Editorial

Here we go again: a new set of learning standards

Posted

New York State Education Department officials will have to forgive the public if people don’t appear eager to embrace Next Generation Learning Standards. We were burned by Common Core.

The state is now replacing Common Core with Next Generation. The education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, presented the new kindergarten-through-12th grade standards to the Board of Regents in May.

According to the Education Department website, Elia has traveled some 45,000 miles across the state over the past two years, meeting with educators and parents to get their take on Common Core reform.

She will face an uphill battle to instill trust among many parents after the debacle that was Common Core. The standards, frankly, were shoved down people’s throats, without much thought given to whether students and teachers were ready for them. The result: Test scores dropped precipitously, so in 2012 apprehensive parents started opting their children out of the exams.

At first the movement was but a trickle of students, but it quickly became a flood. In 2016, one-fifth of students across the state refused to take the grades three-through-eight English Language Arts and math state exams. On Long Island — widely considered the epicenter of the opt-out movement — many districts saw half of their students or more skip the tests.

We don’t yet know a whole lot about how the Next Generation standards might be taught in the classroom — or, for that matter, how they might be measured on end-of-year standardized tests. Right now they’re just standards. And forgive us for appearing skeptical, but they sound much like the old standards.

Here are examples:

From the Reading Anchor Standards
Students will be able to . . .

• Standard 1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly/implicitly and make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

• Standard 2: Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

• Standard 3: Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

From the Grade Three Math Standards
Students will be able to . . .

• Standard 1: Interpret products of whole numbers.

• Standard 2: Interpret whole-number quotients of whole numbers.

• Standard 3: Use multiplication and division within 100 to solve word problems in situations involving equal groups, arrays and measurement quantities.

Under Common Core, the state tried, unsuccessfully, to dictate to teachers precisely how the new standards would be taught, providing scripts, as if teachers were animatronic dummies, unable to plan or think for themselves.

The trouble was, of course, that these so-called lessons were lifeless exercises, devoid of a teacher’s personality. Worse, they did not recognize that every class is a different mix of personalities and backgrounds that requires lesson plans tailored to suit them. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all set of standards that can be applied universally across a state as vast and diverse as New York.

For good measure, the state threw up a set of a couple of dozen videos of “master” teachers at work in the classroom, teaching to the Common Core standards. The videos were mere snippets of lessons, however, so they provided relatively little depth — and thus were of little to no value to the educators who were supposed to be learning from them.

In our April 6-13 editorial, “State must lead on Common Core testing,” we called on Elia to take the reins on Common Core reform. “Instead of sticking their heads in the sand and hoping the opt-out movement withers away,” we wrote, “state education officials should be at the forefront in explaining how Common Core exams can be used to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses so they receive the right remedial services, if necessary, while they are still young enough to benefit from them. When it comes to learning, high school, quite frankly, is too late to play catch-up.

“As New York’s top educator, Elia must lead on Common Core testing, offering words of wisdom and comfort to encourage children to sit for state exams, or she must call for an end to them. With students opting out by the tens of thousands, the current system is clearly not working.”

Elia has done plenty of listening, it appears. Now, however, is the time for action. On the Next Generation Learning Standards site, we see no words of wisdom and comfort. We see lots of education-speak and bureaucratic self-congratulation. That’s just not good enough. Our children deserve better.