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Higher Stakes
Common Core - Is It A Conspiracy, Confusing, Or Just Incompetence?

REGIONAL – Across New York State, the last few months of the school year were filled with an undercurrent of anger over the newly trotted-out testing regime for the Common Core Curriculum, introduced with much fanfare just last summer.

At the Pine Bush Board of Education meeting on June 11, several teachers spoke of their frustrations concerning the testing that New York State has implemented this year.

Celeste Goff, who recently retired after thirty years teaching at Pine Bush, said that "High stakes testing and authentic teaching do not mix!"

She further explained that "high stakes testing really began with No Child Left Behind. Then it increased with Race To The Top." Now, she continued, things have expanded further with the shift to Common Core Standards to the point where she believes "this testing had become a burden on both teachers and students."

Goff pointed to the role of Pearson School, a publishing house with an enormous stake in the Common Core Standards. In many states Pearson sells both the curriculum and the tests, a situation that many educators consider troubling.

Public education in America has been a battlefield for decades and many ideas have come and gone. No Child Left Behind had its roots in Texas, a state that habitually funds public education at a low level. But these days, even Texas has backed away from NCLB. The Obama Administration brought in Race To The Top with $4.35 billion in funding to encourage innovative reform and competition among school districts. States received money for, among other things, introducing Annual Professional Perfomance Review (APPR) for teachers and principals.

Now has come the federal push to implement the Common Core Standards. Describing these, outgoing Pine Bush superintendent Phil Steinberg said they were designed to promote "deeper understanding of core principles of a subject area." Thus, in math, students would cover fewer topics, but in greater depth.

At the Pine Bush Board of Education meeting on June 25, teachers and a number of parents crowded into the district's administration building to express their concerns about the Common Core Standards, the Common Core Curriculum and the implementation of both. A general sense that the children have been receiving too many tests was in the air.

To clarify the situation we spoke to Carla McLaud, president of the Pine Bush Teachers' Association.

"We've had state exams since the beginning of time; I've been giving Regents exams since 1982. The curriculum has changed, the title of the test has changed, but we've always had tests," she said. "The reason there's been trouble this year is that New York State signed on for the Core Curriculum, and at the same time decided to put in APPR for teachers with 20 percent evaluation resting on their students' test scores. But... the state didn't roll out the curriculum in time. So for months teachers were teaching without the curriculum modules. A lot of this could have been prevented if they'd taken more time with it and waited until next year... The result has been that teachers are stressed and parents are upset with this obsession by the state with testing," McLaud concluded. "In addition, state aid is in jeopardy if kids don't take the test."

Indeed, at the June 25 Pine Bush meeting, Steinberg noted that if less than 95 percent of the students in a district took the test, that district's state aid would be jeopardized.

Joan Carbone, the incoming superintendent for Pine Bush, agreed that the implementation of Common Core did not go well.

"New York State initiated several things in Common Core and APPR simultaneously. This has been a disservice to students and the education staff," Carbone noted. "So the test scores are now to be used to evaluate teachers and they aligned the test to the Core Curriculum without giving the schools the materials and the time to adopt that curriculum."

Calls to Ellenville and Rondout Valley school districts found a number of teachers and parents expressing similar sentiments to those found in Pine Bush, although those interviewed said they'd rather not be quoted unless district officials or union representatives themselves spoke.

But in a nutshell, Phil Steinberg was right when he said, "They're flying the plane while they're building it."

Celeste Goff, with three decades in the classroom behind her, went one step further.

"It all becomes teaching for the test.," she surmised. "We had three days of 90 minute testing for English language arts and math, and before that we did 90 minutes of pre-testing, practice tests. People don't want to admit it, but it's all teaching to pre-tested benchmarks. And then the students' actual performances on the tests are measured against the benchmarks. In my opinion this is not authentic teaching."



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