Its always a good sign when shills for those who are systemically attempting to undermine public education, the better to privatize it, are reduced to making public arguments that read like they are written by a person on a six day drunk. Such is the study in utter incoherence found in today’s New York Post under the headline, Common Core opt-out movement is parents who can’t handle their kids failing by Naomi Schaefer Riley.
Providing no evidence for her conclusions, mixing in a not so subtle accusation of snobbery,(” upper-middle class white parents “) adding a dose of gross civic negligence (“depriving parents, schools and taxpayers of valuable information about how well (or badly) we are educating our kids”) citing articles and systems that mock the very tests she is so desperately defending, Riley adds a new twist to Arne Duncan’s insulting statement of a few years back about “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were ” who were therefore opting out.
Riley’s takes Duncan’s insulting idiocy even further. Riley’s Opt Out parents are “helicopter parents ” who are simultaneously almost psychotic about the academic progress and success of their children and at the same time “don’t want to risk the fact that they might fail.”
Hence, these moral cowards have their children opting out.
That’s it. That’s her argument.
I am the parent of a child who is opting out and will opt out just as long as the campaign to privatize education continues. The Common Core aligned tests, funded largely by the despicable and insidious Gates Foundation and designed to insure most children would fail and in failing provide a rationale for the corporate takeover of public schools, are the central nervous system of that campaign.
As such, it is my belief that it is my moral and ethical duty and the moral and ethical duty of all parents to opt out of this corporate imposition.
As a parent I would love to speak with Ms. Riley about her convictions and how she arrived at them. I would love to have her accuse me and other opt out parents of cowardice.
Somehow I don’t see that happening.
I know it’s the Post and, as such, a low bar but still I believe such a public display of outright incoherence is a small but good sign that we are winning even as I know this war will continue for a long, long time. Such is one of the logical outcomes of allowing less than 1% of a nation to own over 40% of the nation’s wealth.
Raginghorseblog 