Cuomo Playing Games With Common Core

Here's Andrew Cuomo's response to Shelly Silver and Cathy Nolan calling for at least a two year delay on stakes attached to CCSS:

Statement From Communications Director Melissa DeRosa on the Legislature's Call for a Moratorium on Common Core

Albany, NY (February 4, 2014)

Governor Cuomo believes that the best long term economic development strategy is ensuring New York State has the strongest possible education system. Common Core is an issue about which there has been a lot of dialogue. The Governor believes that we need to set real standards for our students and have a meaningful teacher evaluation system, and continues to support the Common Core agenda.

However, the Governor believes that the way that Common Core has been managed by the Board of Regents is flawed, leading to too much uncertainty, confusion and anxiety among students and their parents. The strength of public education in New York is dependent on a rational system that is well administered.

Two weeks ago, the Governor announced that he will assemble a panel that includes education experts and members of the legislature to identify flaws in Common Core’s rollout and take corrective action by the end of this session. The Governor believes there are two issues – common core and teacher evaluations – and they must be analyzed separately. It would be premature to consider any moratorium before the panel is allowed to do its work.

That panel of education experts and members of the legislature Cuomo says he wants assembled to look into CCSS has yet to be named or convened.

That's because Cuomo is in no rush to name members to that panel or convene it, let alone do anything as a result of the panel findings.

It's a delaying tactic Cuomo is employing here because he doesn't want to give up the ghost on CCSS (he's taken many suitcases full of cash from the DFER's and other supporters of CCSS to do that), but he also doesn't want to take a political hit from the parents around the state who are irate about the Common Core State (sic) Standards, the Endless Testing regime that goes along with it and the inBloom data project that they're using to track all the stats from the tests.

He also fails to note how parents are upset about all the testing and much of that testing is mandated by his teacher evaluation system that he has claimed in the past is so state of the art, so while he is arguing that CCSS and APPR are different issues, they actually are related issues - APPR was devised to go hand-in-hand with the Common Core testing, punishing teachers who didn't teach to the CCSS tests.

Maybe Cuomo thinks this statement will fool people into thinking he's doing something on the CCSS/testing issue, but I doubt it will.

He's simply delaying taking a stance on the issues, just as he has done with other tough issues in the past - like fracking, for example.

The parents and educators who have been advocating for changes to the state's education reform agenda will not be fooled by Sheriff Andy's little CCSS panel gambit.