To reduce Common Core acrimony, NY’s top education official floats renaming the standards

The rancor around the Common Core learning standards in New York might be diminished by renaming them, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said Tuesday.

“There is so much politicization about those words ‘Common Core,’” Tisch said on the Capitol Pressroom, an Albany-based public policy radio program. “We can call them the ‘Empire State’ standards’ or ‘New York’s higher standards.’”

“If you call them something different and you make appropriate adjustments, addressing some developmental questions,” she said later, “I think those are all appropriate things to do.”

Her remarks reflect just how unpopular the standards — and the state tests associated with them — have become in New York state, where one in five eligible students boycotted the exams this spring. The State Education Department and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have each announced plans to review the standards, a process that 18 other states have also undertaken.

Tisch, a strong proponent of the standards who oversaw their adoption in 2011 and related changes to state tests in 2013, said New York’s review should consider adjustments to certain standards after listening to teachers’ and experts’ concerns. Only one similar state review, in Oklahoma, has resulted in a full rewriting of the standards, according to the Council of Chief State School Officers.

“They have tweaked in a couple of areas, but they haven’t changed it,” Tisch said of the standards, which spell out skills that students should master at each grade level. “What they did do, however, was they changed the name.”

New York state officials have said little so far about how they will conduct those reviews. It’s also unclear whether the reviewers will seek to include suggestions about the content of state tests or the way test scores are used to judge school quality and factor into teacher evaluations, all concerns that have powered the growing opt-out movement.

But a few critics were quick to say that their concerns would not be assuaged with a name change.

“If it walks like a duck & quacks like a duck,” Mike Reilly, president of Staten Island’s Community Education Council, wrote on Twitter.

As Chalkbeat reported last month, even supporters of the Common Core have said that some portions of the standards should be adjusted to better account for the needs of the youngest learners. Susan Neuman, an education professor at New York University and a specialist in early literacy development, said that standards don’t appear to account for the order in which young children build language skills, for example.

Tisch said she was open to looking more closely at the standards in elementary grades.

“People keep talking about the developmental appropriateness in the kindergarten through sixth-grade range,” Tisch said. “All over the country, people have been talking about that. That’s something we should look at.”