RIP, N.Y. school reform
The era of fighting to improve education in New York, including for low-income kids, is over.
Welcome to the age of inertia. The only question: How much will the state Board of Regents water down standards and retreat from holding adults accountable for student performance?
Panel members, including a chancellor, set education policy. They are appointed not by the governor but by the state Assembly. But the Assembly is dominated by allies of the teachers’ unions — and those unions are verging on a takeover.
For many years, Chancellor Merryl Tisch was flanked by like-minded Regents who raised standards to prepare more boys and girls for college or the workplace.
With two-thirds of the state’s kids — and 85% of black and Latino kids — falling short, the Regents adopted the Common Core curriculum, as well as methods to measure how well teachers imparted knowledge. The Regents also backed charter schools.
Progress was steady until the unions, in alliance with misguided parents, fomented opposition to evaluating teachers and asking more of children.
Standardized test boycotts not only jeopardized the accountability system, they also threw an election-year scare into Gov. Cuomo.
After championing Common Core standards and the use of test scores as part of teacher evaluations, the governor last year called for a multi-year review that would eventually produce new standards and postpone accountability for state test results until 2019.
Amid the tumult, criminal charges deposed Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who had kept personal control over Regents appointments and, unbelievably, had limited union sway.
His successor, Speaker Carl Heastie, has surrendered the keys by letting individual members fill Regents seats that represent their regions. Those members march in lockstep with the unions.
Between retirements and force-outs, the 17-member board at present has 11RIP, N.Y. school reform - NY Daily News:
