In a series of public forums across the state, John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, has become the sounding board for crowds of parents, educators and others who equate his name with all they consider to be broken in schooling today. Some blame him for too quickly imposing more rigorous academic standards tied to what is known as the Common Core. Parents call him deaf to the misery of pupils taking standardized tests and too open to commercial involvement in the system; teachers blame him for sapping what joy they had left in their craft.
“There is now a ‘Common Core Syndrome,’ ” Beth Dimino, an eighth-grade science teacher, said on Tuesday, speaking to Dr. King in a packed high school auditorium in Suffolk County.
“Do you understand what that means?” she continued. “We have children that are being diagnosed by psychologists with a syndrome directly related to work that they do in the classroom. If that is not child abuse, I don’t know what is.”
While no such condition is listed in the official manual of psychiatric disorders — Ms.