During the month of April, our children are faced with Common Core testing, which should remind each of us of how important it is to reform the education system in New York. Certainly, there are flaws with the implementation of Common Core, and I have serious concerns about how the governor’s so-called reform to teacher evaluations will work out. Over and over again, the governor and the State Education Department (SED) are making sweeping changes without consulting the people it would impact the most – our school administrators, teachers, parents, and children.

I, however, have made it a point to listen to you. I held a public meeting about our education system, one of 14 my Assembly Minority Colleagues and I held throughout the state. From those meetings, we gathered input from parents, educators, school administrators and students, and we crafted the Achieving Pupil Preparedness and Launching Excellence (APPLE) Plan. The APPLE Plan is a set of legislative solutions to reform education.

At the crux of the APPLE Plan is the simple premise that those who have a stake in education should have a role in helping to craft the curriculum our children will use to become successful adults. We propose that the people actually educating our children, the ones who have had the training and college education to teach, be the ones to help create our children’s school curriculum. This will help to ensure that developmentally-appropriate material is learned and that Individual Education Plans (IEP) for special-needs children are honored.

Additionally, the APPLE Plan would correct the funding imbalances our schools face in upstate New York, especially in rural areas. I have long been a proponent of reforming the school aid formula, which has put children in rural New York at a disadvantage. Little by little, Albany has been paying back the funds taken from our schools in 2011, but it is not happening fast enough. The APPLE Plan would require those funds to be paid off entirely.

Lastly, the APPLE Plan would inject some democracy and shed some sunlight on the actions of the Board of Regents. Our plan would ensure oversight of the board, which at this point has little accountability to the people.

The fight for a better education for our children is not over. It is so important for New York to get this right. As we all know, it is a quality public education that will lift people out of poverty and prepare them with the tools for success in life.