NYSED Commissioner King Should Open Up A Whine Shop

He's always whining how the message about how wonderful his education reforms are never gets out to the general public - and usually he blames the media for not carrying his message.

Here's his latest whine:

Commissioner King, speaking to reporters afterward, admits the message about what the department believes are the benefits of using data collection companies like Inbloom, has not been getting out.  

“What’s clear is that there’s a lot of misinformation about Inbloom, about the data system that the state has in general,” King said.

Let's revisit a vintage King whine from earlier in the year:

“One of the challenges is that the media conversation about education always boils down to black hats and white hats,” King said, referring to the polarized sides of the education debate. As an example, he pointed to a recent New York Post story about a reading passage in the state’s curriculum that contained criticism of the passage’s content but little recognition of its value as a challenging text that reflects real-world issues.

“That may be all that space allows, but I think ultimately our challenge is to have a deeper conversation of what it would really take to change student outcomes,” King added.

He said New York had tried to tackle the communication problem by circumventing the media altogether through EngageNY.org, the state’s website that includes free curriculum and resources for teachers.

Yeah, see the problems Commissioner King and his merry men and women in reform are having in selling their reform agenda to the public is fundamentally a messaging problem.

It has nothing to do with the fact that children are getting sick to their stomachs from anxiety over the stress that has been put on them via the Common Core, the new curriculum, the Common Core tests, or the new teacher evaluation systems that tie kids' test scores to teacher ratings.

It has nothing to do with the fact that students and teachers both hate the new SED Common Core unit modules - the ones that have kids spending 17 days on one short story and practicing close reading over and over and over...

It has nothing to do with the fact that parents do not trust Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, John King, Merryl Tisch or any of the various inBloom functionaries King wants to hand over sensitive student data to.

Nope - it's simply a messaging problem.

Now if only the media would just get his messaging out the way he wants, parents would love inBloom, kids would love the Common Core lessons, teachers would love to be rated via the Common Core tests, and peace would break out in the Middle East.

Yeah, it's the media's fault.

Too bad fellow deformer Paul Vallas doesn't buy that crap:

Asked by Steiner if there was a problem with how officials had communicated their reforms to the public, Vallas said the issue was more fundamental.

“We’re losing the communications game because we don’t have a good message to communicate,” he said. In separate comments, Vallas criticized evaluations as a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”

A rare moment of transparency and honesty from a member of the corporate education reform aristocracy.

The problem isn't the messaging of the reforms.

The problem is the reforms.