Can you believe this?
While everyone else is complaining that Governor Cuomo is crushing teachers with his punitive and research-less teacher evaluation plan, the New York Post complains that Governor Cuomo has capitulated to the teachers’ union by ordering a new review of the Common Core standards and assessments. Imagine that! The governor actually might have cared that 220,000 children opted out; he no doubt realized that 220,000 children might have 400,000 or so parents, and they vote. The New York Post seems unaware that in a democracy, it is usually a good idea to pay attention to mass movements.
The Post feels certain that Cuomo is kowtowing to those horrible teachers’ unions, always the enemy (the teachers’ union has now morphed into George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984,” the quintessential enemy of the State).
Read the editorial. The Post will not be satisfied until there are mass firings of teachers.
Here are the closing lines:
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The unions and the politicians they control will make sure no system ever lets schools shed rotten teachers.
The only hope for kids is to flee these failure factories — to flee to charters or private schools, or out of New York altogether.
Oh, dear, where should families flee to?
Not to Connecticut; it has teachers’ unions.
Not to New Jersey; it has teachers’ unions.
Not to Massachusetts; it has teachers’ unions.
Not to Pennsylvania; it has teachers’ unions.
Flee, families, flee!
Flee to Tennessee! Flee to Mississippi! Flee to North Carolina! Flee to the Deep South! Flee to any state without a teachers’ union.
You won’t get better education but at least you can be sure that the teachers are without any representation.
Oh, and by the way, do the writers and workers at the New York Post belong to a union? Or is it a non-union shop?

Who is this person writing this article who calls himself or herself Post Editorial Board? Is this a group all in hysterical frenzy simultaneously or is it a single individual expressing for an entire group? Sounds like a plot to reduce population of areas desired for gentrification if you ask me. FLEE our state now….we want your domicile for real estate profiteering and your school buildings as well. Go FAST people with children to a place that we will not have to educate your children is the message I hear.
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I guess students should flee the union controlled Great Neck, Syosset, Manhasset, Rockville Centre, etc. school districts. Those districts are such failure factories that thousands are fleeing those horrendous neighborhoods. Students should also flee such failing schools as Stuyvesant HS. Bronx Science, Townsend Harris, Cardozo HS, Francis Lewis HS, etc. I guess no teacher has ever been terminated in all these years either for any cause including sexual molestation within the city and state? This newspaper wants every teacher to be held accountable to the umpteenth degree, but who holds the Post accountable for their slander and lies. If they believe that the union is in control of the opt out movement in this state, the least they can do is publish the evidence. if they believe that every NYC school is a failure factory, they have to prove that statement also. If they believe no teacher has ever been charged and convicted through the 3020a process in all these years, show the evidence. They love the CCLS so much that they should themselves follow the this beloved curriculum in which one has to prove everything one writes or “publishes” with “text based evidence.”
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So many recommendations for fleeing from NY.
Get out your cameras to film the exodus.
Book your flights and reservations NOW.
Idiots in the newsroom.
Brilliance from the owner of this blog.
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The writer apparently needs to spend sometime as a teacher to get a new perspective on the reality of education in this country.
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I wouldn’t wish that on any child ever!
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Agreed, but until some of these ignorant people walk in our shoes then they will continue to make uninformed decisions
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Funny, the data they are so fond of keeps saying that teachers are effective yet students fail.
Why is it that the data (that THEY IMPOSED) is saying what they don’t want it to say, so it must be wrong?
Every year they use “data” and every year they get similar numbers of results (although how those numbers are assigned is sketchy). I agree VAM is ridiculous and inaccurate, but even by their own measures teachers are effective.
What lengths must we go to in order to fire “ineffective” teachers? Who are all these teachers that noone likes that can’t be fired without the state stepping in?
What number must be fired every year before they’ll say “the data is accurate”? I simply do not get how you can consistently say that the data measures (that THEY choose and manipulate) are wrong when they keep changing them (as scientific as they are…) until they get the result they want.
How do you reconcile this being “science” when it seems more like a second grader changing math problems until he gets the result he knew he wanted but didn’t know how to get there?
If the result is pre-determined (and apparently it must meet some arbitrary firing standard for them to believe it’s accurate – no matter other factors – so long as teachers are fired) – then how do we say this system is fair and accurate?
And if it isn’t, then doesn’t evaluation simply become a political tool to break off tons of teachers no matter the human cost? To what end? Why?
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Ditto, Ms. Chapman.
Thank you for nailing the Post, Diane. You plunged a harpoon deep into the blubber-headed editorial board. Maybe next week they can get back to their outrage over the body-painted women of Times Square.
Oh yes, I almost forgot how teachers’ unions were able to dupe 400,000 parents into opting out of the NYS exams so their members could avoid evaluation. Must have been all the milk and cookies they gave parents in April.
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400k possible parent voters and they might have friends and family and possible future parents too versus a few guys and gals with a few million dollars? Lets see. This has to be tough for Andy. Which way will he go? Which way will he go? Hummmmm.
