Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post hates the teachers’ union. It hates the union so much that it blames the union for whatever it doesn’t like. Today, the Post says the massive opt out in New York was controlled by the union. Imagine that: the parents of 220,000 children take orders from the union. Wow, who knew that parents were so easily manipulated?
As the Post sees it, the union doesn’t want teachers to be evaluated at all, so they pulled the puppet strings and the parents did as the union bosses told them. The stronghold of the union is New York City, where the number of opt outs was minuscule. Why didn’t the opt out movement succeed where the union was strongest?
Note to the editorial board of the New York Post: Please meet with the leaders of New York State Allies for Public Education. Let them explain to you why they led the opt outs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It has Rupert Murdoch. It doesn’t need an editorial board.
This just in, NYSUT blamed for Global Warming and the proliferation of bad Republican Candidates.
I have spoken to educators/teachers form six different districts here on Long Island- all tell me that they are not allowed to recommend to parents to opt out their children. Consequently, I have my feelers out wherever I go, striking up a conversation with everyone with children or grandchildren. I explain to them that opting out is our only weapon to making a change – getting rid of the Common Core and its aligned testing.
Just this morning I was speaking to a grandfather about the need to have his grandchildren opt out. Peace
I don’t bring it up, but I’d love to. I’d catch lot of grief from our Cuomo loving administration. When asked I do give my honest opinion, which is, the tests are useless, period.
It’s the same elsewhere, too. In Utah, we have been told that we could lose our licenses if we tell parents about opting out.
Wow, if the union is “strongest” in NYC, where psycho Principals run roughshod over the contract and teachers without a peep from the UFT, where many schools have no Chapter Leader/Building Rep, and where the union President brags about his coziness with the Boss, I’d hate to think of what it’s like for teachers elsewhere.
The NY Post has been poison to NYC ever since Rupert Murdoch took over the money losing publication. Remember the days when Americans looked at the daily news papers from Europe and could not believe the extreme journalism i.e. just about nude woman every day cover the paper in color, drama stories like the dinosaur came out of the ocean to suck up people, George Clooney is gay and we use to say that the daily news papers in Europe and alike are sleaze ball publications just like here in the US where we have the star and national enquirer. Well now, the NY Post is here in the US owned and operated by Murdoch and every day we have stories like the dinosaur and the naked woman covering our daily news. So, regarding education I would not even piss at the idea of the NY Post writing anything of journalistic value especially when it comes to education because according to the NY Post the dinosaur is coming for us when the oceans dry up
Oh Rupert Murdoch is just annoyed, so they wrote a flimsy, factless editorial for him.
Did “the unions” (i.e. teachers) “break” Cuomo? Yes, and Christie too and that fool from Louisiana!
Good! No, great!
Anyone who thinks teachers are “powerless” hasn’t been reading the papers. We just fight in a different way, as in “We vote and there are many of us.”
Muckrakers like Murdoch never let fact or truth get in their way. They simply invent a narrative to justify their conclusions. Has he bothered to try to understand the genesis of the opt out movement? Why would he when it is easier to blame unions?
The ed reform obsession with labor unions is amusing to me. I’ve been to a lot of public school “community” meetings and not once have the intrinsically evil labor unions been mentioned by any parent or community member in attendance, and our teachers belong to a union. Maybe the whole town is quietly seething with anti-labor fervor, but I doubt it, since every other subject is hotly debated- everything from testing to school lunches.
So we can conclude that if there were states that had no unions those states must have high scores … here’s the proof: http://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions-are-illegal-2011-2
…. oh wait, is that what the data shows???
The NY Post has it wrong, as usual. Cuomo did not call the teachers’ union ‘the last public monopoly’. What he said was that if he was re-elected he would work hard to bust up ‘one of the only remaining public monopolies’, referring to public education.
He is retreating now ONLY because of the parent-led opt-out movement.
Thanks NY Post! As a proud union member I will proudly take the blame for waking an army of moms and dads. When you focus your attention on us, it allows the army of moms and dads to outflank your agenda.
I am a teacher where the union is “strongest”. (Disagree that my union is the “strongest”). However, I can personally attest to the fact that my union had NOTHING to do with promoting the opt out movement in any way, shape or form.
Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
The NY Times pushed the same slop yesterday … claiming it was union power that forced Cuomo’s test-retreat. It seems the Post sips from the same polluted news pool.
Let’s be clear, the unions have been either neutered or are outright whoring Common Core. NYSUT has sat on their flat hands for so long they can’t feel their fingers. The UFT … under everyone’s lovable thug, Mulgrew … hasn’t uttered a word about Common Core … so NYC children get an extra-special thumping from this hoax-reform.
