Governor Cuomo: Parents Speak Out on Education

Dear Governor Cuomo,

As parents, and therefore as our children’s primary lobbyists, we applaud your intention to put educational issues high on your priority list – and to join with us in fighting to improve our schools.

The first goal we should pursue together is the repeal of No Child Left Behind. When waivers are necessary to make federal laws functional, it is time for the laws to go.

This should be part of a larger effort to restore sanity to our nation’s education policy. Top-down education “reform” has failed. We must return control of school curricula to parents and teachers and give local school boards and principals the responsibility for determining performance assessment and hiring practices for teachers.

New state-administered accountability measures, designed to accommodate yet another misguided federal law – Race to the Top – will further reinforce the worst aspects of NCLB. Real teacher assessment can only be accomplished by experienced professionals directly observing their work. The apparent objectivity of standardized tests is a mirage: the only useful result of these tests has been to show again and again that poverty hurts student performance.

Charter schools don’t help (their test scores on average are the same as traditional public schools). Teachers’ unions don’t hurt (the most unionized states have the highest test scores). When you look only at schools with low poverty rates, our schools already perform with the best in the world. There is no crisis in American in education, and we ask you to speak out against that dominant misperception – the rationale for endless attacks on our public schools. There is a poverty crisis, and addressing that is the most important thing any leader can do to boost student performance.

Yes, there is no higher priority for our nation than raising the intellectual level of our children. But right now our nation is hurtling down the path of ever more destructive testing and accountability measures, and your public statements to date seem to indicate you want to push us further in that direction. We ask you to change course.

It is not a mystery how we should proceed. The world contains models of national education policies that that work – as seen in countries like Finland that reject false quantitative measures of educational quality and understand that poor children cannot raise their academic performance when they are hungry, sick or abused. We must pay teachers well as a profession and avoid pitting them against each other in the demoralizing pursuit of bonuses based on arbitrary performance measures. Too many politicians are fixated on accountability and merit pay – crude carrots and sticks they think will improve education. But what really motivates teachers (as shown not only by foreign example, but by the prevailing practices in our own private schools, the ones our political leaders send their children to) are responsibility and the flexibility to respond to the best of their abilities to the children in front of them, without incompetent bureaucrats dictating their teaching methods.

For ten years, since the passage of NCLB, our nation’s education policy has been guided by the myth that teachers and schools are to blame for the educational deficits of the poor. We are wasting billions of dollars every year on standardized tests when we could be putting those resources directly into programs we know will help vulnerable students. Please join with us, with enlightened political leaders like Governor Brown of California, and with great educators like Diane Ravitch, in resetting this nation’s course in education policy. Celebrate our teachers and create working conditions for them that will draw ever more talented people into the field. Reject arbitrary school closings and support measures we know will boost the educational attainment of our most vulnerable citizens: prenatal care for poor women, high quality day care for young families in need, Head Start and similar pre-kindergarten programs, parenting classes and adult education.

Above all, listen to us, the true lobbyists for our children and for the future that belongs to them.