Was Common Core rewritten or just touched up? Editorial

This week, the state Education Department announced changes to 60 percent of Common Core's ELA standards and 55 percent of its math standards. The release of proposed "new" academic standards is supposed to be a key step in New York's long, arduous path to education reform.

The state even quietly dropped the sullied Common Core brand in favor of a temporary tag: The NYS P-12 English Language Arts and Mathematics Learning Standards.

Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said that the new standards were based on: reviews by more than 130 educators and parents serving on two state committees; 750,000 pieces of feedback delivered to an online survey; and what Elia heard during her travels around the state. The whole review was motivated by New York's 21 percent "opt out" rate on state tests, which stopped the last round of state reforms in its tracks.

NEWS: New York proposes Common Core revamp

VIEW: Why are we sticking with Common Core?

A cursory comparison of the Common Core standards and the proposed new standards, though, shows that many revisions are for the sake of "clarification." One sixth-grade math standard, for instance, was tweaked by replacing "e.g." with "for example." A fourth-grade English Language Arts standard was changed from "Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions and carry out assigned roles" to "Follow agreed-upon norms for discussions and carry out assigned roles."

To be sure, other revisions are more substantial. The new ELA standards, for example, have more emphasis on fiction. Some new math standards include far more detailed explanations for what students are expected to know. On both the ELA and math sides, some Common Core standards have been dropped entirely.

A task force convened last year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for an "overhaul" of Common Core. It will take some time for educators to decide whether these revisions truly represent new standards or are really a nip and tuck of Common Core — something that might be called Common Core-Plus. It will take even longer to determine whether a decade of "reforming" education will have amounted to much. New York still has a long, long way to go, with plans in place to develop new tests and a new teacher evaluations system after the new standards are reviewed and adopted.

Keeping track of the changes has become an endurance test.

What are standards?

In case you haven't seen the Common Core (and most probably haven't), it consists of more than 1,600 standards that spell out what students should know and be able to do by the end of each grade. Many are so narrow in focus and written in such technical language that evaluating them is likely beyond the reach of non-educators. These standards are supposed to be grade-by-grade goals, but not curriculum or what's taught in order to reach the goals.

Opposition to Common Core is complex and difficult to summarize. It starts with the way Common Core dropped out of the sky in 2010, like educational scripture, having been conceived by governors and state educational officials and funded largely by Bill Gates. Although it's true that states voluntarily adopted the standards, they were enticed by the feds dangling billions in Race to the Top grants to states that adopted a new reform agenda (New York got $700 million).

Things really heated up, though, when states like New York rolled out new standardized tests tied to the standards and a new teacher evaluation system tied to the test results. The whole thing imploded in 2015, when 1 in 5 New York students boycotted the state tests for grades 3-8. Since then, we've seen much of the reform agenda put on ice as the whole thing is reviewed and reviewed and reviewed.

And what about the Common Core standards themselves? Many educators in the Lower Hudson Valley like the standards in isolation, apart from the tests. Others are lukewarm, with many criticizing the "age appropriateness" of the standards for the early grades (which Elia promised will be addressed by a new task force). Others could live without Common Core, but don't think New York can afford the time and money to start from scratch after years of tumult.

The big sell

The state Board of Regents and Commissioner Elia will now have to sell the need for new standards and tests to a fatigued public — a task at which their predecessors were inept. We anticipate that many will have the same concerns about the new tests (coming in 2018-19) that they have about the current ones: that they will narrow classroom lessons and distract educators from instruction. And it's still not clear that having all these precise targets will lead to students being able to hit them. As one superintendent tweeted, "Standards don't teach children, teachers do."

Supporters of supposedly rigorous standards continue to insist that they force urban schools to set high expectations for minority and poor students. Without standards and tests, they say, schools cannot be held accountable for how they serve students who need them most. Whether or not this is a sensible approach to closing the "achievement gap" — the greatest challenge in education — is a debate that will not be settled soon. Besides, education policy has become so politicized, with so much money at stake, it's hard to separate analysis from spin.

The state has its work cut out to convince school districts, already overburdened with regulations, of the need for new standards, new tests and a new evaluation system. Otherwise, Albany's latest reforms will also whither, and we could be looking at a whole new reform agenda for the 2020s. Beyond Common Core?

The public is invited to comment on the new/revised standards until Nov. 4 on the Education Department's website.