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If NY parents followed the national Common Core marketing campaign it must be confusing to find out the Common Core testing was all about firing teachers.
I don’t know what they were told in NY but there was never any mention of firing teachers in Ohio- we heard a whole bunch of carefully crafted fear-mongering on economic competitiveness.
Ed reformers should probably quit while they’re ahead. This isn’t helpful to The Cause. They should go back to how 3rd graders have to rescue the economy.
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To be fair, the Post’s first suggestion was not to leave New York (although lots of people do that) but for parents to enroll their children in a charter (most but not all charters in NYC aren’t unionized) or a private school like Dalton, Trinity, Spence, Saint Ann’s, Horace Mann, Calhoun, etc. Teachers (and of course students) in these elite privates continue to suffer without unions, and no one, not even Steve Nelson, is doing a damn thing about it.
That is a good question about the Post’s newsroom (its typesetting and printing units are unionized). I had been working under the assumption that they were a Newspaper Guild shop, but that no longer seems to be the case.
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Tim,
Since the private schools you list have tuitions in the range of $40,000-50,000 per year, that is not an option for the 1.1 million children in the city. Even the charters you adore can’t accommodate 1.1 million children.
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“to be fair”
When have Reformers ever been fair? The anti-teacher crowd is so afraid that the true wizard behind the curtain – poverty, lack of support, wealth disparity, failed economic policies – will be revealed, that they are terrified the public will see that just blaming teachers and their professional organizations is a misdirection. When the public turns on the Reformers, there will be heck to pay.
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Duncan is promoting the Toledo Technology Academy as an ed reform “innovation” that is “modeled” on P-TECH.
It’s a Toledo public magnet school that was founded as a partnership between Toledo Public Schools and the United Auto Workers in the 1990’s 🙂
Now why wouldn’t he say that?
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20150903_Philly__other_cities_should_adopt_K-14_model.html
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The NY POST can’t “go bonkers”; it’s been bonkers for decades.
Also, it must be confusing for Murdoch and his paid minions at the POST when it comes to the Common Core: on the one hand, they seem to be supporting it because it’s part of the Big Deform package. But on the other, haven’t they become aware over the last couple of years that the Common Core is considered entirely evil by many people on the radical right, who have “proved” beyond doubt that it’s fraught with Communist and Islamist America-hating propaganda, designed to convert children to become followers of Mohammed and Allah and Karl Marx? What a quandary!
Of course, some readers here, not all of them folks who consider themselves to be right of center politically, take similar absolutist views of the Common Core, rejecting seemingly out of hand anything and everything if it’s contained in the actual standards themselves or in any textbook whose publisher slapped a label of “aligned with the Common Core State Standards” on it before selling it to schools.
You’d almost think that when it comes to these issues, Barry Goldwater’s timeless slogan, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVNoClu0h9M
Call me crazy, but moderation in the pursuit of justice when it comes to the actual content of the Common Core seems to be precisely what is called for. And I find the extremism of the NY POST and many of its right-wing allies only slightly more frightening and disturbing than that of those I would have thought were my allies on the left when the shibboleth of “Common Core” is uttered.
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Michael Paul,
The Post is certainly confused about Common Core. Maybe they are following Jeb’s lead. If Jeb is for it, it might be ok.
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I knew Emmanuel Goldstein. I worked with Emmanuel Goldstein. Emmanuel Goldstein was a friend of mine. Governor Cuomo, you’re no Emmanuel Goldstein.
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Arthur, was he a cousin? Orwell said he was the Leon Trotsky of 1984.
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You know that Joel Klein wrote it for the Post, right?
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Didn’t he publish the alphabet once?
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I;m old enough to remember 17 years ago when this started and they sold it to the public as “improving public schools”.
I actually think this new straight-forward privatization pitch is better for all concerned. Kudos on the new political campaign.
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My view:
These anti union politicians should be stripped down to their
“union” suits. Or does that date me?
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This should be enough for teachers to decide who to vote for. Let’s hope they know this is happening.
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They can’t flee to Finland either. Finland has a strong teachers’ union.
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Well, New Hampshire’s motto is “Live, flee or die!” so maybe NY families should go there.
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:o)
I have a suggestion. Let’s give all the deformers fleas so they will flee.
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I’d much rather impart bubonic plague to them.
Locusts?
Hail?
Serpents?
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Excellent suggestions.
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The Daily News and The Post are shills for the billionaires’ boys club, and other than entertainment news offers nothing of value but ads. No surprise here. Our media is bought, lock stock and video & press, which is why the assault on education has been hidden for two decades. With most of the veteran, experienced and dedicated professionals gone the schools failed, and could be taken over by the states.
But, for a look at the stories and the tragedy to Americans who happened to be teachers, go to
http://www.endteacherabuse.org
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Oh wow!!! Talk about hitting the “panic button”!!!! These guys are nuts! They (READ: Murdoch and his sycophantic lackeys) see that Corporate Ed Reform in NYS is circling the drain! GOOD!
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This is asinine.
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