The president of the Verona Board of Education and the leader of a Verona parents’ group that led the March boycott of the PARCC test are voicing skepticism over Gov. Chris Christie’s about-face on the use of national education standards in New Jersey.
On Thursday, Gov. Chris Christie, once an ardent support of the national teaching standards known as the Common Core, said it should be abandoned. “Instead of solving problems in our classrooms,” he told a crowd at Burlington County College, “it is creating new ones.” The governor said that rather than have Washington imposing its standards on New Jersey, he wants to the Garden State to develop its own new standards.
Verona schools have been working hard for the last four years to implement the Common Core and this year held the first round of the computer-based standardized test designed to accompany it, the PARCC. Verona even ended midterms at Verona High School to make room for the test. Board of President John Quattrocchi said openly that he didn’t think the PARCC was ready for prime time, and 10% of Verona’s students refused to take it in March.
So now what?
“To be honest, I don’t know what the governor means,” Quattrocchi said by email on Friday. But he stressed that parents have to separate the PARCC test from the Common Core curriculum, which he described as the “minimum” requirements for education; districts are free to extend the curriculum from there. “We do that in Verona to a large degree, already, with very good progress and results,” Quattrocchi said. He noted that Verona has been following a multi-year plan to expand electives, and dual-enrollment, honors and advanced placement classes at Verona High School and so-called STEM classes in science, technology, engineering and math in the lower grades. “Common Core does not conflict with any of those augmentations,” he said.
“Are there elements of Common Core that should be improved?” Quattrocchi asked rhetorically. “Of course–there always are. But, if the state of New Jersey determines we are going to implement another K-12 massive rewrite of curriculum, then we should secede. That would mean seven to 10 years of non-stop change. So, a student in the second grade at the start of Common Core, faced with another massive/equal change, would be graduating high school before the state ‘finalized’ what they are supposed to master. And that’s with the diversion and expense of such things put aside.”
Beth O’Donnell-Fischer is equally skeptical. She is one of the leaders of a Facebook group called Verona Cares About Schools that had urged parents to opt their children out of taking the PARCC. “I’m pleased that Chris Christie has acknowledged that the Common Core standards were not written by educators,” she said by email, “and that the Common Core has ‘brought only confusion and frustration to our parents. And has brought distance between our teachers and the communities where they work.’ I am however very skeptical of his motivations. He plans to continue testing NJ students with the PARCC exam which was developed to test the Common Core standards. I think parents and teachers need to stay vigilant in this fight for public education because it is likely that he will attempt to rebrand the Common Core without making substantive changes.”
Why did the governor switch course on the Common Core? The math and language curriculum, which has been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia (New Jersey approved it in 2010), is thought to be unpopular with Republican voters. Many political pundits expect that Christie will announce his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination soon. If he does, Christie would join three other GOP presidential hopefuls who have also abandoned the curriculum model they once supported, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
