What NYSED Commissioner John King Finds Disturbing

From Chalkbeat:

King spoke at length in defense of the Common Core learning standards during a panel discussion at the conference, which was hosted by Schools that Can, a national nonprofit that helps district, charter, and independent schools collaborate.

At one point, when assessing different arguments that he has heard educators make against the Common Core, he noted that some say the standards exceed students’ intellectual capabilities at certain ages.

“Sometimes I feel like ‘developmentally inappropriate’ is being used as a euphemism for ‘harder,’” he said.

Some Twitter users seized on that comment. The user @perdidostschool, for instance, turned it on the state’s Common Core curriculum materials: “‘Rigor’” is often a euphemism for poorly-written EngageNY modules,” the tweet read.

Luckily for King, if not his critics, he also said during the talk that he tries to avoid checking his Twitter account too often.

“There are angry tweets sometimes,” he said. “I try not to look at those, because they’re disturbing sometimes.”

As we know from the Poughkeepsie debacle, what NYSED Commissioner King finds disturbing is anybody who doesn't agree 100% with his education reform agenda.

He doesn't like tweets pointing out problems with the state's reform agenda, the Common Core, the State Education Department's CCSS implementation or the EngageNY modules.

Too bad.

That he says "I try not to look at those" let's you know he very much looks at them.

In other words, they're hearing the criticism at SED even though they make believe like they're not.

I think it was Michael Fiorillo who pointed out that Nixon's people used to say the president never heard the protests outside the White House over the war, he was too busy watching football and engaged in doing the business of the country to hear that stuff.

But we know now from the tapes that the Nixon people were obsessed with the protests, looking for ways to retaliate against the protesters, looking for ways to silence them.

King, Tisch, Cuomo and Company like to make as if the widening parent/teacher protests over Common Core, the Endless Testing regime and the APPR teacher evaluation system that mandates so much of the extra testing don't matter to them one whit.

But you can be certain these protests do matter, they're paying attention and they're worried about them.

In the end, that's what King finds most disturbing about the critical tweets.

They're emblematic of the growing revolt over his reform agenda and he can't ignore that no matter how hard he tries.