The Farewell Speech NYSED Commissioner John King Should Have Given

Here is the "emotional" farewell speech NYSED Commissioner John King gave yesterday according the Capital NY morning education email:

“Last night … I was thinking about those moments in fourth, fifth and sixth grade, when my father was so sick and my mom had passed, and I didn’t have hope,” he said. “But hope came in school. Hope came in Shakespeare. Hope came in The New York Times. Hope came in the capitals that we memorized in every country in the world. Hope came in knowing that tomorrow I would go to class, and I would learn something, and it would be engaging and challenging and interesting. You bring your students hope. This community brings me hope. It has been a tremendous honor to work alongside our team at [the State Education Department] and … the Board of Regents and every person in this room. I’m very grateful. I look forward to our work together, and I look forward to closing that gap between what is and what ought to be together.” [PRO] http://bit.ly/1wFi6uc

Given how destructive King has been to the public school system and the children and the teachers in that system, how arrogant he has treated parents and teachers, how much creativity and joy he has sucked out of education, this is the speech he should have given:

I was thinking about all the hope and joy I was given in school when I was a child, all the hope and joy that my children are given in the Montessori school I send them to, and all the hope and joy I took out of the public schools in New York by pushing the rote learning of Common Core, the test-based teacher evaluations of APPR, the soul-sapping redundancy in the EngageNY learning modules.  To be frank, my job as NYSED Commissioner was to prove that public schools are failures so that charter schools could flourish.  I was hired for that job, that was the job I worked very hard to carry out.  I wasn't quite successful at destroying the public schools or the children and teachers in those schools, but I came close.  It is my hope that my successor can finish that job so that New York State will be a land of innovation and choice, just like they have in the New Orleans school system.

I went into education because a teacher helped me greatly when I was at one of the lowest points in my life.  I had some very grave family issues and, like many children, I was bringing the emotions I had around those issues to school.  A teacher at my school noticed this and talked to me about the problems I was facing. He gave me hope, he showed me some one cared.

In the school system I have helped to create here in New York State, I wanted to make sure that no teacher can have that opportunity to help a student in emotional need because there is no time for that kind of help.  There is only time for test-based learning, endless professional development, useless focus groups, and all the other mind-numbing, soul-killing corporate drivel we at NYSED have pushed on schools and school staff.

If I were a child today and needed the help that I needed from my teacher, I might not get that help because the teacher would say "I'm sorry, John, I'd like to talk but I have to run off to my daily focus group to talk about my target students. Then I have to keep going on the EngageNY curriculum because every teacher in this school needs to be on the same lesson every day or they risk getting an 'ineffective' on their next Danielson drive-by observation.  Good luck, John..."

So much of what King talked about getting from his own teachers - hope, optimism, honor - is the opposite of what King himself brought to the New York State public school system.

Like many reformers, King is a hypocrite, of course.

He makes sure his own kids are given the nurturing they need by sending them to a Montessori school - this way, they don't have to experience the Reign of Error King and his merry men and women in reform have thrust on public school children.

I wasn't expecting him to acknowledge any of this publicly in his "farewell" remarks.

That's why I did it for him.

EngageNY Modules Make No Sense - An Emblem For Common Core As A Whole

Kindergarten math homework. Makes no sense whatsoever. #CommonCore should be ashamed. pic.twitter.com/emnxjUwRrU
— Chris Zoller (@ChrisZFitness) February 27, 2014

This is the "rigor" of the Common Core in crystallized form.

It's needlessly complex and makes no sense.

It does, however, make children cry and parents scratch their heads and wonder what the hell is going on in schools these days.

It is also a great symbol for why so many parents and teachers are rising up against the Common Core State (sic) Standards - not just the tests aligned to the standards or the teacher evaluation systems that rate teachers based on the CCSS-aligned tests but the the Common Core State (sic) Standards themselves.

In my school, the 9th grade teachers are spending endless days teaching "The Tell-Tale Heart" - the SED EngageNY module says teachers should spend eight days teaching these lessons, but the lessons themselves take much longer than that.

Students are asked the same kinds of questions over and over and over ad nauseaum about each paragraph - here's an example:

What information does the narrator reveal about himself in paragraph 1?

Who is the narrator speaking to? 

What does Poe’s use of punctuation in the first sentence reveal about the narrator?

During what part of the action does Poe begin his story? 

What is the effect of Poe’s choice to begin the story after the action has taken place? 

What is the narrator's purpose in asking the two questions in paragraph 1?

Personal responses of any kind are not valued in these lessons - it's all about the text and the text alone.

Students are then given "Accountable Independent Reading" assignments for homework in which they are required to 

Instruct students to reread and annotate paragraph 1 to gather evidence about whether the narrator is mad. Instruct students to preview paragraph 2 and annotate using the annotation codes from Module 9.1. 

That's Day One of the lesson, but it actually takes longer than one class day to complete.

By the end of the lessons on Poe, students want to bury the Tell-Tale Heart in the floor and run from school screaming.

But it gets worse for them, because there is an Emily Dickinson poem waiting on the other side that they will find incomprehensible and will spend 10 days on (though the SED EngageNY module has five lessons based on Dickinson's "I felt a funeral in my brain," the actual lessons take closer to two weeks to complete.)

As I pointed out earlier in the school year with this post, these EngageNY modules are steadily killing the creativity and energy children and teachers have for school and learning.

You still see this jive in the media that the Common Core are a more rigorous set of standards that will help students be college and career ready when they graduate high school.

The truth is, the "rigor" of the Common Core is causing "rigor mortis" of the soul for students, parents and teachers and the only thing these standards are doing for children is preparing them to drop out of school because they hate every second they're in a classroom.

These are the standards that Governor Cuomo and State Senator John Flanagan support, these are the standards that they think can be better implemented if only John King and Merryl Tisch can get their acts together.

But these standards cannot be better implemented because they were written by people as delusional about what children need to learn in school as the narrator of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" is delusional about himself.

In the end, the Common Core State (sic) Standards will end up in the graveyard of education reforms past, but there is going to be a lot of damage done to children, parents, teachers, schools and public education as a whole first.

Charlie Brown And Peppermint Patty Learn The Joys Of The Common Core