Across the nation, Americans are expressing their dislike for Common Core standards. In New York, it’s become a political issue with the governor’s Democratic challenger in the Sept. 9 primary speaking out against Common Core and with his Republican challenger creating a Stop Common Core ballot line to capitalize on the unrest.

A Phi Delta Kappa Gallup poll last week found that 81 percent of Americans this year knew something about the Common Core. Last year, 62 percent had never heard of it. Only a small percentage knew about it from their school district; for the vast majority, knowledge came from television, newspapers, and radio.

Sixty percent of Americans, the poll found, oppose requiring teachers to use the Common Core State Standards to guide what they teach, with opposition among Republicans much higher than Democrats. The most important reason cited for opposition was limiting teachers’ flexibility to teach what is best.

The most important reason for the 33 percent of Americans who favor the Common Core is it will help more students learn what they need to know regardless of where they go to school.

Most educators believe the new standards are challenging but 40 percent of Americans overall say they are not challenging enough, the poll found.

Against this backdrop, The Enterprise in this special edition, will explore how the a are playing out locally in the school districts we cover — Berne-Knox-Westerlo, a small rural district; Guilderaland, a large suburban district; and Voorheesville, a small wealthy district on the cusp between rural and suburban.

History of the standards

Three decades ago, states across the country began writing standards, setting out what students should know at each level and assessing if those goals were being met. In what became known as the Standards and Accountability Movement, business leaders and state governors founded Achieve Inc. to raise academic standards and improve assessments. The group found that high school graduation requirements fell short of employer and college demands. To restore the value of a high school diploma, a common set of rigorous standards was called for.

The National Governors Association developed such standards for literacy and math in 2009. Initially, 45 states and the District of Columbia were members of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, but a number of states have since voted to repeal or replace Common Core. The New York State Board of Regents, which governs public education in the state, adopted the standards in January 2011.

The federal government gave states an incentive to adopt the Common Core by offering competitive Race to the Top funds, starting in 2009, to motivate reform. New York’s first attempt at winning the federal funds failed, partly because teachers’ unions would not agree to have student performance count as part of the evaluation process for teachers. On the second round, the unions agreed and New York State was awarded nearly $700 million out of over $4 billion in Race to the Top funds nationwide. Half of the money went to the State Education Department; the rest was portioned out to schools across New York based on a formula that gave poor districts more money.

Guilderland, for example, receives $30,771 over four years, or $7,600 annually while the district has spent over $1 million implementing requirements, which include new technology for computer-administered tests as well as staff training.

New York State had previously had its own set of standards. In 2011, the State Education Department came up with a dozen “shifts” — six in English and another six in math — for teachers to follow to align with the Common Core standards. In math, the shifts were: focus, coherence, fluency, deep understanding, application, and dual intensity. The shifts in English were: balancing informational and literary texts in elementary school, knowledge in the disciplines in secondary school, following a “staircase of complexity,” test-based answers, writing from sources, and academic vocabulary.

The Common Core Standards Initiative stresses, “While the standards set grade-specific goals, they do not define how the standards should be taught or which materials should be used....”

For example, under “phonics and word recognition,” the standards list four steps for kindergartners such as, “Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondence by producing the primary sound or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant.”  Seven skills are listed for second-graders, including, “Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words.” Another six skills are listed for second-graders, including, “Decode words with common prefixes and suffixes.” And so on.

There is no reading list or selected textbook. Rather, as students progress, they are expected to comprehend more and more complex texts. Writing, speaking and listening, and using media and technology similarly progress in a step-by-step fashion without any specifically required content.

The Common Core standards for math require the teaching of eight basic principles in every grade: make sense of problems and persevere in solving them; reason abstractly and quantitatively, construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, model with mathematics, use appropriate tools strategically, attend to precision, look for and make use of structure, and look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Many of the complaints with Common Core in New York State have centered in two areas — rushed implementation, and increased testing.

Many teachers and school leaders felt ill prepared to teach the new standards, much less be judged on them, and tests were given without a grace period for learning. Tests for the standards were administered in New York before new curricula had been developed and taught, leading to widespread public and political discontent.  Consequently, full implementation has been delayed until 2022.

Tying evaluation to student performance added another layer of testing in many districts.

New York Education law on annual reviews for principals and teachers required that 40 percent be based on student performance: 20 percent of that is from student growth data based on state assessments and 20 percent is on locally selected assessments.

Staff are evaluated at four levels: highly effective, effective, developing, and ineffective.

While test scores as a whole for a building can be used as part of the formula for calculating an individual teacher’s rating, many teachers’ unions chose instead to have districts administer pre- and post-assessments to set up a baseline against which student progress could be measured. This caused several additional layers of testing, frustrating students and parents alike.