Weingarten Twisting in the Wind Over Common Core Embrace

Randi Weingarten has tried every strategy that her posse of lawyers can come up with to maintain her loyalty to corporate education plutocrats who made her, while pretending to represent the interests of children, parents, and public schools.  

She has gone so far as to get herself arrested in protest of school closures, while behind the headlines continuing her undying support of Common Core, test-based teacher evaluation and bonus pay, Big Data, and segregated corporate charter schools.  

Last week she went on the offense against the Tea Party for attacking the Common Core, while entirely ignoring the fact that the 30,000 members of the progressive Chicago Teachers Union just denounced the Common Core.  

“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.”

This week she is telling MicroSoftNBC that we should not focus on the Common Core Standards but, rather, on what would like to pretend is underneath: "policymakers should listen to the 'voices of those closest to the classroom. Enable educators, with the proper resources and supports, to make the transition to focusing on the critical-thinking skills that underlie these standards'."

Obviously, Weingarten will be twisting when she goes to Los Angeles in July to face thousands of skeptical teachers who are demanding union leadership that supports schools, students, teachers, and learning, rather than the ideological agenda of Bill Gates and Eli Broad, and the business plan of Pearson and the corporate socialists.