Local educators to join Common Core reform effort

Schools superintendent and local father tapped by governor

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District 13 Superintendent Constance Evelyn and Valley Stream resident Geoffrey Canada Sr. will join a state task force that will review the current Common Core and student testing systems and recommend changes, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office announced today.

“The agenda of the task force is straightforward and clear: To overhaul the Common Core system — to do a total reboot,” Cuomo said in a video message posted on the Common Core Task Force’s website.

Evelyn served on Cuomo’s Smart Schools Commission last year. She joined District 13 on July 1 after serving as superintendent of the upstate Auburn Enlarged City School District since 2012, before which she worked in several administrative and teaching positions in several different school districts.

Canada is a world-renowned educator and former head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, where he still serves as president of its board. He is known for “his pioneering work helping children and families in Harlem, and as a thought leader and passionate advocate for education reform,” according to Cuomo’s office. Canada was selected by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2006 to serve as co-chair of the Commission on Economic Opportunity, tasked with creating a plan to significantly reduce poverty in the city, and was appointed to the New York State Governor’s Council of Economic and Fiscal Advisors in 2011.

Cuomo outlined the group’s mission in six points:

•A “top to bottom” review and reform of the state’s Common Core standards.

•A review of the state’s curriculum guidance relative to its standards, with a focus on ensuring that the state Education Department provides teachers with sufficient support. “Before a student can be presented with new material, the teacher must first understand it and feel comfortable with it — and that did not happen here.”

•The development of a process to ensure that student tests fit the curricula and standards.

•An examination of the impact of the current moratorium on Common Core grading to see whether or not it should be extended.

•To consider how the state and local districts can reduce the number of tests and amount of time students spend taking them, and the development of a plan to work with local districts to review all tests — with parent input — to analyze their usefulness, “with the goal of reducing the total test burden.”

•A review of the quality of state tests to be sure that the private contractor the state is using is doing a “professional and competent job.”

Cuomo acknowledged several times that the state’s rollout of Common Core was flawed. He said that change in a system as complex as that of education should be done carefully, and “that did not happen here. We must fix it and we must fix it now.”