FOCUS DC News Wire 2/18/14

 

 

Dupont Circle’s Ross Elementary has undergone a transformation in recent years, morphing from a school that neighbors dismissed into one so highly sought-after that there is a near-hopeless waiting list for pre-kindergarten classes.

 

But as much as parents love Ross, a brick building tucked amid some of the District’s priciest real estate, many choose to pull their children out of the school before they graduate. Ross’s fifth-grade class last year had just eight students. Of last year’s 19 Ross fourth-graders, just nine stuck around to finish there.

 

Most of the students who have left Ross have landed in D.C. public charter schools. A few have gone to private schools, a few to the suburbs. Many parents say they remove their children in search of the same elusive thing: a path to a decent middle school.

 

By next year, city statistics show, many of the remaining nine will have scattered, too. In the past three years, just one Ross fifth-grader out of 47 went on to attend the assigned public middle school, which many parents consider substandard.

 

The attrition embodies a looming challenge for the District’s school system and its next mayor: How can officials overhaul the city’s long-struggling middle schools to stop the exodus? It’s a test that comes as the first cohort of children to grow up with high-profile D.C. education reforms, including universal pre-kindergarten and mayoral control of the schools, reaches the end of elementary school and a decision about what comes next.

 

“A lot of us, we feel like we don’t have a choice but to leave Ross prematurely,” said Jennifer Touchette, president of the PTA and mother of a fourth-grader at Ross. She, too, has entered the charter lottery and applied to a private school for next year. “All we want is a viable middle-school option.”

 

Ross families are far from alone. After the 2011-12 school year, 11 percent of the system’s fourth-graders did not continue on to fifth grade in a traditional D.C. public school, according to city data. From fifth grade to sixth grade — the city’s usual transition point from elementary to middle school — the system’s enrollment that same year plummeted by 24 percent.

 

Often, those leaving D.C. schools are those with the most educated and engaged parents, who worry that the city’s middle schools won’t prepare their children for the rigors of high school and beyond. They cite poor academic results, concerns about safety, discipline and culture, and a lack of course variety and extracurricular activities that students need to stay engaged and to prepare for high school.

 

There also are tensions regarding race and class. District elementary schools have become increasingly diverse as the city has gentrified, but poor and African American students make up the majority of all but one of the city’s stand-alone middle schools.

 

School system officials say that they have quietly made strides in improving the middle grades and that middle-school enrollment is up 12 percent this year over last. Middle-school students have made some of the city’s largest math and reading gains in recent years, according to city test results, and strong principals and teachers are leading a culture change in some long-troubled schools.

 

“We know reputations take time to change,” said Melissa Salmanowitz, a D.C. schools spokeswoman. “But we also know what is actually happening in our middle schools is good and getting better. Parents should come see what is happening for themselves and talk to us about what they want in our middle schools. It’s probably similar to what we want for all our students.”

 

A new Washington Post poll suggests that the District’s system faces a particularly difficult task in rehabilitating perceptions about its middle schools.

 

Only about one-quarter of city residents say they would choose to send their child to a D.C. Public Schools middle school. Among parents who send their children to a D.C. public school, 45 percent would prefer to send a young child to a DCPS elementary school, but only 31 percent would send a child to a DCPS middle school. Thirty percent would seek a charter middle school for their child, while the rest say they would look to private schools or leave the city.

 

Anxiety and frustration about the state of city middle schools has bled into the mayoral race. While Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) boasts that the city has made some of the nation’s greatest gains on math and reading tests, some parents say the District has failed to offer a vision for improving middle schools.

 

“If a politician’s every third word isn’t middle schools, I tune them out,” said Tim Krepp, who has two children at Brent Elementary School on Capitol Hill, including a fourth-grader who is seeking a charter-school spot for next year. “There’s a lot of things I expect them to take care of, but I need them to take care of middle schools, and soon.”

 

Gray spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said middle schools across the city are improving, even if their reputations are slow to change. “Sometimes the reality does not jive with the emotion,” he said. “Sometimes the emotion can overwhelm what the numbers really are and [how] things are really looking.”

 

Wide disparities

 

The call for stronger D.C. middle schools has simmered for years, but it has grown louder recently, in part because the city has embarked on an effort to overhaul school boundaries for the first time in decades.

