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Saturday, January 19, 2019

Corey Booker, Kirsten Gilibrand and the democrats that don't understand and respect public education

I am a big fan of Barrack Obama but that didn't stop me from looking hard at other candidates when he ran for reelection in 2012 and that's because his education policies were dreadful. Race to the top, brought blame the teacher evaluations and doubled down on high stakes testing and in my state of Florida led to the end of teacher protections for every teacher hired after 2010. Now they are all on one year contracts and can be let go for any and no reason. 

I am a big fan of Barrack Obama but he didn't understand education. This seems to be a problem for at least some of the next group of democrats running for president.

Kirsten Gillibrand said she wants to fix public schools, um spoiler alert they aren't broken and parrots the talking points of the right wing privatizers. 

Then there is Corey Booker who has long favored charter schools to traditional public schools. 

From the Gadfly on the Wall blog, 

In California, 30,000 Los Angeles teachers are on strike because charter schools are gobbling up their funding without providing the same level of quality services or accountability.
That wouldn’t be surprising if Booker was a Republican.
He has also been a fan of Vouchers that allow children to go to schools where some teach as long as slaves had Jesus in their heart they were more free than people who didn't and other nonsense.
Obama wouldn't have gotten elected twice without the help of teachers, I have no doubt about that, but while in office, with his myopic secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, he attacked and damaged the profession. It's funny, people rightfully complain about DeVos, but Duncan wasn't much better, and was not an educator either. 
Public education as we can tell by what has happened in state after state, despite being far and away the best option is barely hanging on, suffering attack after attack by people who want to privatize and profit off it. We can't afford another president who doesn't understand or appreciate its importance.

Public education more than anything built this great country. It's not broken and shouldn't be replaced by private schools that take vouchers and don't have standards or charters that don't offer innovation and instead just fill their owners pockets with silver. 
In 2020 we can't afford to let another smooth talker who gives good speeches run the show. We just can't. 
The candidate that gets my support will be one that unequivocally supports public education, something I can't say about Booker and Gillibrand. 
We need somebody who has this position on education
Someone who can figure it out.


  

1 comment:

  1. I agree wholeheartedly. The 2020 Presidential election will be the most important one to get right more than ever before.

    ReplyDelete