ust five years after signing on to adopt the Common Core State Standards, New Jersey officials are unceremoniously signing out.
To implement the Common Core standards — a set of educational benchmarks aimed at increasing classroom rigor — New Jersey public schools spent five years training teachers, investing in new technology and buying textbooks.
Bowing to political pressure, the state is now reversing course and reverting to a not-so-distant past when New Jersey educators set their own academic bar. A six-month review of the existing standards for math, English and language arts commenced Wednesday, with an aim toward putting a New Jersey stamp on new standards.
Despite the about-face, nobody is forecasting wholesale changes in New Jersey. Such 360-degree turns can take considerable time and money. Similar turnabouts elsewhere have mostly amounted to rebranding or cosmetic changes, rather than sharp departures from the status quo.
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Education waiting game: Common Core review begins
"We will not be tearing down and starting over, but rather looking critically at where are there opportunities for clarification, for omission and for addition, to make sure that we always have the top standards for our students," Kimberley Harrington, chief academic officer in the Department of Education, said last week.
In fact, New Jersey is retaining perhaps the most controversial aspect of the education reforms — the standardized tests that large numbers of parents and students boycotted in the last school year. Among teachers especially, those exams have been a lightning rod for criticism because the results are factored into teacher evaluations.
"My sense is that most people are treating this as more of a political statement than one that is based on a detailed analysis of the content of the standards," said Drew Gitomer, a professor at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education.
Bipartisan scorn
Once supported by Republicans and Democrats alike as a tool to drive stronger student performance, Common Core has instead become a political pinata, with critics assailing it from across the political spectrum.
Its critics say the standards are confusing, lead to learning gaps, and diminish the rights of states and local school boards to make educational decisions. Additionally, they have been panned as top-down reforms from Washington, even though the nation's governors and state education commissioners played key roles in their formation.
Some of the backpedaling — and the fallout — elsewhere:
•South Carolina's Board of Education voted in March to replace the Common Core with standards written by teams of state residents.
•In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to force Oklahoma to provide school choice and free tutoring after the state repealed the Common Core. The federal department relented after Oklahoma reverted to its old standards, which were deemed sufficient.
•Indiana dropped the Common Core in 2014 and its Core-aligned state test. Schools there struggled to quickly administer a replacement test. For a time, Indiana, like Oklahoma, faced similar threats of school choice and free tutoring from the Department of Education.
"You can't even mention it in Indiana now," said Jonathan Plucker, an endowed professor at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut who previously ran the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy at Indiana University.
In Indiana, "a lot of people learned the hard way," he said. "You can't do this in a couple months. It takes a lot thought."
To implement the Common Core standards — a set of educational benchmarks aimed at increasing classroom rigor — New Jersey public schools spent five years training teachers, investing in new technology and buying textbooks.
Bowing to political pressure, the state is now reversing course and reverting to a not-so-distant past when New Jersey educators set their own academic bar. A six-month review of the existing standards for math, English and language arts commenced Wednesday, with an aim toward putting a New Jersey stamp on new standards.
Despite the about-face, nobody is forecasting wholesale changes in New Jersey. Such 360-degree turns can take considerable time and money. Similar turnabouts elsewhere have mostly amounted to rebranding or cosmetic changes, rather than sharp departures from the status quo.
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Education waiting game: Common Core review begins
"We will not be tearing down and starting over, but rather looking critically at where are there opportunities for clarification, for omission and for addition, to make sure that we always have the top standards for our students," Kimberley Harrington, chief academic officer in the Department of Education, said last week.
In fact, New Jersey is retaining perhaps the most controversial aspect of the education reforms — the standardized tests that large numbers of parents and students boycotted in the last school year. Among teachers especially, those exams have been a lightning rod for criticism because the results are factored into teacher evaluations.
"My sense is that most people are treating this as more of a political statement than one that is based on a detailed analysis of the content of the standards," said Drew Gitomer, a professor at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education.
Bipartisan scorn
Once supported by Republicans and Democrats alike as a tool to drive stronger student performance, Common Core has instead become a political pinata, with critics assailing it from across the political spectrum.
Its critics say the standards are confusing, lead to learning gaps, and diminish the rights of states and local school boards to make educational decisions. Additionally, they have been panned as top-down reforms from Washington, even though the nation's governors and state education commissioners played key roles in their formation.
Some of the backpedaling — and the fallout — elsewhere:
•South Carolina's Board of Education voted in March to replace the Common Core with standards written by teams of state residents.
•In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to force Oklahoma to provide school choice and free tutoring after the state repealed the Common Core. The federal department relented after Oklahoma reverted to its old standards, which were deemed sufficient.
•Indiana dropped the Common Core in 2014 and its Core-aligned state test. Schools there struggled to quickly administer a replacement test. For a time, Indiana, like Oklahoma, faced similar threats of school choice and free tutoring from the Department of Education.
"You can't even mention it in Indiana now," said Jonathan Plucker, an endowed professor at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut who previously ran the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy at Indiana University.
In Indiana, "a lot of people learned the hard way," he said. "You can't do this in a couple months. It takes a lot thought."
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