Editorial

Common Core task force: We can only hope

Posted

Forgive us for being skeptical when we hear Gov. Andrew Cuomo use words like “transparent” and “reform” when he’s talking about his new 15-member Common Core Task Force, created two weeks ago to fix the disastrous system forced on school districts across the state a few years ago. We haven’t yet recovered from the governor’s last demonstration of transparency and reformation, his Moreland Commission on Public Corruption. The public still knows nothing about what that blue-ribbon panel accomplished, and nothing about why Cuomo suddenly killed it. Touted with such fanfare, greeted with such optimism, it reformed nothing and was about as transparent as mud.

Now the governor has assembled learned educational professionals, teachers’ union leaders and others and tasked them with the enormous job of changing and rebranding the mess made by his previous State Education Department. This is the second council to look at the standards program, and we see that some of the new panelists are the old panelists from the first attempt to improve it.

Common Core — which The New York Times called “clearly the most important education reform in the country’s history,” but which U.S. News & World Report described as a “poison pill for learning” that doesn’t “allow for the sort of imaginative ideas and critical thinking teachers need to inspire their students” — is surely the most radical, most controversial and most fundamentally upsetting change in the lives of children in this state since federal laws in 1938 and 1949 banned child labor.

Common Core isn’t just like the New Math that had parents scratching their heads at homework time a couple of decades ago. It isn’t just the introduction of a new set of courses, like English as a Second Language or computer technology.

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