 

At the same time, Gray’s challengers in the mayoral contest have seized on middle schools as a possible weak spot for the incumbent, and D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) — who is exploring a run for mayor — has used his perch as chairman of the council’s new Education Committee to press for improvement.

 

“I’ve been surprised at the level of inequality in school programming in our middle schools,” Catania said at a recent hearing. “It is shocking.”

 

Alice Deal Middle School offers the kind of experience that many parents say they want for their children, and it draws 78 percent of the students who live within its Northwest Washington attendance zone — plus hundreds more who travel across town.

 

That’s partly because Deal has an International Baccalaureate curriculum that includes year-long courses in science and social studies at each grade level; advanced math classes and three foreign languages, including Mandarin Chinese; at least 14 sports, including lacrosse, swimming and ultimate frisbee; and dozens of after-school activities, including African drumming, knitting club and Brazilian jujitsu. This year, Deal also began offering “Period 8,” optional after-school enrichment courses taught partly online in subjects such as forensic science and mapmaking.

 

Nearly nine in 10 Deal students are proficient in math, according to city tests, and 83 percent are proficient in reading.

 

By contrast, Hart Middle School in Southeast draws 31 percent of the students from within its attendance boundaries. There are no foreign language classes for Hart middle-schoolers. Social studies is a semester-long elective for seventh- and eighth-graders. After-school sports and activities are far more limited, and there is no Period 8.

 

Fewer than one-third of Hart students are proficient in math and reading.

 

Chancellor Kaya Henderson has said that such disparities are unacceptable, and she has promised that addressing them will be a top priority in her budget for the next school year.

 

Henderson also has acknowledged that the system’s approach to middle school — including a 2008 decision by then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to establish more pre-school through eighth grade “education campuses” — has largely failed to attract the growing number of young families who want to stay in the city. And she has said repeatedly that she welcomes the scrutiny and the call for change.

 

“I actually take that as an indication of our success,” she told a group of middle school leaders at a recent budget meeting. “For a long time, people didn’t care enough about D.C. Public Schools to demand anything.”

 

Henderson also has drawn criticism for saying that in some cases in which the school system has failed to establish strong middle schools, it might make sense to funnel students into charter middle schools. Charter schools have grown quickly in recent years and enroll 44 percent of the city’s public school students.

 

“Parents want good options,” she said, “so we should figure out how to get as many good options in front of families as possible.”

 

Many parents say the city has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in rebuilding high schools, many of which are severely underenrolled. To fix middle schools, they say, the District must be just as willing to invest in building academic programs that parents value.

 

But school funding is based on enrollment, so principals of unpopular schools often don’t have money to build new programs. That’s backwards, said Joe Weedon, whose two children attend Maury Elementary School on Capitol Hill.

 

“DCPS has been saying, when you come, we will build it,” Weedon said. “Parents aren’t going to come unless it’s built before we are there. We want to see investments and programs in place.”

 

Promises about the future aren’t enough for plenty of parents who face choices about middle school now, including those from Ross. Students at the school, which is one of the system’s smallest and has fewer than 300 children, are supposed to go on to Cardozo Education Campus in Columbia Heights.

 

While Cardozo is in the midst of a turnaround effort, it is known for rough behavior, poor test scores and a dearth of opportunities for advanced students. It was a high school until fall 2013, when it added students in sixth grade through eighth grade from a nearby middle school that closed because of low enrollment. Only 38 percent of Cardozo high-schoolers graduate within four years.

 

“I am not going to send my kid to a school where there’s high-schoolers there,” said Gabriella Savio, a former Ross parent whose two boys are now at BASIS, a downtown charter school. “It’s not the right environment. It’s not what I want for my kids.”

 

BASIS, like many charter middle schools, starts at fifth grade, luring top students away from the city’s traditional elementary schools before they graduate to middle school.

 

Savio acknowledged that demographics matter, too, a charged and often-unspoken element of school choice.

 

Cardozo is 68 percent black, 30 percent Latino and 1 percent white. Enough students are poor that the whole school qualifies for free lunches. Hardy Middle School in Georgetown — another school Savio considered but rejected — serves a mostly out-of-boundary population that is primarily black and 56 percent poor.

 

“I need diversity. I need a nice mix of people,” Savio said. “I don’t want my child to be the only white child in a classroom full of all African Americans.”

