Not long after New York state raised eyebrows with a curriculum solicitation that was anything but business-as-usual, it is triggering uneasiness among teachers who feel that tests are being given on the new standards too soon.
At issue is a new, voluntary curriculum in mathematics and English/language arts that New York purchased from private vendors and is offering for free online as each piece is completed. Also at issue are new tests that the state had designed to reflect the Common Core State Standards, and which are scheduled to be given for the first time next month.
New York is ahead of most states in its work to design detailed curricula and professional development for the common core and to build brand-new tests to reflect them. What's unfolding in the Empire State as a result of that work illustrates the way the common standards can pressure changes in the education landscape, and torque the tensions involved in a deep reworking of curriculum and instruction.
What happens in the publishing world, for instance, when a state demands total ownership over the curriculum materials it purchases so they can be available to all for free? And what happens when pivotal stakeholder groups disagree about the pace of change that best serves schoolchildren? Those questions sparked the two waves of concern that have arisen from New York's curriculum procurement and its assessment timeline.
The first came from the publishing world, whose biggest players snubbed the competitive procurement process because of unusual requirements that the materials be free of licensing restrictions that would interfere with New York's desire to make them available for free online. The second and current wave arises from the state teachers' union, which welcomes the curriculum itself, but believes that it's too soon to test students—and evaluate teachers—on it. Many pieces of the curriculum are posted on the state's common-core website, www.engageny.org, but it won't be complete until December 2014.
"We're giving the test before teaching the curriculum. That's not what you should do," said Maria Neira, the vice president for research and educational services for New York State United Teachers. "We're rushing to do it, instead of doing it right."
Yesterday the NYSED said too bad, we're giving the kids tests they aren't prepared for since the curriculum doesn't exist yet, or only exists in piecemeal, and we're holding schools and teachers accountable for the scores.
Today, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said the same thing:
Merryl H. Tisch, the chairwoman of the state board of regents, counters that the state's timeline for common-core implementation has been clear for more than two years, and that schools and districts would have to have been "living under a rock" to be surprised now.
"There is an enormous pushback against us because we are rolling out the common-core assessment, and some think we should have waited a year," she said. "But as youngsters graduate high school right now, they've already hit a wall. Their reality is right now. We feel this is such an urgent issue, we have to roll it out now."
I wrote the same thing yesterday - who cares if the state told people the tests were changing two years ago? At a time of economic austerity and cutbacks, for the education corporatists at the NYSED and the Regents to expect districts to create curriculum or purchase curriculum for the new Common Core tests is absurd.
And that's basically what Tisch is saying by pushing back against the NYSUT attacks by saying, "Hey, we told you about these changes two years ago."
These people, funded by the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the rest of the education "malanthropists" shoved through these radical changes to the curriculum and to the tests and to the evaluation systems in New York State, piloted none of these changes anywhere, provided few if any resources to help districts deal with the changes (many of the Race to the Top grants for evaluation systems that were supposed to be for four years have run out in the first year!) and now are going to use these radical alterations to the education landscape to fire teachers and close schools.
And that has ALWAYS been the motivation for Merryl Tisch and John King and the rest of the education corporatists in Albany.
They don't care about students in the least.
If they did, they would have piloted these radical changes in slowly over time to make sure they will work.
Instead they "Shock Doctrined" the state with APPR and Common Core tests and VAM and now they're using these to ultimately do what they have always wanted to do:
Privatize the public school system.
Sell it off to K-12 Inc. and the other edu-vultures.
Hand it off to Uncommon Schools and the other charter networks.
These people have a radical political agenda and now that the agenda is becoming clear, they're getting defensive.
But spare us on how this is for the kids, Merryl.
This is for the privatizers.
Otherwise, why insist that this years Common Core tests, given before the curriculum has been fully developed and implemented, will go off as planned and schools will be closed and teachers fired as a result of the scores?
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