Report: Cuomo's Common Core Task Force Will Call For "Up To A Four-Year Moratorium" On Using Test Scores In APPR

From Keshia Clukey at Politico NY:

ALBANY — In its draft report of recommendations to the governor, the Common Core task force is calling for an overhaul of the state's testing system, the creation of new state standards and transparency on those standards' rollout, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO New York.

The draft report, given to the majority of task force members for review Wednesday, is expected to be finalized and will likely be released Thursday or Friday, task force members told POLITICO New York.

The draft also includes a space for the task force to weigh in on the impact of student test scores on teacher evaluations, and the panel will likely use that space to recommend up to a four-year moratorium, according to a source familiar with the task force's plans.

Devil is always in the details but if this is what ends up in the governor's agenda, I'm not impressed.

The "creation of new state standards" will be Common Core Mach II, with just enough tweaked so they can say this is "all-new"!

The overhaul of the state's testing system can mean a whole bunch of things, but until we get details on it, I'm not ready to give it my blessing.

I know they say these new tests will be age-appropriate and teacher-created and all that jazz, but as far as I can tell in the Era of Common Core, no entity-developed test has been either, so I remain skeptical of what the testing overhaul will come up with in the end.

As for the four-year moratorium on test scores, that doesn't mean much to me either - a moratorium is nothing more than a delay and a delay on junk science in APPR means they're still using junk science in APPR.

Remains to be seen what actually ends up in the governor's agenda, but if this is the big news, I'm not that impressed.

Feels to me like another attempt to make it look like big change is coming without big change really coming.

What they're really trying to do is put a stake through the opt out movement by claiming its rationale for existence no longer holds.

But so long as the Endless Testing regime remains in place and is the underlying principle behind the education system, opt out very much has a reason to exist.

More as we get it.

Cuomo's Education Reform Agenda Gets Hammered At His Common Core Task Force Public Hearings

Bethany Bump in the Times Union reports on the Common Core task force public hearing last night in the Capital Region:

COLONIE — The whole thing is a train wreck. The teacher evaluations are an unmitigated disaster. Students are being drained of any creativity. The material isn't developmentally appropriate. Children are being used as political pawns.

A majority of people who spoke at one of five public hearings Friday on the state's Common Core program had these and lots of other negative things to say about New York's implementation of the stringent educational standards. The Capital Region was home to one of those hearings — the first since Gov. Andrew Cuomo charged a task force in September with reviewing the Common Core standards, curriculum and assessments for a "total reboot."

About 100 people turned out to the Crossings of Colonie Friday afternoon for the Capital Region hearing. They were parents, current and retired teachers, school administrators, school board officials and business representatives. Other hearings were held simultaneously Friday evening in the Finger Lakes/Western New York, Hudson Valley, Long Island and New York City regions.

"These kids see no relevance to these tests they now have to take," said Stacey Caruso-Sharpe, a math teacher in the Amsterdam City School District, where she's worked for more than 30 years. "The governor says they don't mean anything yet, and then you want to tie them to a teachers' score? It doesn't make sense."

John Hildebrand of Newsday on the Common Core hearing at Stony Brook:

Common Core opponents predicted at a state-sponsored forum Friday in Stony Brook that 500,000 students statewide in grades three through eight would boycott spring tests unless Albany pulls back from unpopular new exams and teacher evaluations tied to students' scores.

A standing-room-only crowd of parents and educators cheered and applauded as Jeanette Deutermann of North Bellmore, leader of Long Island's testing opt-out movement, warned that boycott numbers could more than double in April from more than 200,000 recorded last spring.

Other forum speakers followed suit.

"You are going to see a tsunami of test refusals," said Beth Dimino, president of the teachers union in the Comsewogue school district.

The 2 1/2-hour session, organized by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's office, was held in a small auditorium of Stony Brook University's Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology. It was one of five simultaneous "listening sessions" across the state attended by members of the governor's appointed Common Core Task Force.

Several teachers and superintendents at the hearing called for a two-year moratorium on education reforms.

"What we have is a culture of standardization," said Patchogue-Medford schools chief Michael Hynes, a vocal opponent of overtesting and the linking of student scores to teachers' and principals' performance evaluations. He called for separating student scores from job ratings and "getting rid" of the Common Core.

For the most part, the forum was an orderly affair, in contrast to a raucous session held two years ago at Ward Melville High School, less than six miles away. At the earlier public hearing, then-Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. was at times shouted down as he tried to defend state education policies before an emotional crowd of 1,500 parents and educators.

Friday's session drew more than 150 parents, educators and others, and speakers were limited to three minutes each. Those who voiced criticism of the Common Core standards, curriculums and tests -- implemented in districts across the state largely over the last three school years -- were clearly the large majority. The national guidelines were adopted by New York in 2010.