 

Other parents say they have heard of improvements at middle schools, but they aren’t willing to risk their children’s education on schools that have not proved themselves over the long term.

 

Candace and Greg Rhett live east of the Anacostia River in a neighborhood zoned for Kelly Miller Middle, a long-struggling school that has improved dramatically during the past three years under the leadership of Principal Abdullah Zaki.

 

But D.C. principals come and go quickly, and there is no assurance that Kelly Miller will continue its upward trajectory, the Rhetts said. They are entering the lottery for charter schools and considering private schools for their fourth-grade daughter.

 

“My husband and I will not offer our child up as an experiment because they say things are getting better,” Candace Rhett said. “There is no sense of certainty, and I think parents want certainty.”

 

Missed opportunities?

 

Not every family leaves the system’s middle schools, and many of those who stay are happy with their choice.

 

Capitol Hill mother Heather Schoell said she entered the lottery for charter schools — and got her daughter into one well-regarded school — before deciding to send her to the neighborhood middle school, Eliot-Hine.

 

Her initial concerns about safety and discipline were unfounded, she said.

 

“We have been really happy with Eliot-Hine!” Schoell wrote in an e-mail. “I feel like we wasted a lot of time and effort fretting for a year on the pros and cons of the schools we considered. We could’ve focused that energy on the school!”

 

The District is hardly the only jurisdiction that struggles with middle school, a time when students and their raging hormones often test adults.

 

“We do it wrong more than any other grade level,” said Mike Muir, president of the Association of Middle Level Education, a national organization based in Ohio. He attributed the trouble to schools’ failure to meet the very particular needs of young adolescents, including the need to move, to interact with each other and to learn in ways that connect academics to the real world.

 

But many parents argue that the District has missed opportunities to strengthen its middle schools.

 

Four years ago, the school system adopted a plan, largely developed by parents, to improve Eliot-Hine and other Ward 6 middle schools. School system officials say they have invested heavily to implement the plan, but parents say the system has not kept up with the promised pace of change.

 

In Ward 5, officials planned to build two middle schools in response to complaints that K-8 schools did not provide enough academic and extracurricular offerings. But the first school, McKinley Middle, was severely underenrolled when it opened in fall 2013. The second school was supposed to open in Brookland this coming fall, but officials delayed the opening until 2015 in part because of concerns that it hadn’t been advertised widely enough to recruit a full student body.

 

In June, officials closed MacFarland, the system’s only stand-alone middle school in Ward 4. Parents of young students at Powell Elementary, a thriving school around the corner from MacFarland, hope the city will eventually reverse that decision.

 

Martha Holley-Miers, mother of a Powell pre-kindergartner, said she worries that without strong middle schools, the school system won’t reap the benefit of the energy people have poured into improving elementary schools.

 

“It’s unrealistic for us to think we can keep Ward 4 families engaged in the traditional public school system if there aren’t reasonable opportunities for high-quality middle and high schools in our neighborhood,” she said.

 

 

The Washington Post's Emma Brown and Scott Clement write today about parents of D.C. public middle school kids pulling their children out of DCPS to attend charters or private schools. The result is exceedingly low enrollment rates in these facilities and the high schools that the students would have attended. Parents and politicians, especially head of the D.C. Council's education committee David Catania, have been calling for improvement to the city's offerings after fifth grade. But the focus on fixing the traditional middle schools is in itself a little odd because up until now people had such a poor opinion of public education in the nation's capital they would do anything in their power to leave them. The Post reporters quote DCPS Chancellor Kay Henderson as stating, “I actually take that as an indication of our success. For a long time, people didn’t care enough about D.C. Public Schools to demand anything.”

 

The movement to attract more families to traditional middle schools is about to face a tremendous challenge. This year is the last one that all public schools in the city will be testing students utilizing the DC CAS. For the 2014 to 2015 term the standardized test relied upon for measuring academic proficiency rates will be the PARCC which is aligned with the Common Core curriculum. States that have tried measuring student knowledge based on the new standards have seen their scores decrease tremendously.

 

The Common Core curriculum has now ignited a firestorm of controversy across the 45 states and the District of Columbia that have adopted it. The political right has accused the Obama Administration of a government takeover of public education through its attempt to influence states in accepting the curriculum through its Race to the Top grant competition. The New York Times had an article just yesterday about the left's problem's with the new standards. Here in the nation's capital we had a hint of what is to come last fall when Mr. Catania accused the Office of the State Superintendent of Education of staying with the old method for grading the 2013 DC CAS because a newer recommended methodology would have showed that education reform is not going as well as Mayor Gray would have us believe.

