New York’s education commissioner and members of its Board of Regents will be speaking at two town hall events tonight, December 10, in New York City’s Brooklyn and Bronx boroughs to promote the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to parents and their communities. Although many parents and teachers support the standards, others have organized to oppose them or their implementation in the state, and will attend tonight’s events to air these objections, they tell School Library Journal.
Supporting the standards
According to Tom Dunn, director of communications for the New York State Education Department (NYSED), Commissioner Dr. John B. King, Regent Kathleen M. Cashin, and Regent Lester W. Young will appear in Brooklyn at Medgar Evers College at 6:30pm. Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch and Regent Betty A. Rosa will appear in the Bronx at the Evander Childs Campus at 6:00pm.
The two Common Core Community Forums, part of a series of similar events held recently across the state, will be followed by another tomorrow, December 11, in Manhattan at the Spruce Street School at 6:00pm, and two more to-be-scheduled events in Queens and Staten Island, Dunn notes. King is also participating in several forums at NY Public Broadcasting Stations (PBS) in front of a studio audience, which will be recorded and available on the web. Each event is scheduled to last for two hours.
“I want to have a respectful, direct, and constructive dialogue with parents,” King said in announcing the forums. “We want the conversation to rise above all the noise and make sure parents understand the CC, and, just as important, we want to understand parents’ concerns. We all share the same goal: to make sure our students have the skills and knowledge to be successful in a changing world.”
New York’s Board of Regents approved the adoption of the CCSS in 2010, and has just marked its second year of full implementation with rigorous testing.
One parent group, StudentsFirstNY, has come out strongly in support of the standards, and will have several representatives in the audiences tonight when the town hall series comes to New York City, the organization’s communications director, Chandra Hayslett, tells SLJ.
“The Common Core Learning Standards represent real progress for our struggling schools,” adds Jenny Sedlis, StudentsFirstNY’s executive director. “We should set higher standards for all schools and all students, so that no child’s education depends on where they live, or how much money their parents make. Setting consistently high goals across New York is a step in the right direction toward fixing these inequalities that exist in our school system.”
Sedlis notes that the CCSS “provide a consistent, clear, understanding of what students are expected to learn so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them,” but they “have become a bogeyman. State leaders need to ensure parents understand what these standards are, and are not.”
Voicing the opposition
Perhaps because of this uncertainty, many parents and teachers have already spoken out across the state in opposition to the standards, and have expressed their dismay with the town hall process to the point that several of the events were cancelled or postponed back in October.
Chris Cerrone, social studies teacher and parent in suburban Buffalo, attended an event last week in Jamestown. “It is clear that Commissioner King is not listening to the concerns expressed by parents and educators,” he tells SLJ of that experience. “From following the forums across our state, I hear a consistent message from families and teachers that NYSED’s implementation is rushed, flawed, and shows a lack of leadership in Albany. As long as the Common Core is tied to the high-stakes testing machine, it will cause the same negative impact as NCLB and Race to the Top.”
In New York City specifically, many more oppose the way the standards have been implemented so far, especially when it comes to high-stakes testing, according to Geoffrey Decker, senior reporter for Gotham Schools, a local news organization covering the education beat “from a New York City lens.”
Decker also says the opposition from parents takes its lead from objections by teachers themselves, who may support the standards but not the state’s jump into immediate assessment.
“There are still concerns that teachers aren’t prepared to teach to these new standards because the state hasn’t been as quick as they promised in producing curriculum aligned to these standards,” Decker tells SLJ. “The pushback has been, in a lot of ways, from high-achieving districts, from parents of kids who generally perform pretty well on these state tests. For the first time their scores dropped.”
Though many parents and teachers across New York City think strong standards are a good idea, they are disappointed at the implementation so far, Tesa Wilson, elected president of Community Education Council (CEC) 14, confirms to SLJ. Wilson—whose CEC serves in lieu of a local school board in representing Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods—also notes that some of her constituents “very much support” the Common Core while others have been vocal that they “are completely against it.”
Implementation at issue
On a personal level, “I clearly get what [the standards are] attempting to do,” Wilson says. “I’m not against that at all, but I have a problem when you don’t inform parents. And that’s the blowback that [Chancellor] Merryl Tisch and [Commissioner] John King do not get. They’re just starting to wake up to the fact that our parents don’t understand. And as a result of their anxiety and frustration, that’s why [parents] are voicing anger at these meetings across the state.”
“I really feel they should have taken some time, even within the DOE, to begin to inform parents about what was coming,” Wilson says. “”And for the Commissioner to state that he only expected a 30 percent pass rate, and not prepare parents ahead of time for that? To me, it was one of the biggest PR fumbles for the Common Core. It really was. If they would have taken the time to really explain to parents what they were trying to do, I think some of the anger wouldn’t have been as intense.”
Decker agrees. This disconnect about test scores caused a lot of the initial uproar in the city, he tells SLJ. “People who support the Common Core and who want to push back against this criticism have said that parents need to realize that the new standards are challenging their kids, that their performance on the old tests was not a reflection of the international standards,” he says, noting, “the Common Core standards for the first time are measuring that.”
The lack of involvement by both teachers and parents is another one of the most problematic issues. According to NYC schools advocate Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, “I think the way the Common Core has been developed and implemented in NY has been very foolhardy.”
“There has been no input from parents and very little from teachers,” Haimson tells SLJ. In addition to concerns about student privacy, the CCSS program the state is trying to implement “is developmentally unsound,” she says. “The quotas for informational text are particularly absurd, and are likely to kill the love of reading for many students. And the amount of testing and test prep is very damaging.”
Many teachers, Wilson says, are frustrated that they didn’t receive the materials that they needed to teach to the new curriculum, or that their professional development has not prepared them for such a big shift. “We keep hearing the same phrases over and over again: ‘we’re teaching the same subject matter but we’re going to be teaching at a depth we never have before,’” she says.
“And at some point, parents starting asking, ‘what exactly does that mean?’ As those questions began to not be answered, the frustration began to grow, and parents felt that they were being talked at.”
Building alliances
Hopefully, this latest round of town hall events will change all that, according to Regent Cashin, who cites a lot of common ground among those in favor and opposed to the Common Core.
“Tonight, I’m really going to listen,” she tells SLJ. “I don’t believe in just going to a meeting and having my mind made up. I’m not going to tell parents [what] they should do or not do. They have to have voice and we have to be really, really listening, not just for the parents but for the teachers in the classroom.”
And, although “having a full, deep, rich curriculum is a good thing,” Cashin says concerns about implementation issues—and reliance on high-stakes testing to the exclusion of all other data—will remain on her mind as she hears from constituents in the coming weeks.
But Cashin also points to what she considers a much more urgent concern, that of the state’s poor and homeless children. These kids must be equipped with all that they need—“with food, with warmth, with clothing”—and they must be able to come to school “without fear,” she says.
These inequities should have more of a focus and play a larger role when stakeholders meet to discuss student achievement, she tells SLJ. “I’m very concerned especially this time of the year,” she says. “The respite place is in many times the school, and we’ve got to make them school ready by all the coordination of the agencies so that they can learn Common Core.”
Though Common Core “is important and that’s why we’re having this meeting, let’s not forget this whole big dimension of what the children are suffering,” Cashin says. “How can we expect them to learn anything if we don’t have the coordination of the agencies and support services?”