Dennis Van Roekel’s call for Common Core course correction.

The response to NEA President Dennis Van Roekel’s call for a course correction in the implementation of Common Core State Standards has been all over the ideological map.

This might be expected when DVR in his statement took a swipe at “the detractors from the left and the right who oppose the standards.”

As if those with a vision of what good schools and good teaching should look like are somehow tainted.

Reality is a different matter however.

It’s not as if those who consider themselves progressive educators have always been of one mind on the issue of Common Core.

There were many who DVR would probably tag as on the left who had hopes that Common Core might address the inequalities in the kinds of education that rich and poor students received. Most of the national Civil Rights organizations supported Common Core State Standards early on.

I think DVR, like his counterpart Randi Weingarten at the AFT, saw the conservative assault on public education that has found a home in Obama’s Department of Education and funded by billion dollar philanthropies and thought that a conciliatory approach would get them to the table.

That approach has failed miserably.

In the year and half since I retired there is not a conversation that I have with former colleagues and those who I am in contact with through my writing and activism that does not begin with a story of how bad things have become in the classroom because of Common Core.

At last year’s NEA Representative Assembly in Atlanta the leadership and delegates were unwilling to go beyond resolutions opposing using Common Core assessments misused to evaluate teachers and rank schools.

Perhaps things will be different at this year’s RA (DVR’s last) in Denver.

If I can get the votes from my IEA Retired colleagues in Illinois, perhaps I can be there to take part in that important discussion.