 

There will be enormous pressure to delay the implementation of the Common Core and the PARCC examination when student scores drop. But this would be exactly the wrong path to take. States have adopted the new curriculum because of its higher goals for what students should learn in school and its emphasis on accessing students' ability to reason instead of memorizing facts. It significantly raises the bar regarding public education and it does so that America can complete in a better position globally.

 

If we are really committed to education reform in the nation's capital then we will stick with the adoption of the Common Core on schedule.

 

 

Parents and education advocates agitated by a rash of school closings by D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson are invited to submit questions to be used in depositions regarding the closures.

 

Henderson, who is slated to be questioned under oath on Feb. 21, is among several government witnesses called upon regarding a lawsuit filed nearly a year ago by civil rights attorney Johnny Barnes on behalf of grass-roots advocacy organization Empower DC.

 

"We have begun pouring through thousands and thousands of internal DCPS documents and emails received during discovery," Barnes said. "The content provides a window into the infrastructure that was responsible for decision making within DCPS. We look forward to these depositions with expectations that we will learn even more about that which motivated the closing of schools."

 

While a federal judge dismissed the bulk of the lawsuit in October involving the shuttering of 15 schools in the mostly low-income Wards 5, 7 and 8, he allowed several of the civil rights claims to move forward.

 

In upholding the plaintiff's core complaints, the judge wrote in his opinion that "the parents and guardians have alleged sufficient facts to state claims of discrimination under the three civil-rights provisions at the heart of their case: the Equal Protection Clause, Title VI, and the D.C. Human Rights Act."

 

As a result, the District, which became the first city in the nation to file a legal challenge against school closures that disproportionately affected students with disabilities, has also become the first in the country to have withstood dismissal and entered the discovery phase, according to Empower DC.

 

"In this case, Empower DC exemplifies David going against the Goliath of not just DCPS and the District government, but the large, powerful and wealthy network including the likes of the Waltons and the Gateses who drive privatization-based school reform throughout the country," said Parisa Norouzi, Empower DC executive director.

 

"It is no secret to us that there is more than meets the eye with regard to public education in D.C. Being the nation's capital, we have been used as a laboratory for the so-called "reform" movement. The proceedings of our lawsuit will bring that to light," she said.

 

Mayoral control of city schools began in 2008 when 4,000 students were either transferred to other schools that have also been closed, or displaced entirely from the DCPS system. Since then, 29 of its schools have been shuttered.

 

Empower DC contends that the 2013 closings, which affected more than 2,700 students, had not been subjected to studies to determine their impact, and that no evidence was provided to show how the closures would improve students' education.

 

Meanwhile, people who have prepared questions for the chancellor's deposition, as well as others with information about the inner workings of the DCPS, can forward their submissions via Twitter @empowerdc, by emailing Daniel@empowerdc.org or by calling anonymously at 202-234-9119, ext. 106.

 

 

My wife surfs the Internet more than I do and delights in sharing her discoveries. “You’ll like this comment,” she said last week. A reader wrote that the rising number of students failing Advanced Placement tests “could be a response to Jay Mathews’ ridiculous Challenge Index.”

 

It was nice to be noticed, and the reader had a point. I have been rating high schools since 1998 with an index that measures the portion of students taking AP, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education courses and tests, not how well the students perform on them. The reader was commenting on a thoughtful post by education blogger Natalie Wexler expressing concern about “putting students in a class they’re not prepared for,” such as AP.

 

Many people wonder why schools do that. Doesn’t that discourage the students? Isn’t it a waste of their time to try to learn something so far above their level? Those legitimate worries are important, as the D.C. school system has just released its AP results showing many students with failing scores on those tests.

 

After 31 years watching and interviewing hundreds of AP and IB teachers who welcome everyone into their classes, I am convinced that schools that challenge average or even below-average students that way have the right idea. What critics of that approach don’t understand are nuances in what motivates teenagers and what happens when courses lack the incorruptible exams provided by AP, IB and AICE.

