A group of panelists made up of state officials and educators agreed last Wednesday that New York State’s education system needs to change, though they could not come to a consensus on what is needs to take its place.
Speaking at a League of Women Voters of Port Washington-Manhasset forum at Landmark on Main Street in Port Washington, the panelists discussed how state education policy is set and problems with the current education system The five-person group consisted of Associate Professor of Education at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, Arnold Dodge, state Assemblyman Dean Murray, state Sen. George Latimer, President of the New York State School Boards Association Susan Bergtraum, and member of the Board of Regents tenth judicial district Roger Tilles.
Murray said the current Common Core system does not take into account the different situations of each individual child.
“Every child is not the same. They don’t come out of a cookie cutter or a mold. Every child’s home situation may be different,” Murray said. “Some have one parent, some have two parents, some have no parents. Some are raised by grandparents. Some are foster children. Some don’t have warm clothes in the winter time. Some don’t get six to eight hours of sleep a night. The situations are completely different. All children are different. They don’t grow at the same level.”
The Common Core State Standards, which were created by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices, and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and released in June 2010, are a set of expectations for what students should learn and be able to do so the state education department can ensure that every student across the state is on track for college and career readiness, according to EngageNY.com, a website maintained by the New York State Education Department.
The Board of Regents voted to adopt Common Core standards in January 2011.
Bergtraum said the failure to treat students as individuals counters the purpose of public education.
“If you want to just lump everybody together and not look at what you have individually, you aren’t going to appreciate what goes into being a proponent of public education and wanting to see every child succeed,” she said.
While the board adopted the standards, Tilles, who has been a member of the New York State Board of Regents for more than 10 years, said it does not mean the regents agreed with them.
He said the regents had no choice but to pass the law and adopt the standards because Cuomo and the federal department of education threatened to withhold funds from school districts if they did not.
Due to heavy opposition of the Common Core system, Cuomo announced in September that he was launching a Common Core Task Force to review education standards and identify problems with the system, a review commission he also launched in 2012.
He selected former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons to chair the task force.
Parsons also headed the 2012 review commission.
Dodge said Cuomo’s choice of Parsons to lead the task force was “sabotage” because of his lack of experience in public education.
“If our governor says ‘we have an education commission who should run it?’ And he picks a business man. I’d like to tell the governor next time I walk into an emergency room in a hospital, I’ll tell the doctors ‘I got it, I know what I’m doing,’” Dodge said. “Would he stand for that? No. So why do we stand for a business person running the business that I’m in?”
Latimer said to fix the current education system, policy makers need to forget “not just political ideology, but educational ideology.”
“We’re not here talking about public policy issues, we’re talking about human beings,” he said. “And those human beings are those that will grow into the adults of tomorrow.”
Latimer added that tracking teacher performance based on quantitative information like test scores did not make sense because of how different school districts are across the state.
“To try to track teacher performance on the basis of quantitative metrics, does not make sense to me,” he said. “How on earth can we de-emphasize the qualitative review of a teacher in a classroom, and raise up metric results when Bronxville is nothing at all like the Bronx, in terms of metrics.”
Tilles said the current teacher evaluation system puts blame on teachers for issues with education in urban schools, avoiding the “bigger picture” of how poverty affects those schools.
“It’s easier to blame teachers than to address the bigger problems on why we are having problems in our urban settings,” he said.
Bergtraum said that state and federal government should utilize elected school board members to determine education standards.
“Don’t tell me that district A has to do with district B. Because district B has a different population and a different culture and different need,” she said. “You’ve elected your local board members to do what they believe is best in your district.”
Latimer, who represents the 37th senate district, said he supports legislation that would eliminate mandatory testing for children in third, fourth, sixth, and seventh grades.
He said fifth and eighth grade testing “makes sense” because that is when students make the jump from elementary school to middle school and from middle school to high school.
