NYSED Commissioner John King Says APPR Teacher Evaluations And Common Core Will Bring About Greater Economic Equality

I called this yesterday before NYSED Commissioner King gave his Brown vs Board of Education speech:

Anybody want to bet an APPR artifact that King recycles some of the same boilerplate from the last speech about how the fight for education reform/Common Core is much like the fight for civil rights for this speech today?

Here's Jessica Bakeman on yesterday's speech:

ALBANY—On the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that compelled the nation's schools to integrate, New York education commissioner John King argued that the state's students are still very much segregated by economic status.

During a speech at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, King offered education reforms such as the Common Core standards and teacher evaluations as vehicles of greater equality in schools.

“Believe it or not, 60 years after [Brown v. Board of Ed], we remain deeply segregated,” King said. “According to one recent report, New York has the most segregated schools in the country, both racially and economically. Not only do our 700 school district lines often track patterns of residential economic segregation, there are school districts in this state today—including New York City—with boundary lines within the district that keep children of wealth starkly separated from children of poverty. And we know from our history that segregation, whether it’s economic or racial, breeds inequality.”

...

King said he respects those who are critics of his policies, and he listens to them patiently, even when the attacks are personal. But he won't be persuaded to retreat from raising standards and implementing education reforms like teacher evaluations, he said.

“Too many of the voices attacking the Common Core have done so with false narratives about the motives and intentions of education reform,” he said. “This isn’t about privatization or federal curriculum or enriching testing companies.

“This is about taking responsibility for educating every single child, no matter what his or her race, background or economic status,” he continued. “What those who resist high standards for all students are really saying is that some kids are just not going to make it, and that’s acceptable.

“But it is not acceptable,” he said. “It violates everything that America stands for. It’s an assault on the values of America, a country based on equality of opportunity.”

In short, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that every school district in the nation would have an APPR teacher evaluation system tied to Common Core test scores to ensure a day when all men and women will be judged not by the color of their skin by their Common Core test results.

I dunno about you, but I'm getting sick of these reformers wrapping themselves in the civil rights rhetoric.