 

I invented the Challenge Index, the core of the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list on washingtonpost.com, to dramatize the success of schools like Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Most education experts, people as wise and experienced as Wexler, assumed Garfield students were not ready for the heavy homework and long exams in AP. Yet in 1987, two teachers at that school, Jaime Escalante and Ben Jimenez, produced 26 percent of all the Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP Calculus test with a score of 3 or higher.

 

How did Garfield succeed when other schools with ill-prepared students did not? When the film “Stand and Deliver” was made about Escalante, the popular explanation was that he had a unique genius that other teachers could not replicate. Few noticed that Jimenez, no different from thousands of other good teachers, got the same results doing what Escalante did, giving kids more encouragement and time to learn.

 

If you visit schools that do that today, you will discover that the students who struggle in AP classes are not discouraged by the difficulty of the material when they are taught by encouraging teachers. AP to them is like going one-on-one against LeBron James. They don’t score much, but they improve and are proud to have a tough challenge. Interview students at Columbia Heights Educational Campus in the District, where all must take AP English, and you will see what I mean.

 

AP, IB and AICE exams are written and graded by outside experts. They cannot be dumbed down by classroom teachers. Schools that try somewhat less-challenging courses and tests to suit their less-prepared students find that doesn’t work. The temptation to go easy on such kids is too strong when there is no independent exam to keep them honest. As Columbia Heights Principal Maria Tukeva concluded many years ago, her students learn more and are better prepared for college by taking an AP course, even if most don’t perform well on the AP exam.

 

AVID, the nation’s largest college-readiness program, insists that average students be put in AP or IB but gives them extra tutoring. Washington suburban districts have found that the added support works. More D.C. schools have moved in that direction.

 

Seventy-five percent of D.C. public school AP students still fail the exams, but the number passing has grown from 295 in 2008 to 445 last year. I have yet to find any schools making more progress by challenging their students less.

 

 

Although the number of students taking AP classes in the District has gone up dramatically, many fail the AP exam. But there's a way to ensure that kids get a rigorous education without putting them into classes they're not prepared for.

 

Partly due to a push to increase minority and low-income participation, the number of students taking AP classes has nearly doubled across the country in the last 10 years. In DC, the number of students has grown 45% since 2010, according to DCPS.

 

As access to AP classes has broadened, more students are failing the AP exams. While some say that students who fail the exam nevertheless benefit from taking a rigorous class, others argue that students who are unprepared and don't get enough support can't get anything meaningful out of the experience.

 

But there's a way to give students a rigorous education without forcing them into water that's over their heads. Instead of teaching them how to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests, we need to make sure they truly understand the material that's put in front of them, in every subject and at every grade level. And the best way to do that is to get them to write about it, in a meaningful and structured way.

 

DCPS policies

 

In the District, the explosion in AP participation has a lot to do with DCPS policies. For the past 4 years, all DCPS high schools have been required to offer at least one AP class in each of 4 core subjects: Math, Science, English, and Social Studies. Those courses are open to any student who has taken the prerequisites, and the District covers all fees associated with taking the exams.

 

In addition, DCPS requires that in order to graduate each student must earn at least 2 credits (out of a required 24) in either an AP or International Baccalaureate class, or else in a Career and Technical Education (CTE) class (what used to be referred to as vocational education).

 

Different high schools offer different CTE classes, and the choices at a particular school may not fit a student's interests. In those cases, students are basically required to take an AP or IB course in order to graduate.

 

And here, as across the nation, one incentive for high schools to expand their AP offerings has been Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews' High School Challenge Index, which ranks schools by the number of AP exams taken divided by the number of students graduating in a given year.

 

The ranking doesn't take account of how many students fail the exam. And generally, the AP failure rate is striking. In DC, only 14% of graduating DC seniors got a passing score on an AP exam. That's a 50% increase since 2010, but it's still below the national average of 20%—and even that figure is really low.

 

Does it matter if you fail?

 

If, as Mathews believes, it's beneficial for students to take an AP class whether or not they pass the exam, it doesn't matter how many students fail. The point is to include as many students as possible in the classes, not to select only the higher-achieving students who are likely to do well.

 

Some studies have shown that taking an AP class and the exam that goes with it leads to greater persistence or higher achievement in college, even for those students who fail the exam. But there's some research on the other side, too.