Randi Weingarten of the AFT is an outright Brutus to the very teachers she is supposed to support. She’d rather spend her days kissing high-end backsides and grooming her future for a special government slot in the next administration than in looking out for classroom teachers.
The tongue-challenged Lily Garcia of the NEA gets the Cottonelle Award … for being even softer than Weingarten on this loathed reform. You can see her polished road-show all over the place as she sweet talks audiences with fabricated stories of activism in between insulting mentally and physically challenged students for a laugh. The’s a special dud.
One more time … for all the slow-learning reporters of the world like Lane Filler, Frank Bruni, Katie Taylor, and the entire boards of Newsday and the NY Post … it was the PARENT-INITIATED Opt-Out Movement that crushed the teacher-testing linkage. Teachers can thank parents for the rest of their careers … as their union is busy elsewhere … doing NOTHING.
Too funny. The Union bosses are in bed with Common Core, so that could not be further from the truth! As for the exams, they measure nothing. Special ed students and new language learners are compared with regular students and teachers are held accountable for their scores! And on top of that the State sets the cut scores to meet their agenda. Opt out will continue
The Editorial Should Read as Follows:
Did the parents of New York just protect their children and public education from Andrew Cuomo?
“The single best thing that I can do,” Gov. Cuomo now realizes, is “break what is in essence the private enterprises threatening public education in New York”: the spurious tabloid, the New York Post, and the whoring of public officials for the agrandizement of the oligarchical overlords”.
For years prior to my coming to office, New York has had one of the most effective teacher-rating systems in the nation. Cuomo has been hitting his head, not to improve the system, but to impose a system where a set percentage of teachers would be “pre and post determined” (failure percentiles goals in September, terminations to be handed out in June) to be deemed ineffective. This would further the destruction of our historically proud academic standards of New York, and further expedite the handing over of our public schools to corporate interests, the most obscene private monopoly harming our state and our nation, the donors to Andrew Cuomo.
Now he is set to give up, or to give the appearance of giving up, or to give up without really giving up, or to push for a moratorium, a “re-set”, or another “Le Commission”.
Teachers may have to go back to being evaluated by administrative officials in education, rather than by unfair and absurd tests designed by business, and consecrated by lawyers and politicians. Principals and assistant principals evaluating teachers…working toward the betterment of all teachers…what a strange concept?
Just as the teachers unions have demanded all along.
To kill the ratings system Cuomo has made love to, for the destruction of public education, union leadership has bent over backwards to appease Cuomo, shunning and disregarding its moral compass to protect public education, serving up teachers and schools, and ultimately children, in the 21st Century of Gladiator Wars to destroy our democratic foundations.
It was, still is, and always will be parents that dutifully and correctly took aim at the tests themselves. But the New York Post cannot report this, for it might jeopardize any further political aspirations of Mr Cuomo, to take on those who care for 200,000 kids across New York State. What a better target than to falsely label unions through fear-mongering.
Perhaps with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, the oligarchs and politicians may have a harder time pushing the disingenuous evaluation system…the gift that promises to keep on giving profits, at the expense of our neediest citizens, our children.
Before questioning whether the next head of Regents will be a hack, another example of fear-mongering, one must evaluate the tenure of Meryl Tisch, the Empress of New York who did everything in her power to undermine public education in New York. Perhaps, the term hack might come up with greater frequency when linked to her ineffective and harmful time in office.
The statement “Right now, it’s at least obvious that a school has failed, since the state exams show that nearly all the kids there can’t read or do math at grade level – even as nearly all the school’s teachers are rated “effective” is unethically false, misleading, and resorts to that wonderful wor dthe New York Post loves so much: fear-mongering.
As a parent of public school children in New York, this Post editorial is shameful.
Perhaps the New York Post, and its anonymous Post Editorial Board, would serve its purpose better by meeting with parents of public school children, before resorting to fear-mongering. But it will not, because the purpose here is not to protect public education, but to destroy it.
By Post “Editorial Board”…authored by the anonymous, the nameless, and the hidden…written in the hand of Rupert Murdoch.
For all New Yorkers to see…
Taken with a grain of salt…
For all other than the Post, “Trust, then verify”.
But for the New York Post,
Distrust, disregard, and Opt-Out.
I have always wondered why the Pearson test writers should be the ones in charge of policing the teaching profession. The. single. stupidest. idea. ever.
I used to be one of those “union thugs” (formerly known as a “terrorist” according to the Bush administration)!!! I’m on every social media outlet I can find, urging parents and grandparents all over the country to opt out of those insane tests. No child deserves to be reduced to a data point! When I was working in the schools, I couldn’t spread that message. Now I can say WHATEVER I want!!! Isn’t retirement great?