Let’s Help NEA’s Dennis Van Roekel Forsake His Common Core “Guessing”
It seems that National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel is willing to ignore the “forest” of the spectrum of top-down, punitive, privatizer-friendly, anti-democratic, community-school-destroying reforms in favor of the “tree” of his narrow focus on issues regarding concerns over specific items in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In this January 14, 2014, Education Week article, Van Roekel maintains that he has yet to hear anyone offer disagreement over CCSS specifics.
He also “challenges” CCSS opponents to offer “a better alternative” to a set of standards he defends yet refers to as “a guess”:
The standards have been politically attacked in the states—and by some of the union’s own members—but in an interview, the union’s president challenged naysayers to produce a better alternative.
“When I sit on panels and someone chastises us for supporting the common core, I always ask: ‘Are there specific things you believe should not be there?’ I never get an answer,” NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said. “Second, I ask, “What’s missing?’ I don’t get an answer. And the third thing I ask is, ‘What is the