Scott Brinton

Cuomo returns to the Common Core drawing board

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I am angry with Governor Cuomo. No, I am furious.

I minored in secondary education at Geneseo, earned a master’s in English education from Columbia and have taught at the middle school, high school and university levels, in the U.S. and overseas. In my opinion, the governor hasn’t a clue when it comes to our schools.

I’m all the more infuriated because I have two teenage children in the schools. They are thriving. I know all too well, however, the level of anxiety that they –– and virtually all the kids I know –– feel because of the rapid-fire curricular “upgrades” that Cuomo’s State Education Department has enacted in recent years.

Teachers’ heads are spinning. As a result, students’ and parents’ heads are spinning. What’s the point of it all, Mr. Cuomo?

The governor claims he wants to improve learning outcomes for all students, no matter their socioeconomic background. The trouble is this: Raising standards without adequate preparation (which can require years, even decades) and funding (which is drying up in many districts because of his 2 percent tax-levy cap) is a recipe for disaster. And that is precisely what Cuomo is presiding over.

So . . . after pushing through a perplexing array of comical curricular changes, Cuomo is backpedaling, instructing the Education Department to go back to the drawing board and redo the Common Core curriculum –– for the second time in two years. The governor cited growing parental unrest –– more than 200,000 parents kept their children out of the grades three to eight state exams this year –– as the reason for overhauling the curriculum.

He instructed his new education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, to oversee the process and get it done in months. A panel of academic experts is to recommend changes, which we assume the state will implement with all due haste. After all, why take a gradual, measured approach to revamping standards when expediency is all the rage?

Only a week before Cuomo announced the reset, Elia had warned that school districts could lose federal aid if 95 percent of their students did not take state-mandated exams. Hello? Do the two even talk to each other?

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