"Common Core is destroying the dignity of the learning process," said Dan Campbell, a fifth-grade teacher in the South Huntington school district. He said one parent told him that his 10-year-old son cries at the bus stop because he doesn't understand the math curriculum.

Campbell said he wanted to tell the parent, "Your son is being bullied by the state."

A rare exception to the opponents was Preston Tucci, an eighth-grade math teacher in the Middle Country district, who was jeered by some audience members when he described how his students are enthused by a Common Core algebra curriculum.

"Your time's up!" several shouted as an electronic stopwatch that was used to limit speakers' time wound down. "Very disappointing!" another hissed.

Some participants began lining up more than an hour in advance for the "listening session," which began at 4 p.m., with people allowed to speak on a first-come, first-served basis. Check-in for the event started at 3:30 p.m., and all 45 speaking slots were filled shortly after the meeting began.

Dawn Wylie of North Babylon, who has pulled her two children out of state standardized tests for the past two years and plans to do so again in the spring, was among those in attendance.

"This is the most important thing happening right now," she said. "Our children are suffering -- collateral damage."

Before the hearing, Tucci told Newsday that he had come to speak in favor of new math standards that emphasize "real-world" problem solving.

"In a 15-year career, last year was the first year I haven't had a kid ask me, 'When will I ever use this?' " he said.

Dimino, of Rocky Point, who teaches eighth-grade science in Comsewogue schools, said she had testified last year against the standards and the state's teacher evaluation system. A vocal critic of Common Core, she said she has refused to administer the exams even if it means she is given an "ineffective" job rating.

Before the forum began, she said she was disappointed by both the timing of the event and the size of the meeting room. Organizers should have held it later in the day and in a larger space, she said.

"I am hoping this is not a nonsensical tour," Dimino said. "I am hoping this is a hearing tour."

Earlier this week, parents and educators complained that state officials had not given enough advance notice of the hearing, and that the time and location would make it difficult for many to attend.

Over the past three years, implementation of curriculums and tests aligned with the Common Core standards has spurred a growing test-boycott movement in states across the nation, with parents pulling children out of standardized tests.

Last spring, the revolt in New York was the largest in the country. More than 200,000 students in grades three through eight opted out of state tests in English language arts and mathematics in April, with about 70,000 of those students in school districts on Long Island.

As has been the case with hearings on education reform before, the hearing in the city was attended by the professional Common Core class - civil rights "activists" on the Gates Foundation payroll, an executive director for a corporate-sponsored pro-education reform group and members of StudentsFirstNY:

The first public hearing of Gov. Cuomo's Common Core Task Force in the city drew about 100 people to LaGuardia Community College Friday afternoon – parents, educators and students bitterly divided over the issue.

About two dozen signed up to speak, asking task force members Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan and Brooklyn teacher Kishayna Hazlewood to toss the Common Core, saying it was forcing a test-driven curriculum in schools while others expressed the need to keep high expectations of students.

"I think our children are capable of learning," said Nina Doster, a mother of two from Queens who signed up to speak in favor of keeping the Common Core standards. "Children in other areas get their best education and sometimes our children are left out of that."

A large coalition of pro-Common Core advocates attended the hearing, including Urban League President Arva Rice, Stephen Sigmund, executive director of High Achievement New York and more than 50 parents from StudentsFirst NY.

But City Councilman Danny Dromm, a former teacher who heads the Council's Education Committee, said the state needs to step back from an emphasis on standardized testing.

"The kids are getting bored to death with being beaten over the head with test prep, test prep, test prep," said David Dobosz, a retired teacher who worked in Brownsville and Bushwick. "We are giving kids a narrow education."

As with all of Cuomo's task forces and commissions before, it is suspected that the "reforms" this Common Core task force is going to come up with are already written in stone, so these public hearings are probably nothing more than dog and pony shows to give the illusion that Cuomo is listening to parents and educators.

Nonetheless Cuomo felt threatened enough by the possibility of another Poughkeepsie (where John King had his public meltdown after parents and teachers challenged his reform agenda) that the Cuomo administration did its best to limit attendance at these hearings by having them held during school time and in small spaces.

They eventually made the hearings a little later after challenged over the scheduling, but even so, the message from the Cuomo administration on this is clear - they're not interested in hearing differing points of view on Common Core and the Endless Testing regime, just making it look like they are before they issue the already written Cuomo "reform" plan for the education system.

But one important part of the dog and pony show is it does put pressure on Cuomo, mirroring the polling on his handling of education issues as well as support for Common Core (both of which are very low) and showing that Common Core and the Endless Testing regime are deeply unpopular in most of this state.

I maintain that until politicians pay a political price for their support of the Core and the Endless Testing regime, we will get no substantive change to the reform policies.

