New York’s Rx for Smarter Kids

Congratulations, parents of New York: Your kids will soon get a lot smarter — at least, that’s what you’ll be told. The State Education Department is watering down its K-12 standards, though it will never admit it. Commissioner MaryEllen Elia got the ball rolling by publicly introducing draft revisions on Tuesday. The state Board of Regents will vote them into place in June after a series of public hearings.

As the Chalkbeat blog notes, it’s a “sizable step toward replacing the controversial Common Core learning standards.”

Adopted across most of the nation, Common Core spelled out the knowledge and skills students should be able to demonstrate at each grade level — with state exams designed to measure whether the kids had indeed learned what they needed to.

SED officials insist the changes won’t make New York’s standards less rigorous. But Elia’s chief selling point is to emphasize that teachers and parents were intimately involved in drafting the new guidelines.

Hmm. Many teachers and parents found Common Core too tough: Scores on state exams plummeted as the standards kicked in.

And these changes are the latest in a “reform” process that has already scrapped the exam that tested prospective teachers’ literacy — and even ended time limits on state tests for the kids.

Common Core was designed to ensure that children across the nation develop the same core knowledge and skills to be college-ready by the end of high school — and that parents would be able to see if their kids were indeed learning.

Then, too, Elia emphasizes that the revisions are just guidelines. Districts can still write more-demanding lesson plans for their schoolchildren.

But they don’t have to. That will let some districts ease up, letting parents think local schools (and teachers) are doing their job.

It’s always easier to move the goalposts.