Yawn

About a year ago, Governor Cuomo created a commission to look at the issues facing education in New York State.  Just the other day, the commission released its initial report. Remember, this took a year of work with some of our "top-level" folks.  Here's a brief overview of their recommendations- their preliminary action plan.

1. Provide high quality full-day pre-kindergarten for our most at-risk students;
2. Create statewide models for “Community Schools” that use schools as a community hub to improve access to public, non-profit, and private services/resources, like health and social services, for students and their families;
3. Transform and extend the school day and year to expand quality learning time for students, especially in underserved communities;
4. Improve the teacher and principal pipeline to recruit and retain the most effective educators;
5. Build better bridges from high school to college and careers with early college high schools and career technical education;
6. Utilize all available classroom technologies to empower educators to meet the needs of a diverse student population and engage students as active participants in their own learning;
7. Pursue efficiencies such as district consolidation, high school regionalization and shared services to increase student access to educational opportunities; and
8. Increase transparency and accountability of district leadership by creating a performance management system.

    Really? Those are the recommendations? There isn't a faculty room or BoE that couldn't come up with the same list.  A colleague of mine described it as "a lit review of the past 10-20 years of ed research."