Still, for Cuomo's sham force to hear so much criticism and negativity on Common Core and testing is important, because it continues to ratchet up the pressure and makes it harder for Cuomo to defend the "Steady as she goes" reform plan we're going to get on this in the end.

Cuomo Doesn't Want To Hear Your Thoughts On Common Core

Gee, here's a surprise:

ALBANY — Abrupt meeting notices and inconvenient timing for parents and teachers could hamper Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core task force as it attempts to gather information about the controversial standards, education advocates say.

...

Last week, the task force announced its first public meeting (in New Rochelle) just two days before the event was held. And on Tuesday, the task force announced it will host five listening sessions on Friday from 3 to 5 p.m. in regions across the state to taking testimony from the public on the standards.

The task force's website, however, had incomplete information about the meetings and faulty links.

After POLITICO New York made inquiries about the schedule with the governor's office on Tuesday afternoon, the times and locations were removed from the site entirely and were later replaced.

The process has caused some concern among advocates.

“If you wanted to maximize participation, you would publish the dates, times, and locations two weeks in advance,” said Billy Easton, executive director of the advocacy group the Alliance for Quality Education, which is partially funded by teachers' unions.

Ah, but therein lies the problem - they don't want to maximize participation.

And they don't want another Poughkeepsie:

The timing of the meetings also is inconvenient for parents and teachers who are still working or for those picking up their children from school, said Jeanette Deutermann, co-founder of anti-testing group New York State Allies for Public Education and administrator of Long Island Opt Out.

“Who exactly are they looking to target?” Deutermann asked. “There’s a time problem. If you’re truly looking to get some voices heard, this certainly isn’t the way to do it.”

“You either give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re just scrambling to try to put these things together … but you could say this is by design,” she said.

Deutermann referred to the Common Core town hall meetings in 2013 where former state education commissioner John King was met by hundreds of frustrated parents. King later came under fire for canceling and subsequently rescheduling a series of these public forums.

“We packed a giant auditorium,” Deutermann said. “They know that’s the potential. Maybe that was a way to stave that off.”

Hey, let's have some flash Common Core task force meetings, we'll announce them an hour beforehand on the governor's twitter feed and see what happens!

Then we'll have a few meetings that we announce a couple of days beforehand, but give limited info about on the task force's website.

Then the governor will give the task force the plan he wants them to give him back and they'll vote "yes" on it and it'll all be over.

Enjoy the dog and pony show.

Republican Assemblyman Not Buying Cuomo's Common Core Task Force Jive

Skepticism abounds:

North country Assemblyman Ken Blankenbush says Governor Cuomo's plan to have a task force look at problems related to the controversial Common Core curriculum doesn't make the grade.

Blankenbush is skeptical about the task force membership and says if the governor thinks this group will come up with something dramatically different than what we have now, he's kidding himself.

He says reform needs to happen with the help of teachers, administrators and parents.

"As long as those groups are not represented on this task force, I can't see it change - or a major change in the Common Core," said Blankenbush (R. - 117th District).

The task force is rigged with pro-CCSS people.

They may as well release the results of their task force now, because we know what they're going to be.

The CCSS will get slight tweaks, perhaps a new name, but the Endless Testing regime will go on.

Expect No Meaningful Change Out Of Cuomo's Sham Common Core Task Force

The ever perceptive Fred LeBrun in the Times Union:

The governor says he wants a complete reboot of Common Core, and wants to hear what all the stakeholders have to say through his diverse commission. Then he wants to lay out a new plan in January when the Legislature comes to town. Effectively that means the commission — which incidentally has no member from the "Opt Out" movement representing 20 percent of the state's students and their parents — must grapple with a complicated set of issues with diverse viewpoints and come up over the next several weeks with a consensus that satisfies all sides. An impossible task.

So we will most likely get what we got before, a bad joke masquerading as a thoughtful policy change.

Todd Hathaway, a teacher at East Aurora High School, was a member of the governor's first Common Core panel, and saw with horror how Albany really works. He was a dissenter from the commission's report advocating the garbage we got and found out they didn't really care what he thought. The governor's office, he said, "repeatedly ignored my concerns ... about inappropriate state testing, the misuse of invalid tests for (teacher) evaluations and the lack of transparency in state testing."

...

Our transactional governor, who long ago listened appreciatively to his hedge fund friends on promoting charter schools, for-profit education, devaluing teachers and advocating Common Core and high-stakes testing, is mostly looking for a political solution here, not an educational one. He wants to find a way to appease an angry, rebellious public while changing as little as he can of the atrocious education policy he dictated to the Legislature earlier this year.

...

The governor has made the Regents and the State Education Department scapegoats for his failed policies, blaming them for the hurried rollout of still unformed Common Core in this state. Lest we forget, it was the governor who insisted on getting there first among states, ready or not. Nor can we forget his continued vilification of teachers for a very long time.

