Next week could mark the final nail in the coffin of Common Core standardized school tests.
The Board of Regents elected long-time educator Betty Rosa (seated) last week to replace Merryl Tisch as their new chancellor.
Parents and teachers opposed to such high-stakes tests are hoping to repeat the amazingly successful opt-out movement they pulled off a year ago.
Last April, an estimated 240,000 students across the state refused to take annual math and English Language Arts exams — one of every five pupils scheduled to do so.
This grass-roots civil disobedience stunned the politicians and data-obsessed bureaucrats who have dictated public education policy for more than a decade.
Ever since then, the bureaucrats have been scrambling to win back the confidence of fed-up parents. Things will be different with the new round of state tests that start Tuesday, they claim. There will be fewer questions. Students will have unlimited time to answer them. Test scores won’t be the only measuring stick of pupil progress, nor the only yardstick for evaluating teacher performance.
But opt-out leaders aren’t buying the sales pitch.
Betty Rosa understands her biggest stakeholders are parents and teachers.
They insist standardized testing still consumes too much in time and resources from schools.
And now the parents suddenly have encouragement from a top state official.
The Board of Regents elected long-time educator Betty Rosa last week to replace Merryl Tisch as their new chancellor.
Rosa proceeded to make a startling remark in her first news conference. “If I was a parent and not on the Board of Regents, I would opt out at this time,” she said. Her words were a clear reminder that Albany cannot simply ignore the concerns of teachers and parents.
Rosa was, after all, a successful principal and school superintendent. Unlike all those modern school “reformers” who hail from the corporate world, she understands her biggest stakeholders are parents and teachers.
Parents like Charmaine Dixon, whose child attends Public School 203 in the Mill Basin, Brooklyn, and who is urging a test boycott again this year.