Editorial

Let's start over with Common Core

Posted

Gov. Andrew Cuomo appears locked in a political death spiral.

Last year brought growing dissatisfaction with the State Education Department’s dysfunctional implementation of the new Common Core State Standards, which are part of a movement to standardize education across the country and upgrade graduation requirements to better prepare students for college and careers.

This year we are seeing outright revolt, with an increasing number of parents opting their children out of the English and math exams given to third- through eighth-graders. More than a million New York children were scheduled to take the ELA and math tests over the past two weeks. As many as 200,000 students refused to sit for the ELA exam, and that figure was predicted to climb even higher for the math test, according to Dr. Carol Burris, the celebrated principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre, who is retiring early in protest of Common Core.

Opt-out rates exceeded 50 percent in many school districts across the state. On Long Island, the region with the highest percentage of students refusing to sit for the exams, rates often exceeded 60 percent. At Grand Avenue Middle School in Bellmore, which takes in students from North Bellmore, the epicenter of the opt-out movement, the rate was 68 percent for the ELA exam.

This mass exodus came despite persistent threats by state education officials that districts could lose tens of thousands of dollars in federal aid if less than 95 percent of their students sat for the tests.

State education officials can say all they want about the supposedly valid test data they can extract from the completed tests, but parents, educators and most observers just aren’t buying that empty rhetoric anymore. Cuomo and the Education Department are rapidly losing credibility.

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