For months now, New York State has been ground zero for the backlash against Common Core among parents, teachers and school administrators.
The latest evidence demonstrating exactly how much New Yorkers loathe Common Core comes in the form of a shocking statewide poll, Albany NBC affiliate WNYT reports.
The poll, by the Times Union of Albany and Siena College Upstate Education, shows that a whopping 82 percent of the Empire State’s residents want to abandon the Common Core Standards Initiative in its current form.
“When you get over 80 percent of the people who say that, that’s what people believe,” said pollster Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute.
Levy suggested that the the survey data is compelling evidence that New Yorkers are convinced that the Common Core standards won’t enhance student achievement.
“It reads as though it’s not a throw it away,” Levy told WNYT. “It’s a take inventory and let’s launch 2.0.”
The poll also found that state residents are perplexed that state education bureaucrats want to use Common Core-aligned tests to rate teachers and school districts. Overwhelmingly, respondents said they don’t care about such ratings, Levy said. Instead, New Yorkers want standardized tests to be used to measure individual student achievement.
A spokesman for the 600,000-member New York state teachers union told the NBC affiliate that the poll is more evidence that the implementation of Common Core throughout the state has been rushed and botched terribly.
In the fall, for the first time, most states and the District of Columbia began implementing the national math and English standards, which attempt to standardize various K-12 curricula around the country.
Since then, Common Core has been a slow-motion disaster for New York’s public elementary and secondary schools.
In the fall, thanks to a combination of Common Core and new teacher evaluations, some four- and five-year-old students in New York City were forced to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice, standardized tests. Many of the kids couldn’t even hold a pencil, let alone bubble in. Other continually tried to help their friends get the right answers. (RELATED: INSANE: Common Core Forces New Kindergarteners To Bubble In Test Answers)
Also in the fall, New York’s education commissioner, John King, canceled four of five town-hall style meetings across the state designed to allow parents to ask questions about Common Core because angry parents in Poughkeepsie asked critical questions and expressed stridently critical opinions King didn’t want to hear. (RELATED: Education Bigwig Abandons Common Core Townhalls After Parents Try To Have Their Say)
More recently, in April, teachers and administrators took to the internet by the score to vent their frustrations about the ELA, the state’s standardized test in English Language Arts which is produced by educational publishing behemoth Pearson and specifically designed to align with Common Core. (RELATED: Think Common Core Class Material Is Bad? Check Out The Unbelievably AWFUL Standardized Tests)
The same tests featured a slew of brand-name products including iPod, Barbie, Mug Root Beer and Life Savers. For Nike, the tests even conveniently included the shoe company’s ubiquitous slogan: “Just Do It.” The brands — and apparently even some of their familiar trademark symbols — appeared in tests questions for students ranging from third to eighth grades. (RELATED: Mandatory Common Core Tests In New York Just Happen To Be Full Of Corporate Brand Names)
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