THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
The New York State Department of Education announced today that it has decided to delay full implementation of Common Core until 2022.
“We have listened to the concerns of parents and teachers,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch said in a release today. “We’ve heard the concerns expressed at the hearings and forums, and we regret that the urgency of our work, and the unevenness of implementation, have caused frustration and anxiety for some of our educators, students, and their families.”
Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo blasted the Regents today by saying their revisions are “too little, too late,” and called today’s announcement “another in a series of missteps by the Board of Regents.”
The action by the Regents today will reduce local testing and will delay implementation of tests that lead to teacher evaluation. Changes in testing will be adopted in the following ways:
Increasing flexibility for districts to reduce local testing used to inform teacher evaluation
Creating an expedited review process for districts that propose to amend their teacher evaluation plans to reduce local testing
Eliminating local traditional standardized tests for K-2 used to inform teacher evaluations (The State does not administer traditional standardized tests in K-2.)
Capping at 1% the instructional time that can be used for local assessments used to inform teacher evaluations (The federally required State assessments in grades 3-8 English Language Arts and Mathematics account for less than 1% of instructional time.)
“Any major shift – especially one involving 700 school districts, more than 4500 schools,
(Photo courtesy of usny.nysed.gov)
and millions of students—is going to require adjustments and course corrections along the way,” Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. said. “The implementation of the higher standards has been uneven, and these changes will help strengthen the important work happening in schools throughout the state. As challenging as implementation has been, we have to remember one important fact: the old standards were not adequate.”
King also announced changes due to security concerns. He said the State has delayed the launch of the data dashboards related to inBloom to allow SED to work with legislators to address concerns about data security and third party providers used by the State and districts.
Cuomo, in a statement released this afternoon, said “Common Core is the right goal and direction as it is vital that we have a real set of standards for our students and a meaningful teacher evaluation system. However, Common Core’s implementation in New York has been flawed and mismanaged from the start.”
Cuomo said he has appointed a commission that will “thoroughly examine the situation,” and he said that assessment is already underway.
“As far as today’s recommendations are concerned, there is a difference between remedying the system for students and parents and using this situation as yet another excuse to stop the teacher evaluation process.
The Board of Regents full board is expected to adopt the recommendations on Tuesday. The complete report is available on the NYSED website.
