The headlines coming out of New York’s education milieu over the weekend were variations of “NY teachers’ union withdraws support for Common Core.”
As the Washington Post reports:
The Board of Directors of the New York State United Teachers, a union with more than 600,000 members, has approved a resolution that withdraws its earlier support for the Common Core State Standards “as implemented and interpreted” by the New York Education Department. It also declares “no confidence” in the policies of State Education Commissioner John King and calls for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes consequences from standardized testing.
In reality, nothing changed. They loudly said nothing new. The teachers of NYSUT will not pull their support for Common Core; they are just complaining that it wasn’t implemented right and want a delay until it is ready for implementation. In the meantime, they are scapegoating a bureaucrat, New York State Education Commissioner John King, so they don’t have to clash with their Democratic Party underpinnings.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who is notorious for her support for Common Core, is also taking part in the farce. As left-wing education activist Diane Ravitch sympathetically reports on her website, Weingarten “said that NYSUT was right to withdraw support from Common Core unless there are ‘major course corrections.’ … Weingarten was insistent that the standards had to be delinked from the new tests.”
Unlike sheep, the rank-and-file in the union know where they are being led. The question is, “Are they going to keep acting like sheep, or will they do something about it?”
It would, of course, be nice if someone would do the right thing: school choice. However, being that this is a fight between the far left and the even farther left, doing the right thing seems to be out of the question.