As chancellor of the state Board of Regents, Betty Rosa is as well informed as anyone on issues affecting education in New York. But when it comes to the shape of national policy under President Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, his nominee for secretary of education, she knows as little as anyone else.
“Many of us are constantly on the phone, trying to figure out: ‘So, what are you hearing?'” she said Friday during a stop in Rochester. “We’re in wait-and-see mode.”
DeVos, a billionaire education reformer who supports charter schools and vouchers for private or parochial school tuition, has sent shockwaves through the ranks of traditional public schools, teachers unions and their supporters. They fear she and Trump will follow through on Trump’s campaign promise of a $20 billion school voucher program.
In a meeting with the Democrat and Chronicle editorial board, both Rosa and Vice Chancellor Andrew Brown recommended against overreacting to those positions.
“People often say one thing on the campaign trail … and then get into office and change their ways,” Brown said. “I don’t know that we can take what Donald Trump said on the campaign trail literally.”
They also pointed to structural obstacles to implementing a new federal system. The recently enacted Every Student Succeeds Act had the effect of concentrating more policy-making responsibility at the state level, meaning it would be more difficult for DeVos to make an impact locally.
Rosa also pointed out that Trump has often said he opposes the Common Core standards, while DeVos, a strong proponent of accountability measures, supports them.
“So, there’s dissonance right there,” she said. “As a state, we’re moving in a certain direction, and (while) we’re very clear we could see some issues or barriers in the future, we, at this point, are not reacting.”
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Regarding state education policy, Rosa signaled a continued movement away from strict accountability standards and toward a more “service-oriented” approach, in which the state Education Department is more focused on helping struggling schools than on sanctioning them.
Notably, she and Brown said the department would like to move away from highly competitive funding opportunities, in which districts devote hundreds of hours of manpower to plowing through lengthy applications.
“The idea of having to compete with the city next door, and you don’t get (the money) even though the world knows you need it more — that is just an unfortunate way to proceed,” Brown said. “We’ve tried to get out from under that, and that’s one area where we’ve disagreed with (Gov. Andrew Cuomo).”
On the topic of assessments, Rosa said the state needs to further expand the ways in which it measures student success. For instance, that could mean projects or portfolios, attendance and suspension rates or teacher-designed, in-class quizzes or tests.
“I think we’ve been much more honest in the conversation about accountability,” she said. “Some of these tests are for accountability — and you’ve got to name that — whereas some others are really there to move the student along.”
Brown, who represents Rochester on the board along with Wade Norwood, said the problem underlying many of the state’s student achievement issues is racial and socioeconomic inequity.
“Right now, in New York state, we are the most segregated school system in the nation,” he said. “Part of the problem is putting all the students in poverty all in the same schoolhouse. That has not served us well. Not in (Rochester) and not in other systems across the state and the nation.”
[Source:-DEmocrate & chronicle]
