As Pearson Tag Teams with Microsoft for Common Core Curriculum in Urban America, Weingarten Attacks Conservatives for Attacking the Common Core

Randi Weingarten has arrived at the most delusional and convoluted logic yet to deflect from her continuing support of CorpEd's centerpiece strategy for more lucrative testing, corporate professional development, and corporate canned curriculum.  

Weingarten has this quote in the New York Times today in a puff piece on Common Core resistance:

“The Tea Party is using the frustration with the implementation as the guise to eliminate standards in schools and to destabilize public education,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. Its executive council recently passed a resolution supporting “the promise and potential of the Common Core State Standards.”

Does the AFT legal team think that anyone with a brain could ever believe that Weingarten's embrace of Common Core could do anything but hasten the privatization and corporate takeover of American public schools?  If there was ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this is it.

If the Tea Party could, for a moment, put its desire for more charters and vouchers ahead of its hatred of a black president, they would clearly see that Common Core is made to deliver the public dollars for the kinds of corporate welfare they approve of, which, by the way, has never bothered any, otherwise, libertarian, from Milton Friedman forward.  The Tea Partiers want privatization, for sure, but that is not the basis for their opposition to the corporate core standards.  

If Weingarten and AFT misleadership were looking for "the promise and potential of Common Core State [sic] Standards," they have to look no further than systems like Memphis, TN, where this week 13,000 Microsoft Windows tablets have just been issued to over ten percent of Shelby County students.

The new tablets are locked and loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum materials at a cost of $650,000 per year, as Pearson provides the lessons that were supposed to be the responsibility of teachers to prepare--once the "standards" were in place.  Remember, Randi??

The cost to Shelby County, TN, where hundreds of teachers will lose their jobs this year to TFA temps and other uncertified temps?  Almost $6 million dollars for the hardware and $650,000 each year for the Pearson curriculum.  This comes when  charters have robbed the school system of enough money to result in privatization of services, ongoing firings of employees, and a $24 million deficit.

This is your "promise and potential" that you don't have to wait for, Ms. Weingarten.  

When will you resign and give someone a chance to restore integrity to the AFT leadership?