Blaming teachers has been nothing but a prolonged, unfair distraction from what remains a prime challenge in New York public education — closing the achievement gap for minorities, for poorer school districts in inner cities and deep rural areas.

The disparity in graduation rates hasn't budged. It's time we got back to that, with a much better plan.

The difference between this "review" Cuomo has put together and the two past education panels/commissions is that we've got a road map on how this all works - Cuomo's office writes the report and hands it off for the members to sign and/or indicates how the report should be written to their shills on the commission.

This is what happened with the Moreland Commission on Public Corruption, this is what happened with the LIPA commission after Sandy, this is what happened with the two previous education commissions/panels.

So few will be fooled by this sham task force or the report it hands off to Cuomo for his January State of the State speech because we've seen this show before.

The key will be to point out to people over and over how much of a sham the Cuomo review was and to make him pay a political price for putting on the dog and pony show.

He wants a political solution to an education problem to come out of this process.

What he's going to get is an even bigger political problem when parents and educators see that the "reboot" was nothing other than a "rename" of the same education reform agenda and policies.

Oldie But Goodie: Cuomo's Moreland Commercial

Says right there, he appointed an "independent commission."

The NY Times report from this morning showed beyond any reasonable doubt that there was nothing "independent" about it: 

With Albany rocked by a seemingly endless barrage of scandals and arrests, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo set up a high-powered commission last summer to root out corruption in state politics. It was barely two months old when its investigators, hunting for violations of campaign-finance laws, issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm that had placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the New York State Democratic Party.

The investigators did not realize that the firm, Buying Time, also counted Mr. Cuomo among its clients, having bought the airtime for his campaign when he ran for governor in 2010.

Word that the subpoena had been served quickly reached Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aide, Lawrence S. Schwartz. He called one of the commission’s three co-chairs, William J. Fitzpatrick, the district attorney in Syracuse.

“This is wrong,” Mr. Schwartz said, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose account was corroborated by three other people told about the call at the time. He said the firm worked for the governor, and issued a simple directive:

“Pull it back.”

The subpoena was swiftly withdrawn. The panel’s chief investigator explained why in an email to the two other co-chairs later that afternoon.

“They apparently produced ads for the governor,” she wrote.

The pulled-back subpoena was the most flagrant example of how the commission, established with great ceremony by Mr. Cuomo in July 2013, was hobbled almost from the outset by demands from the governor’s office.

Gee, I wonder if Cuomo used Buying Time to make the Moreland ad?

Shelly Silver Says Case For Delay In Common Core Reform Agenda Has Been Made

SED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch seemed not to be listening to the public during their Gospel of the Common Core Tour in November and December, but the members of the legislature - including Assembly Speaker Silver - were:

ALBANY—Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said Tuesday he expects the state Board of Regents to form a plan for improving and possibly delaying implementation of the rigorous Common Core curriculum standards.

Silver said he would wait to see what “remedial actions” the Regents come up with before attempting to intervene with legislation.

“I think the case has been made, if nothing else, for a delay and a reevaluation of the implementation of Common Core,” Silver said. “The problem with it is … No. 1, it was suddenly put upon teachers and students and administrators and schools. The support for it was not forthcoming as quickly as the rigors of Common Core, and the training wasn't there for a lot of the teachers that are charged with using it as the basis for their education.”

If the Regents come back with a plan that has little-to-no action on Common Core implementation, the Endless Testing regime, and inBloom, we will have to put pressure onto the legislature to pass into law the fixes that need to be made.

Silver sounds today like he knows the state's education reform agenda is increasingly unpopular and would be open to legislative fixes.

Lawmakers have proposed bills to address teachers' and parents' concerns over implementation, testing and the use of student data.

Silver said “the first opportunity should be [for] the Regents.”

If the Regents don't present a plan shortly, “we'll go from there,” he said.

Ultimately I think that is what's going to have to happen.

Hard to see Tisch and her sham Regents task force making any substantial changes to the reform agenda - they already told us they won't:

The goal is not to undo what's been done or slow the pace of reform, said task force members, whose first meeting is Wednesday. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to go back to testing on the old learning standards, they said. Instead, the task force will focus on how to improve professional development and communication and look for ways to cut down on the time students spend taking tests, perhaps by encouraging districts to replace local assessments with some other measure in teacher evaluations.

In short, the Regents task force is another attempt at propaganda, making it look like the Regents are responsive to public concerns when they're not responsive at all.

So let Tisch and Company come in with their sham report, then we'll expose it as the sham it is and go from there.

Legislators in Albany are hearing public concern over Common Core, APPR, testing, and inBloom - even if the Regents and SED are not.