We know now that the state’s supposed dumping of Common Core educational standards is a politically motivated sham. Assistant Education Commissioner Kimberley Harrington told the state Board of Education last week that a review of the standards is designed more to tweak than reconstruct. The special committee conducting the review will have little choice; it must complete its work in less than six months, not nearly enough time for a more thorough overhaul.
There is nothing wrong with periodically refining the state’s education standards; Common Core has been in place since 2010, and New Jersey typically reviews its academic principles every five years anyway. But the premise in this case is Gov. Chris Christie’s explanation that Common Core isn’t working because there isn’t enough buy-in from parents and teachers who don’t believe the standards are sufficiently local. That’s why he’s talking as if he’s scrapping Common Core and replacing it with a New Jersey-developed model, but it won’t be close to that. There will be some nips and tucks and a rebranding, with the same related standardized testing that has been the focus of so much of the opposition.
That won’t generate more buy-in.
Christie is merely appeasing right-wingers who perceive federal intervention in the Common Core national standards that each state can choose to adopt (with incentives encouraging adoption). But Christie was a past supporter of Common Core, and he won’t entirely back away from an initiative that is promoted as raising the academic bar.
So Common Core will be refined and renamed. That’s not by itself anything to fear. The problem for critics of the standards is that this modest review process will likely be the last meaningful reconsideration for years to come in New Jersey. After this, we’ll be stuck with the rebranded Common Core, and the controversial PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) tests that administration officials continue to support.
We can also expect officials to declare any deficiencies largely fixed after the review, which raises the likelihood that the state will quickly and recklessly raise the stakes of the PARCC scores. Those stakes had been wisely curtailed by Christie himself, cutting the impact on teacher evaluations from 30 percent to 10 percent in the past school year. That percentage is set to grow to 20 percent in the coming year and back to 30 percent the year after that. Many individual school districts have also minimized the influence of PARCC scores, but so far the Legislature has yet to deliver on similar statewide action.
So watch carefully how the state discusses the first year’s worth of PARCC scores. If used strictly to help identify individual student weaknesses, those results can have value. But there will be no comparable data to draw any meaningful conclusions. Christie, however, has relentlessly attacked teachers and the quality of public education since he first campaigned for governor. He still has a point to “prove” and may use those PARCC scores to try to do it. If he or administration officials try to portray results as somehow exposing failing schools, it will be wildly irresponsible.
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