Carol Burris, a high school principal from Long Island, speaks during a forum on the state's school reforms, held Thursday at Ardsley Middle School. / Mark Vergari/The Journal News
Written by
Gary Stern
ARDSLEY — Critics of the state’s ongoing school reforms told about 200 parents Thursday night that tone-deaf state leaders have badly bungled their agenda, forcing questionable top-down changes too quickly and with too high a price
tag.
They spoke at a forum at Ardsley Middle School organized by two advocacy groups.
Carol Burris, a Long Island principal who led protests against the new teacher evaluation system, said that the Common Core standards are poorly done, in part because they count on uniform student progress. She said the standards are clearly test-driven and really morph into full-fledged lessons plans that will squeeze out teachers’ independence.
“It is a very scripted curriculum,” she said.
Burris said the English language arts standards are “skills-based” and leave less room for students to read literature about heroes and dreamers.
Leonie Haimson, an advocate from New York City who has fomented opposition to the state’s plans to send identifiable student records to the inBloom data cloud, explained that eight states have pulled out of the inBloom project. But New York still plans to send student records — including parent backgrounds and disciplinary records — to the cloud.
Haimson said it’s unclear whether the data would be secure or who would have access to the records. She said there is a link between the inBloom plans and the Common Core.
“All this test score data is much more valuable to vendors when everyone is taking the same test and everyone is using the same curriculum,” she said.
Parents also have to find out how their school districts are collecting and using student data, Haimson said.
The forum was sponsored by New York State Allies for Public Education, a network of 45 advocacy groups across the state, and the New York Suburban Consortium for Public Education, a Westchester-based group. It looked like a big class, with parents taking vigorous notes and nodding.
Bianca Tanis, a special education teacher and co-founder of New York Allies, said that students with disabilities have been overlooked by the reforms and efforts to increase standards. Special education teachers will be penalized, she said, if their students perform poorly on state tests.
