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Hudson Valley Parent 21
deciphering.
"I understand they're saying
they're raising the bar, but it was
unnecessarily tricky," she says.
As for opting out, Poughkeepsie's
Anna Shah, says her second grader
"knows (opting out) is a political
choice, [and] that we are saying
that, as a family, we don't want
our child in a test-prep culture. He
knows the message that we're send-
ing, and there's a fine line, but we're
being honest with him," Kahn says.
"But he says 'I'm stupid, I can't do
this.' It's the parent's job to say, 'This
is not your fault, this is an adult
problem.'"
"After seeing what we were aware
of, I felt that (the standards) were
quite advanced and the expectation
would be quite different than what
we were used to," says Shah, who
is in the Spackenkill School District,
and an opt-out advocate. She held
her child back from kindergarten
in 2012-13 because she anticipat-
ed challenges with Common Core.
Primarily, she didn't like how quickly
the state education department
rolled out the system.
"There were benefits to Common
Core, to the data collection, to the
teacher evaluation, but instead of
addressing these things from the get-
go they swept things under the rug
and pushed them out and hoped that
(Continued on Page 22)
"If one were writing
a book on how to fail
successfully,
implementing
this would've
been a
bestseller."
KENNETH EASTWOOD
Superintendent of Middletown's
Enlarged CSD.
