Marian and I attended a July 8th meeting at Faith Temple in Brighton to hear a "What is Common Core?" presentation.  This meeting had been brought to our attention by Bruce Dunn at the July 2nd SWCC Education Committee meeting.  Common Core is a new PreK-12 school curriculum and testing program that is being promoted nationwide to the states and is being implemented in NY State.  Much of the information we had heard so far was from the RCSD which has been charged by NY State to implement the program.   There has been controversy about various aspects of the Common Core program but objections heard in the city has been primarily from parents and teachers objecting to the high emphasis on testing.   Objections to Common Core are being raised from both ends of the political spectrum.  The July 8th meeting was a chance to hear the objections voiced from a right wing Tea Party perspective.  

The July 8th presentation was by Lisa Christiansen, Lisa Johnson and Jodi Kohli who are from outside the Rochester area.  This link,  NY presentation by Lisa Christiansen, Lisa Johnson and Jodi Kohli,  covers most of the slideshow they presented.  There were a few additional slides inserted that were customized for the Monroe County area.   While the presenters' views on social issues differed significantly from what we generally encounter in the city, they presented a lot of useful and detailed information on Common Core that should raise red flags for us on some aspects of the program and which require action. 

From my perspective the most urgent issue to address is the handling of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which will be gathered and stored in a central database called "inBloom".  Whoever has access to this information will have a record of everything that a specific student has done from pre-K through graduation, including medical information in their school records.  This can be seen in slides 88 through 104 of the presentation.  The urgency here is that once this sort of information gets put into this database in the cloud, it is out there to stay.  Legislation is being pushed to get NY out of this agreement and this needs to be passed by September to safeguard student records.  Slide 111 of the presentation lists the NY State Assembly (#A06059) and Senate (#S04284) bills which address some of the problem.   These have bipartisan sponsorship.   See http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?term=2013&bn=S04284.
Please find your NY State Senator at  www.nysenate.gov/ and Assemblymember at http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?sh=search and urge them to sign on to the Student Privacy bill.  Even if the rest of Common Core stays, this privacy invasion must be stopped.

There are of course many other aspects of the Common Core program which are seen as negatives by both the right and the left.

• Excessive focus on high stakes testing much of which is for:
  • teacher evaluation
  • allocation of state resources
  • field tests for the benefit of publishing companies

Few of these are for the academic benefit of the students and they push the system into teaching to pass tests rather than for students gaining a deep understanding of the material.

• Standards were produced with inadequate participation of educational experts and forced on the states by $ incentives during the economic crisis. 
• Common Core results in a loss of local control.  It is controlled by unaccountable outsiders (curricula, testing, database and computer companies, foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc.)  Whether you see that danger as leading to a centralized government takeover of education or a capitalistic grab at public education for the benefit of corporations, there are some real issues here that need to be looked at.

More information on this can be found at: www.Stopcommoncore.com ,  www.stopccssinnys.com ,  www.classsizematters.org/inbloom_student_data_privacy/ ,  www.classsizematters.org/parents-beware-new-york-state-is-planning-....   There are also links to what Common Core is on the RCSD website,  http://www.rcsdk12.org. 

When you have reviewed the material, you can consider signing the petition at www.fixnyschools.com/ asking the governor to stop Common Core in NY.

Keep in mind that Common Core does not just impact public education.  It impacts every form of elementary and secondary education, even home schooling.  Teaching materials are going to be geared to the teaching programs that predominate and as will required testing.