Last week, we noted the departure of New York Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, essentially the face of the state’s rushed reform efforts over the past five years. This week, we learned who will step into the big chair, and the news isn’t wholly reassuring. Betty Rosa, the former Bronx principal and superintendent who is replacing Tisch, is the hand-picked choice of Common Core foes and a veteran of the testing wars. After winning a unanimous 15-0 confirmation vote, she announced that, were she a parent instead of a regent, she would choose to opt her own children out of state tests. That’s a potentially harmful claim in a state where 20 percent of eligible students were kept from participating in the assessments last year. The Tisch-Cuomo team certainly wasn’t a blameless player in the Common Core saga; the former chancellor has herself acknowledged the error in linking the brand-new tests to teacher evaluations, which led to an uproar among the state’s unionized instructors. But swinging too far to the other extreme by undercutting the standards won’t bring the city’s schools any closer to the accountability they desperately need.
You have to wonder how many times Washington State’s charter schools are going to have to prove their right to exist. The public passed a referendum to allow for their creation in 2012. But after eight schools had opened, the state supreme court ruled them unconstitutional last year because charter boards aren’t elected. Then state legislators got behind a bill to save the schools, only to see it stall in committee. Now the bill has finally passed both houses and awaits approval from Governor Jay Inslee, a charter agnostic—but more legal challenges may still await. The legislation attempts to sidestep the issues that tanked the referendum by establishing an alternative funding source for the schools and appointing elected officials like the state superintendent to the statewide charter authorizing commission. We’ll soon see whether those measures will do enough to mollify the court.
