The state hearings on the Common Core standards came to Manhattan on Dec. 11, drawing 200 parents, teachers and students to Spruce Street School to express their impassioned opinions on the topic to State Education Commissioner John King, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and other members of the Board of Regents.

UFT Vice President for Education Catalina Fortino, the first of more than 40 speakers to address the panel, criticized state and local education administrators for failing in their responsibility to implement the standards correctly — with the resources, curricula and professional development necessary for the rollout to succeed.

“We support standards to ensure our children have the skills necessary to succeed in today’s world,” Fortino said. “But it was sheer neglect to leave it on the backs of teachers and principals. The state and the city have had three years to plan this — and it used that time poorly.”

King was heckled at the first Common Core hearing in Poughkeepsie in October after speaking at length from the podium, prompting him to cancel four scheduled hearings and change the format of new ones to give the audience the microphone. The Manhattan hearing took place the day after simultaneous hearings in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The state has yet to set dates for hearings in Queens and Staten Island.

At the Spruce Street hearing, the audience and the speakers’ list featured both opponents and supporters of the Common Core standards. King was routinely denounced from the audience and by several speakers who came to the microphone to challenge him on high-stakes testing and his plans to share personal student data through the inBloom program.

Nancy Harris, the principal of the Spruce Street School, set the stage for the three-hour forum in her opening remarks. She said the new Common Core standards had the potential to make U.S. students competitive with their counterparts in other countries, but “the rollout on the school level has made it incredibly challenging to move the standards from aspirational to reality.”

Parent Kari Steeves said her 12-year-old son opted out of the Common Core tests and told her that he didn’t want his teachers evaluated based on his scores.