 

One expert on the AP, Kristin Klopfenstein, doesn't dispute the results of those studies, but she says it's not clear that enrollment in AP classes is actually causing the positive effects. Klopfenstein has said that taking an AP class probably helps only those failing students who come close to passing the exam. If students are far behind, as many low-income students are, they'll need "wrap-around support" in order to have true "access" to AP-level material.

 

Another AP expert, Philip Sadler, told the Post that for some unprepared students, taking an AP class is like taking an advanced French class without ever having studied French.

 

School demographics

 

Whether or not lower-achieving students benefit from taking an AP class may have something to do with the demographics of the school they attend. One AP physics teacher at Wilson High School told the Post she's sure the students in her class benefit no matter what their score on the exam is.

 

That may be true at a school like Wilson, where 37% of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals (FRM). At the other 8 neighborhood (i.e., non-selective DCPS) DC high schools the FRM figure is 99%.

 

No doubt there are some low-income students who are fully equipped to do AP work, but generally speaking there's a huge and increasing gap in DC between the achievement levels of low- and high-income students. While the proficiency rate on standardized tests is about 60% at Wilson, at the other high schools it's more like 20 or 25%.

 

So an AP teacher at Wilson who has only a few struggling students in the class may have the time to give them the support they need to get something out of it. At a high-poverty school the majority of students in the class are likely to be struggling, and for most teachers giving them the necessary support will be impossible.

 

Small AP classes, and writing for everyone

 

That doesn't mean that DCPS should eliminate AP classes at high-poverty schools, because there are bound to be students there who could benefit, especially if they get some help. But instead of focusing on bringing as many students as possible into those classes, it would make sense for DCPS to drastically decrease their size so that teachers have a chance to give students the attention they need.

 

And what about the rest of the students at high-poverty schools? They need to be in courses they can understand, but that doesn't mean their education has to be dumbed down.

 

If teachers use a structured program to get students writing about what they're learning in a meaningful way, as is currently being done at 4 schools under a DCPS pilot program, they'll stand a much better chance of absorbing the material and developing the analytical skills that AP classes are designed to foster. (Disclosure: I have contributed to funding this pilot program.)

 

Obviously, all this will cost money. But putting kids into classes they're not prepared for and then not giving them the support they need to understand the material may well be a waste of time for many students, and their teachers. 

 

 

The Common Core has been applauded by education leaders and promoted by the Obama administration as a way to replace a hodgepodge of state standards with one set of rigorous learning goals. Though 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to them since 2010, resistance came quickly, mostly from right-leaning states, where some leaders and political action groups have protested what they see as a federal takeover of local classrooms.

 

But the newest chorus of complaints is coming from one of the most liberal states, and one of the earliest champions of the standards: New York. And that is causing supporters of the Common Core to shudder.

 

Carol Burris, an acclaimed high school principal on Long Island, calls the Common Core a “disaster.”

 

“We see kids,” she said, “they don’t want to go to school anymore.”

 

Leaders of both parties in the New York Legislature want to rethink how the state uses the Common Core.

 

The statewide teachers’ union withdrew its support for the standards last month until “major course corrections” took place.

 

 

“There are days I think, ‘Oh my God, we have to slow this thing down, there are so many problems,’   ” said Catherine T. Nolan, a Queens Democrat who is chairwoman of the State Assembly Education Committee.

 

The objections in New York have become so loud, and have come from such a wide political spectrum, that even the governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, has become a critic. Governor Cuomo has called the state’s execution of the standards “flawed” and appointed a panel to recommend changes.

 

Republicans are seeking to turn the broad discontent into a liability for him; Rob Astorino, the executive of Westchester County who is considering a run for governor, said of Mr. Cuomo, “He has pushed it from the beginning, and now he is trying to push it off on someone else.”

 

Common Core advocates like Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group, have been taken aback. “It’s bizarre,” he said. “New York is in some interesting company, right up with the reddest of the red states. And you worry that there will be bleed-over from New York to other states.”

 

Few in New York are calling for abandoning the standards. And state officials have not backed out of a national consortium developing exams based on the standards, as their counterparts in states like Georgia and Oklahoma have. No state that adopted the standards has gone so far as to withdraw from them.

 

The loudest of the complaints is based on New York’s decision not to wait for those new Common Core exams, which are expected to make their debut in 2015, but to begin testing students on the new standards last year. Teachers said they had not been fully trained in the new curriculums, and had not received new textbooks and teaching materials; many still did not have them in the fall. As the tests changed, the scores plummeted: Less than a third of the state’s students passed.

