Common Core Compnents - ‘Round and ‘Round She Goes!

[Chris_Wendt]

No Punishment for Regents over Common Core

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Three of the four Regents seeking re-election to new 5-year terms were re-elected yesterday.
The fourth Regent, whose term is expiring, decided not to seek another term, and a successor was elected yesterday.

Regents are elected by a joint Assembly & Senate vote in Albany.
Yesterday's was the first such vote in many years in which Republicans participated.
Republicans had been on a long boycott of this process over the issue of the perennial dominance by NY City Democrats.
There may be some effort made to balance out the equity in Regents elections, but I do not expect any power shift.

During the run-up to this election, public threats were made by key legislators to turn-out of office the 4 Regents whose terms were expiring, as punishment for the handling of the implementation of the Common Core by the Regents and the Commissioner who works directly for the Regents. The Legislature actually recruited potential replacements, but none were found suitable for the role. I personally suspect that the one replacement Regent elected yesterday was tapped during the process and the Regent who declined to seek re-election was politely offered the opportunity to drop out of the race, or face being replaced by the legislators' votes.

Drama...not really.

Chris Wendt

[Chris_Wendt]

Newsday reporting a "deal in the works to delay Common Core", Wednesday, March 26. Unnamed sources. Part of State Budget deal.
Half-baked, plan would prohibit use of CC Assessment scores to determine class placement or grade level promotion for two years, but still require/allow assessment scores to be used in APPR teacher evaluations. Why this is part of the State Budget negotiations would be amazing to know, except nothing about NY politics or the NY State Budget is amazing anymore.

This is not a done deal, but it may become so this week.

My take: as long as assessment scores are a mandatory part of APPR teacher evaluations, the battle over Common Core will rage.

Apparently Indiana has pulled out of the Common Core (link). This may become The Story to watch in April.

Watching...waiting...writing.

Chris Wendt

[lilly]

Mar 26, 2014 7:00:19 GMT -5 Chris_Wendt said:

My take: as long as assessment scores are a mandatory part of APPR teacher evaluations, the battle over Common Core will rage.

Yup. But I wouldn't characterize it as raging. The longer we're into this, the more 'a little off kilter' the anti-CC sentiment seems.

As for Indiana, check out NPR's account (and reader comments) compared to Fox's:

www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/03/24/293894857/indiana-becomes-first-state-to-back-out-of-common-core

[Chris_Wendt]

Lilly

The NPR article about Indiana pulling out of the Common Core is a good read. Pointing to Rand Paul and Ted Cruz was a little disjointed, Paul being very much his own man (his own party?), and Cruz being from Texas, which is NOT a Common Core adopting state. As a matter of fact Texas, home of GWB, resisted W's hallmark NCLB program, going so far as to run its own parallel system of evaluating and reporting school/district performance and progress each year. Although Texas had to comply with NCLB reporting requirements, including officially publishing their results, they also ran their "own" results alongside their NCLB report cards, and basically IGNORED their NCLB results whenever it was (is) convenient for them to do so. Texas has no stake in the outcome of the Common Core debate*. Neither do I (other than 6 of my 9 grandchildren who are at least potentially subject to it, for better or worse)..

When I get around to publishing the comments from the 'Turkeys' in my "Gathering of Eagles" blog, you will find that we agree on your assessment that some anti-CC arguments are (more than just) "a little off-kilter". But that could be a mutually subjective 'take' by opposing POV's.

Having sat in a few audiences attending CC discussions, my sense of CC-opponents "raging" seems appropriate to me. Raging and being off-kilter are not mutually exclusive! One often enables the other.

Regards,

Chris Wendt

* While it is true that "Texas has no stake in the outcome of the Common Core debate", the Common Core Concept has a huge stake in Texas, and a huge RISK presented by Texas being and remaining an outlier to what is supposedly "Common" with the Common Core. Texas, with 5 million students, has the second largest public school enrollment in the nation, behind California. More significantly, though, more than one out of every ten American public school students attends school in Texas. That statistic, alone, renders the Common Core as being only the "Ninety-Percent Common Core" at best. -CW