NYSED Commissioner John King: Elementary School Teachers To Blame For Common Core Opposition

First, he said there is no turning back:

State Education Commissioner John King defended the Common Core curriculum during a tour of the Binghamton region on Monday while acknowledging some difficulty in rolling out the standards.

“Any time you try to raise standards across 45 states, it’s going to be a complicated process,” King said.



King is traveling throughout the state to explain the initiative that supporters say is designed to raise the performance level of students statewide. But the common core has come under harsh criticism in some sectors as too rigid and too test intensive.

Throughout the state, some teachers are scrambling to teach to the new standards. Many teachers didn’t receive instructional materials on how to use the new curricula until mid-summer, leaving them little time to prepare lesson plans before school started. Two months into the school year, some instructional aids remained unavailable.



King said the state would remain committed to the standard.


“It would be a mistake to retreat from higher standards and from the idea of college and career readiness for all students,” King said. “That said, there are adjustments we will make along the way. We already have in the last four years.”

He then blamed elementary school teachers for some of the furor over the new Common Core:

King said some of the resistance to common core concepts comes at the teacher preparation level.“Historically, in New York, you could pass the elementary teacher certification exam and fail the math section,” King said. “You could compensate with your scores in other areas.”

 He recalled the dean of a teacher prep program telling him that candidates said they were going into elementary education “because they don’t like math.”

“That’s a problem,” King said. “We need elementary school teachers who have a strong background in math.”

In short, it's the elementary school teachers who can't understand the vaunted Common Core math standards that are the problem here.

Never mind that the Common Core math standards are considered developmentally inappropriate for young children and even parents are finding them confusing or just plain useless.

Yeah, never mind that - all this hub-bub over Common Core is the fault of the elementary school teachers.

King displacing blame onto others once again - special interests have fooled the parents into opposing Common Core, elementary school teachers who don't understand the math standards are driving the opposition to the Core.

The more he tries to defend his indefensible positions, the deeper he digs himself into a hole.