 

In Albany, leaders of both houses of the Legislature called this month for a two-year moratorium on the use of Common Core test scores in teacher evaluations and in decisions about student promotions or admissions. The state teachers’ union has asked for a three-year pause. The state Board of Regents, which oversees education policy and is appointed by the Legislature, has already voted to delay by five years the date by which all high school graduates must pass Common Core-aligned Regents exams.

 

The state education commissioner, John B. King, Jr., who reports to the Board of Regents, conceded there was an “uneven” rollout of the standards. Looking back, he said recently, “we could have prioritized parent engagement, and helping parents understand what the Common Core is, and is not.”

 

Yet he staunchly defended the effort, saying Massachusetts went through the same pains two decades ago after it adopted new standards, and now consistently scores as high as the top countries do on international measures.

 

Dr. King was booed and shouted down as he made similar arguments at public forums he held around New York in the fall. They grew so testy at one point that he called the remaining forums off before scheduling new ones.

 

The Obama administration encouraged states to adopt the Common Core as part of the Race to the Top grant competition, but it is not a federal mandate. Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, declined to comment on what was happening in New York. But in November, Mr. Duncan attributed some of the unrest nationally to “white suburban moms” who discovered that “all of a sudden, their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought.” (He quickly apologized.)

 

The Common Core grew out of a concern that the 2001 No Child Left Behind law had lowered the bar on what students should learn, since the law required improvement in test scores but left it up to states to write their own tests. It sets out a sequence of skills, or “competencies,” for students to master. Whether it is through tackling math problems or analyzing text, the Common Core encourages students to show evidence for their solutions and articulate how they think, with the overall goal of promoting more critical thinking at earlier ages. Districts and schools choose curriculums that meet those standards.

 

Recently, at Public School 253 in Brooklyn, Myra Wenger applied her new curriculum in a lesson on ancient Athens, asking her second graders why the city adopted Athena, not Poseidon, in naming itself. A pupil, Daniel Gornak, 8, answered, “Because Athena gave more uses than Poseidon did, and more healthy things for Athenians,” and Ms. Wenger lauded his methods in consulting his marble notebook for the facts.

 

“They love it,” Ms. Wenger said of her lesson plans. “They’re very engaged, more than last year.”

 

In another room, a group of first graders sat on a mat, eagerly raising their hands to explain similarities between farming in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

 

“They needed water,” one student, Rabiha Islam, 6, said.

 

“And, and, and,” she continued, searching for another answer, “they didn’t have, so they made canals.”

 

The school chose one of the country’s most popular Common Core curriculums, called Core Knowledge. It is based on the ideas of E. D. Hirsch Jr., whose 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” argued that mastery of a common set of facts was critical to learning.

 

Beyond the testing difficulties, one of the criticisms of the Common Core, in New York and elsewhere, is that it can be too demanding for young grades. Diane Ravitch, an educational historian, has said that very little of what is taught to first graders about ancient civilizations will stick with them; Mr. Hirsch and other defenders of the Common Core say children in early grades need lessons in history, civics, science and literature to build vocabularies and thrive.

 

In interviews with a range of teachers in New York City, most said their students were doing higher-quality work than they had ever seen, and were talking aloud more often. But it has not come without sweat. Homework is more complex and takes longer, several said, and in some cases is frustrating parents.

 

Teachers also said that pupils who were already struggling, particularly those who speak limited English, were facing greater challenges. Nonnative speakers are having a harder time in math because the new curriculums require greater use of word problems.

 

At a recent study group for teachers at P.S. 36 in the Bronx, Kathleen Rusiecki, who teaches first-grade special education, described one task in her curriculum: Draw a picture of the word nobody.

 

“It doesn’t even make sense,” she said.

 

Ms. Burris, who leads South Side High School in Rockville Centre, and was named the state’s 2013 high school principal of the year, said the Common Core required children to grapple with topics in mathematics that are in many cases taught a year earlier than before and “in a more difficult way.”

 

“I fear that they are creating a generation of young students who are learning to hate mathematics,” she said.

 

All the pushback in New York is “not optimal” for the shift to higher standards, said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant education secretary and now senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. But he said he thought the Common Core would survive.

 

“It is a drag and it will slow things down a little bit,” he said, “but it is not a mortal wound.”