State task force: Overhaul Common Core

In its final report, issued Dec. 10, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core Task Force called on the state to place a four-year moratorium on the use of students’ state test scores to evaluate teachers’ classroom performance.

The recommendation came amid a raft of proposed policy changes intended, as the report states, “to right the ship.” The governor impaneled the task force this fall after mounting parental anger over plummeting exam scores led more than 200,000 New York students in grades three to eight to “opt out” of the battery of state tests required under the Common Core curriculum last spring.

Jeanette Deutermann, a Bellmore mother of two, started the Long Island Opt-Out Facebook page in February 2013. It quickly ballooned into a full-scale movement. The page now has more than 23,200 friends. Last spring, some 87,000 Long Island children in grades three to eight –– almost half the state’s total –– did not sit for state exams in English Language Arts and math.

The task force’s report, Deutermann said, “is a huge first step because it opens the door to the changes we want to see. It opens the door to a shift in the conversation. We were going in the complete opposite direction last year.”

What the report says
The report, assembled by a panel of education and business leaders and experts, issued 21 recommendations in all. Among them, the task force called on the state to:

• Modify early-grade standards to ensure that they are age-appropriate. Many parents have complained that the Common Core standards, which the state began implementing in 2012-13, are one to two grades above most students’ ability levels.