Kaminsky: Common Core revisions are inadequate

Proposes recommendations to new draft ELA and math learning standards

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More than a month after the New York State Education Department released new draft English and math learning standards in response to criticism over the Common Core curriculum, State Sen. Todd Kaminsky said that the proposed revisions fail to address parents’ and teachers’ concerns, and offered a number of recommendations.

The Education Department released the new standards in September, describing them as the culmination of a year-long effort to gather feedback from teachers and parents and initiating a public-comment period that ended Nov. 4.

The move followed four years of parents’ protests about the Common Core State Standards, which were adopted by New York in 2012. More than 200,000 parents across the state kept their children out of the third- through eight-grade English and math state exams in 2015. That led Gov. Andrew Cuomo to empanel a task force to offer recommendations to overhaul Common Core.

“Dedicated teachers, parents and educators from across the state put in countless hours to develop these new draft standards,” State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said in September.

But in a letter to Elia sent on Nov. 17, Kaminsky said that while the revisions “are a small step toward addressing the plethora of concerns around the flawed Common Core standards,” they don’t go far enough.

Kaminsky called for the “anchor standards” — the state’s Common Core college and career readiness learning standards for English Language Arts and Literacy for all grades — to be further revised.

“The revised standards do nothing to address the reason why students and parents have chosen to opt-out of Common Core tests,” he wrote. “Lessening the number of testing days from three to two, for instance, should be considered.”

Kaminsky suggested that some of the standards are beyond students’ level of understanding. “The standards have been proven to be set at inappropriate levels for students and fail to adequately assess their abilities,” he wrote.

The revision process began last spring, and ended in September with a raft of new standards. Two committees comprising 130 educators and parents recommended changing 60 percent of the English and 55 percent of the math standards.

The recommended changes to the ELA standards included streamlining reading and literature studies, reorganizing writing standards so they are easier for educators to use for curriculum and instruction, and creating a New York State Early Learning Task Force focused on pre-kindergarten through second grade.

The recommended mathematics changes included giving students more time to develop “deep levels of understanding,” and better defining the progression of skills and the transition between Algebra I and Algebra II.

Matt Adler, a Long Beach resident who teaches ninth-grade math at Seaford High School, said that the proposed changes are not substantial.

“There are certain topics that are not developmentally appropriate,” Adler said. “Some of the concepts in the statistics units are the beginnings of [Advanced Placement] stats. There are topics that I don’t think are appropriate for a freshman in high school to be learning.”

In April, about 53 percent of Long Island students opted out of the state mathematics exams, a number that was 6.3 percentage points larger than 2015.

This year, 52 percent of students opted out of the English Language Arts exams, a jump from 43 percent in 2015.

In Long Beach, 47.5 percent of students refused to sit for the mathematics exams this year, compared with 37.9 last year. About 41 percent of students opted out of taking the ELA exams, an increase of 13.5 percentage points over 2015.

“Opt-out rates aren’t going to change on Long Island unless teachers and parents believe that these tests are beneficial to their kids and not detrimental,” Kaminsky said. “They don’t feel that sense of comfort.”

The State Education Department did not return a call seeking comment. Nassau and Suffolk County Board of Regents Representative Roger Tilles said that the board has responded to thousands of concerns from teachers and students.
“Major changes in the standards were, in some areas, age appropriateness and the amount of nonfiction versus fiction in the ELA standards,” Tilles said of the revisions.

Kaminsky called on Elia to consider a number of recommendations, including a revision of the anchor standards and addressing the cause of the opt-outs. “The task force has done nothing to substantially reform this broken system,” he wrote.

He also said that the revision process needed to be more transparent, and called for the release of dissenting opinions that were submitted during the public comment period.

He noted, as well, a need to eradicate one-size-fits-all standards. “By teaching to the standards and not the students, we have seen that students’ abilities to learn and comprehend concepts is dramatically stifled and undermined,” he wrote. “By and large I think parents and teachers are in favor of opting out until they see improvement.”

Additionally, he suggested that the Education Department reduce the number of testing days, which currently ranges from three to six.

“How many days do students lose of instruction?” Adler said. “Between the days the students are taking the tests and test prep … Why do we send our children to school? To be educated, to become lifelong learners, not to become test-takers and test prep.”

Tilles said that the Board of Regents is addressing the issue that Kaminsky and others have raised. “We are trying to make [the tests] much shorter,” he said. “It was too late to change this year’s test — we’re trying to see if we can change next year’s test. Not only make it shorter, but to change the content.”