Apparently New York State’s Education Commissioner John B. King thinks he’s above being questioned. After holding two Common Core public forum’s he decided he really didn’t want to hear questions from the parents after all. You see he made the mistake of not taking questions ahead of time and screening out the hard questions. Parents in New York State were not treated to the Delphi technique and so Dr. King was treated to the frustration that many New York parents feel with the Common Core implementation.
Now that that he has two of these forum’s under his belt he’s suspending the rest because they’ve been taken over by “special interests” (i.e. parents who disagree with him). Newsday reports:
New York’s education commissioner said Saturday he had called off Long Island’s only Town Hall meeting on the Common Core curriculum and state testing after "special interests" hijacked the first such forum.
The meeting had been scheduled for Tuesday in Garden City and was sponsored by the state PTA.
Commissioner John B. King Jr. also put on hold the other three Town Hall meetings planned across the state, which for the first time would have let parents and teachers ask him about testing and the Common Core.
Hundreds of people attended a pair of at times adversarial and boisterous forums earlier this month — a debut Town Hall in Poughkeepsie in the Hudson Valley and an event in Whitesboro, near Utica.
King, in a statement, said he had been looking forward to speaking with parents.
"The disruptions caused by the ‘special interests’ have deprived parents of the opportunity to listen, ask questions and offer comments," he said. "Essentially, dialogue has been denied."
Dennis Tompkins, a King spokesman, declined to identify the special interests.
Carl Korn, the spokesman for New York State United Teachers, said, "Parents and teachers are not special interests."
What a coward. You can watch a video of the first forum to get a taste of what he encountered when parents were able to question him for the first time in Poughkeepsie on October 10.