On Dec. 10, President Barack Obama signed a law that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act with the Every Student Succeeds Act. George W. Bush’s defining legislation for education over 13 years had rankled both the right, which didn’t like federal control of schools, and the left, which objected to the emphasis on standardized tests and a punitive approach to failing schools.

In a signing ceremony, Obama said his Race to the Top initiative, giving states more flexibility, “could only do so much” and, although the goals of No Child Left Behind were the right ones, in practice, the law fell short — not meeting individual community needs, and using too much testing, and “cookie-cutter reforms.”

The new law — the latest incarnation of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act that established the federal government’s role in schooling from kindergarten through 12th grade — returns powers to states and local districts, and keeps the government from imposing standards like the Common Core.

On that same day, Dec. 10, New York’s governor announced the final report of his Common Core Task Force, which recommends overhauling the current Common Core system and adopting new, locally driven standards.

Like the president, the state task force — made up of educators, parents, education officials, and state leaders — said that high standards are important but the method of achieving them was not effective. The report says, “New York must have rigorous, high quality education standards to improve the education of all of our students and hold our schools and districts accountable for students’ success. However, it is well established that there were significant issues with the roll-out and implementation of the Common Core standards causing parents, educators, and other stakeholders to loose trust in the system.”

Indeed. For the past five years, our pages have carried stories, letters, and editorials on the many shortcomings of the implementation of Common Core in our schools. Those who are in the thick of it, working every day to educate students, could see firsthand what was wrong.

Local school leaders told us how they weren’t consulted in developing tests for the state as they had been in the past. A British company had been hired instead. Teachers told us how the tests were not appropriate for the age of the students being tested; some of the children cried in frustration and the teachers weren’t allowed to help them.

We also wrote of the pain felt by parents and teachers of students with disabilities who were forced to take tests they had no hope of passing or even understanding — tests that were irrelevant to their lives. We wrote, too, about teachers and administrators who valued the standards but had nowhere near the time needed to adequately prepare lessons to meet them.

We heard often from, and reported frequently on, teachers who felt pressure to teach to the test rather than pursue the much richer projects they had used before their livelihoods depended on having their students score well on the new standardized tests.

The task force heard these concerns, too, and came up with a series of 2o recommendations in several broad categories — establishing new high-quality New York standards; developing better curriculum guidance and resources; and reducing test and test preparation time and ensuring the tests fit the curriculum and standards.

These 20 recommendations are all listed prominently at the start, and explored throughout the 36-page report. Then, on the last page, the 21st recommendation, the hot potato, is given: Until the tests are properly aligned, they “shall not have consequences and shall only be used on an advisory basis for teachers.” The transition phase is to last until the start of the 2019-20 school year.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has done an about-face, issued the report with a release saying, “Today, we will begin to transform our system into one that empowers parents, teachers and local districts and ensures high standards for all students.”

In 2012, we wrote here that rhetoric is one thing and reality another. We wrote then that the rhetoric from the State Education Department was about how the new system for evaluating teachers would advance the profession and improve student learning while the reality was children were crying at the start of the school year.

They were being tested to set up a baseline against which their progress would be measured at the end of the year. To qualify for federal Race to the Top funds, New York State agreed to have teachers evaluated, in part, by their students’ test scores; the teachers’ unions agreed to this.

When the baseline tests were given, “We did have some of the little kids cry,” said Voorheesville’s superintendent at the time. “We also had a student ask a teacher why she couldn’t help, and we thought that was profound — giving these tests seemed to go against the role of a teacher, which is to help.”

We wrote that was, indeed, profound, that trust is a cornerstone, a foundation for learning. How awful for both the students and the teachers to have to endure this charade.

The New York State Common Core Task Force Final Report states that the roll-out of the Common Core caused stakeholders to lose trust in the system. Restoring that trust is essential. Following the task force recommendations would be a good start. But, further, student test results need to be uncoupled from teacher evaluation. Burying the hot potato won’t solve it.

If tests or other assessments are constructed so that schools can improve their teaching — determining what students need help, for example — that is useful. But if they are used to evaluate teachers, teachers too often feel compelled to teach to the test, reducing their effectiveness.

Even before New York caved in to the federal plan, too much emphasis was placed on high-stakes testing. Schools were already being judged by state-issued report cards, based on a compilation of test scores. This ignores a convincing body of research that shows students’ success — as measured, yes, by test scores but also by later life’s work — is most directly correlated to family background and expectations.

Good teachers know what is best for their students. The rigidity, the lack of flexibility, comes from the force to teach to the test. It is much easier for a teacher to get rote responses from students, working off of a template of previous tests, than it is to truly challenge them with a rich curriculum, to shape young minds in a way that will make them resilient.

Alan Fiero, who has been a teacher for 42 years, wrote a series of columns for The Enterprise, pointing out flaws in the state’s implementation of the Common Core Standards. “We need to create tests that relate to what a child learns,” the Guilderland middle school teacher said this week. “The state tests had no relevance to a child’s learning or how a teacher had succeeded. ...Anybody in education knew it was a disaster waiting to happen.”

He also spoke of what it felt like to be a teacher as the political winds blow in one direction and then in the opposite direction. “It cycles back and forth,” said Fiero. “I was praying in my lifetime education would return to a humanistic as opposed to a mechanical approach.”

When he started as a middle school teacher, he said, “We had open classrooms, the best learning environment for the child. The learning was project-based, fostering sharing and investigation, which is much more meaningful for students and the community than the model of rote memorization.”

We hope his prayer is realized — that, with the new freedom granted by the Every Student Succeeds Act, more than the rhetoric is realized. District by district, student by student, the state needs to support the work of its teachers.
— Melissa Hale-Spencer