Is NYSED Admitting EngageNY Modules Are Crap?

Chris Cerrone tweeted the following this afternoon:

​Is NYSED admitting modules are flawed? Do taxpayers get a $12.9 million refund? http://t.co/Y1SUna6f9b via @AlbanyBizReview
— Chris Cerrone (@Stoptesting15) April 27, 2014

Megan Rogers of the Albany Business Review reports this:

The New York state education department wants teachers to revamp the state's online curriculum resources for the Common Core learning standards.

The state education department released a request for information on a proposal to create regional Common Core Institutes, where educators from school districts, BOCES or charter schools would work full-time to develop new online instructional materials for the 2015-16 academic year.

Educators would serve as Common Core Institute Fellows during the 2014-15 academic year. The teachers would work on one grade level in K-12 math or 9-12 English language arts.

The state has some curricular materials on EngageNY.org.

I've covered the EngageNY modules a bit here at Perdido Street School blog:

NYSED ELA Lesson Module - 17 Days On One Short Story

EngageNY Modules Make No Sense - An Emblem For Common Core As A Whole

The NYSED Common Core Modules - Meant To Dumb Down A Whole Generation Of Children 

The EngageNY modules have been widely mocked, ridiculed and criticized by parents and educators, students have complained about the drudgery of the lessons, so perhaps the flacks at SED have just gotten sick of defending the indefensible and are ready to throw even more cash into the Common Core curriculum development process.

This time they seem to want to hire actual teachers to do the development work, as opposed to ferreting out the work to private corporations to the tune of $12.9 million Race to the Top dollars.

Nonetheless, this is the kind of thing that could have been avoided if the autocrats at SED and the Board of Regents had slowed down the implementation process and taken the time to think through and collaborate on that process - including the curriculum development, the test development, the evaluation system for teachers, etc.

Instead everything got shoved through at once, a la Shock Doctrine-style, with top-down mandates coming from the self-described geniuses at SED and the Board of Regents, with an assist from another self-described genius in the governor's office.

So now SED seems to be admitting that they lit the $12.9 million they spent on EngageNY modules on fire, that the entire process needs to be redone, this time by actual teachers (though we'll see about that - I suspect the "teachers" SED looks to get for these Common Core Institutes will have to be Common Core-friendly ones, though this is a group that gets smaller and smaller by the week.)

This is just another sign of how the corporate education reform agenda as developed by Regents Chancellor Tisch, SED Commissioner King, Governor Cuomo and the Abany educrats/Gates Foundation employees is falling apart.

One of the fatal flaws of the Common Core/education reform agenda was the hurried way everything was shoved through, which ensured much of the reforms were going to be half-assed and badly done.

The autocrats and plutocrats running the system wanted everything shoved through at once so that no dissent would be encountered.

That worked initially, but now that hurried agenda implementation is helping to mobilize critics across the state to the reforms and getting much of the public on board as they see just what crap the EngageNY module material is.

We'll just have to see if SED and the Regents can salvage this mess by creating these Common Core Institutes (how Orwellian a name!) and developing new CCSS modules and resources for 2015-2016.

The problem for SED and the Regents is that the opposition to the CCSS reforms may be so broad and widespread by that time frame that even if the CCSS Institutes developed useful materials, the whole process may be so poisoned by what came beforehand that no one will dare to use any of it anyway.