Carol Burris Retiring to Fight Common Core

Rockville Centre School District officials have announced they have found a replacement for South Side High School Principal Carol Burris, who will retire in June to fight Common Core.

The district appointed John Murphy, an assistant principal in RVC, as Burris’ replacement. He begins July 1, one day after Burris’ official retirement.

Burris, 62, said she plans to use her retirement to fight Common Core full-time.

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“I think that a lot of the changes that I see happening in schools right now — especially the evaluation of teachers by test scores — they’re changes I’m not personally comfortable with,” she said, according to the Rockville Centre Herald. With the newest bill in the state budget that made a teacher’s evaluation rely more on test results, she said it was time to move to the front lines.

“That was a bridge I could not cross,” she said, according to Newsday. “I did not feel, in good conscience, that I could come back the following year and participate in that evaluation system. I felt it would undermine much of the good work we have done here at the high school.”

Burris has been at the forefront of the fight against Common Core since its implementation.

In March, Burris addressed a letter to lawmakers, insisting she has never understood why they “would want to be in the business of evaluating teachers.”

The letter was posted on her blog.

“Teachers are employed not by the State of New York, but by their locally elected school boards,” she wrote. “I do not believe that our legislature has created systems to evaluate police officers, school superintendents, firefighters, the custodians who work in government offices, SUNY professors, or the men and women who take tolls on our bridges and tunnels.”

Read the full letter here.

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