needs to be cut for the 2014-5 budget in order to stay within the cap. State aid is still not at the level it was three years ago.
Indeed, even as Gov. Cuomo gleefully gives away $2 billion in tax breaks for corporations (fully well expecting a return in the form of support for his reelection), Cuomo’s proposed $608 million increase in education funding falls $1.3 billion short of what public education advocates say is necessary to sustain schools.
While Long Island schools would receive a $73,732,021 increase under the Governor’s proposal, this amount would potentially increase by $232,392,585 with a $1.9 billion increase statewide.
“The Governor’s budget is woefully inadequate and does not come close to keeping up with rising cost in schools. It will mean cuts in arts, music, tutoring, libraries and more,” said Lisa Tyson, Director of the Long Island Progressive Coalition.“This budget negatively impacts every school district across Long Island and does absolutely nothing to address the huge inequalities between rich and poor schools.”
So what is the true objective of the property tax freeze? Cuomo has long made it clear that his goal is to force consolidation by impoverishing school districts so that the only way they can continue to provide public education at all, is to consolidate.
The property tax cap – in face of mandated increases in spending, enrollment increases and demographic changes – is the equivalent of an immigration policy designed around making life so harsh that undocumented immigrants “self-deport.”
And now, he is effectively legislating consolidation in his budget proposals.
Here’s how Cuomo’s consolidation plan would unfold: in year one of the property tax freeze, for districts that stay within tax cap, residents get a rebate from the state to offset increase; but in year two, in order to qualify for the tax rebate, a district also has to participate in a consolidation or shared services plan with other districts in their BOCES, and that plan would be required to produce savings equivalent to 1 percent of the combined tax levy for all the school districts in the BOCES in the third year.
The largest school district in the BOCES would be charged with coordinating that plan (no reference to how that district, blessed with this added responsibility, pays for it).
“The whole idea is not well thought out,” commented Robert Lowry Jr., deputy director of New York State Council of School Superintendents.
“First, districts have been through five years of tough budgets, many have made aggressive efforts to share services and some have exhausted all opportunities. There have also been more attempts at actual district mergers, but voters have rejected eight of the last 10 proposals, including every one presented since the start of the current school year. Last, it would also be extremely burdensome for any district to coordinate a sharing plan; that responsibility should belong with BOCES.
“We do support legislation to promote further sharing of services, to authorize regional high schools and to streamline procedures for voter-approved consolidation. But roughly three-quarters of school spending is devoted to instruction, less than 3 percent goes to district administration on average. Twenty-nine states have more school districts relative to enrollment than we do. The number of districts we maintain does not explain our education spending.
“We have supported efforts to create a circuit-breaker in the income tax as a way to efficiently target the meaningful relief to taxpayers with the greatest need,” Lowry added.
Indeed, school districts already collaborate on purchasing and share services where possible, but it is not clear if they would get credit for what they already do. And what happens when they have done all they can do, and there is no more?
Now keep in mind, the property tax rebate under the tax freeze that Cuomo is pushing would average about $350 – that seems like a meager amount to get communities to sell out local control of their school district.
And what if it the penalty would be the loss of all state aid? Well, the state only provides 3 percent of Great Neck schools’ funding now – not a small sum in a $200 million budget, but would it be worth effectively destroying the Great Neck public school system? Would it be worth it to become Uniondale or New Hyde Park or Roosevelt? Would it be worth destroying the very thing that keeps our home values so valuable?
Gov. Cuomo, whose education policy mimics the right wing (a push toward privatization, weakening teacher unions, computer-based education and consolidation) and has made clear his contempt for school districts, wasn’t at all happy with the Board of Regents’ proposals, either, particularly, getting teachers off the hook from punitive use of assessments.
“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.”
Great Neck Public Schools will hold their first public hearing on the preliminary 2014-15 budget on March 10, a second budget hearing on March 31, and the inspiring line-by-line, zero-based budget review on April 5.
