Task force: Overhaul Common Core

In its final report issued last Thursday, Governor Cuomo’s Common Core Task Force called on the state to place a four-year moratorium on the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers’ classroom performance.

The recommendation came amid a raft of proposed policy changes intended, as the report states, “to right the ship.” The governor impaneled the task force this fall after mounting parental anger over plummeting exam scores led more than 200,000 New York students in grades three to eight to “opt out” of the battery of state tests required under the Common Core last spring.

The report, assembled by a panel of education and business leaders and experts, issued 21 recommendations in all. Among them, the task force called on the state to:

- Modify early-grade standards to ensure that they are age-appropriate. Many parents have complained that the Common Core standards, which the state began implementing in 2012-2013, are one to two grade levels above most students’ ability levels.

- Ensure that standards are “flexible” enough to accommodate the specific needs of special education and English as a Second Language students. Alternative assessments should be provided for the “most severely disabled students,” the task force said. Many educators have said special education and ESL students, who enter school significantly behind their peers through no fault of their own, are expected under Common Core to perform on level in mainstream settings, and that, they say, is fundamentally unfair.

- Ensure that standards do not “diminish the love of reading and joy of learning.” Many parents and teachers have said the standards, because they are centered around state exams, lead schools to “teach to the tests.” In the process, creativity and individuality are brushed aside. Teachers, in fact, have complained that the state has provided step-by-step lesson plans that are essentially scripts.

- Reduce the number of days that students must take state exams, as well as the length of the tests. Many parents and teachers have noted that several of the Common Core tests are significantly longer than college finals.