Johnson: Common Core 'Insanity' Must Stop

The superintendent of Rockville Centre schools warned that “we can’t lose a generation of kids” by allowing the “insanity” of New York’s implementation of Common Core to continue.

Dr. William Johnson, long an opponent of the new standardized tests and state implementation of the federal standards, continued to rail on the state education department’s decision to introduce modules into the classroom.

“It’s embarrassing for me to tell our state education officials that they don’t know what they’re doing,” Johnson said during the board of education meeting on Wednesday.

He added that the Common Core standards, which provide a framework that sets benchmarks for what students should know at each grade level, were “developed backwards from the 12th grade.”

The superintendent said he’s not against the standards themselves, and the district has provided teachers with the opportunity to experiment with them.

The district is planning a forum on the federal standards in January, but an exact date has not been nailed down.