Dear Commons Community,

The pendulum has swung back with the election of Betty Rosa yesterday as the new chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents. In a 15-0 vote and two abstentions, Rosa was the overwhelming favorite for the position.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The members of the State Board of Regents on Monday elected Betty A. Rosa, a former New York City principal and superintendent, as the new chancellor, signaling a sharp shift in the state’s education policies after dramatic protests by parents.

Dr. Rosa has criticized the new, more difficult tests that the state introduced under her predecessor, Merryl H. Tisch, as part of its transition to the Common Core standards. She has suggested that the tests were designed so that many students would fail, giving policy makers a chance to point to a crisis in the state’s schools. On Monday, she said that if she had children in the grades taking the exams, she would have them sit out the tests, as the parents of more than 200,000 students did last year.

Board members are elected by the Legislature, and set education policy for the state.

Dr. Rosa’s election is an indication of how much both politicians and the public have turned against the policies promoted by Dr. Tisch, including the evaluation of teachers on the basis of state test scores. In December, the Regents placed a four-year moratorium on including the scores as a factor in teacher evaluations. Dr. Rosa has said she would like to make that change permanent.”

Her bio reads as follows:

Born in New York City but raised for the first ten years of her life in Puerto Rico, Dr. Rosa attended public elementary and junior high schools in the Bronx (Districts 9 and 10) before graduating from St. Helena’s High School, now Monsignor Scanlon High School, in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx.

She received a B.A. in psychology from the City College of New York and holds two Master of Science in Education degrees, one in Administration and Supervision and the other in Bilingual Education from the City College of New York and Lehman College respectively. She also received an Ed. M. and Ed. D. in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard University.

Dr. Rosa worked in the N.Y.C. Department of Education as a bilingual paraprofessional, teacher and reading coordinator, served as an assistant principal and principal in special education, introduced an integrated linguistic model in developing a multilingual and multicultural school for general and special education populations, and was principal of I.S. 218, a full-service community school in partnership with the Children’s Aid Society in District 6. While working in the central office of the then N.Y.C. Board of Education, she developed the Office of Conflict Resolution in the Division of Special Education. She has taught graduate level education courses Education of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Children and Due Process: Law and the Handicapped, has served on dissertation committees and is currently an executive coach for doctoral students.

We wish Dr. Rosa the best of luck!

Tony