Cuomo's Common Core Review: Less A Reboot, More A Showboat

David Bloomfield pans the Cuomo Common Core review:

“This is unlikely to make a difference, other than to provide the governor and other leaders with cover for a pre-set agenda,” David Bloomfield, an education leadership professor at Brooklyn College and at the City University of New York Graduate Center, told POLITICO New York. “I think it’s showboating.”

“Mostly, this seems like a strategy to deflect attention from Cuomo's ruinous program of test-based school and teacher evaluations, the root cause of the opt-movement, none of which are addressed in this toothless initiative," he said.

Indeed, it's a move meant to provide political cover for the governor ("I'm listening to parents' concerns!") without really having to change the part of his agenda that drives so much of the hostility from parents and teachers - the Endless Testing regime used to punish teachers and schools.

The task force is rigged with a bunch of Common Core supporters, they could issue the guidelines now before meeting, because there will be no radical change - no reboot - in their recommendations.

They'll tweak some of the tests, they'll shorten them (as NYSED says will already happen), they'll put some nonsense about limiting "test prep" in schools in place that will be about as useful as Cuomo's SAFE ACT (which can't be enforced), but that's about it.

In short, it will be a rebrand, with little substantive difference to the day-to-day realities of students and educators.

I don't think this will work out the way the governor wants it to.

In the end, few will be fooled by Cuomo's "reboot" of the Core - parents and teachers have heard way too much jive from the politicians and the educrats over the course of the Education Reform Era to be fooled by it.