Obama's Abusive Marriage With Teachers

Politico has some crap up today about how the war between teachers and the Obama administration is over:

In the past few weeks, President Barack Obama delivered two major speeches touting education reforms. He invited teachers to the Rose Garden and pushed the House to pass an emergency spending bill saving thousands of school jobs. This week, his education chief is traveling on a cross-country bus tour to highlight school success stories.

...

The White House says it’s a back-to-school message that fits squarely into the president’s plan for economic recovery, stressing the role of educators in shaping a competitive American work force.

But all this apple-polishing hasn’t gone unnoticed by teachers unions, which have had a rocky relationship with the White House from the start over Obama’s unflinching support for reforms that unions view as an affront. After 18 months of frosty relations that at times bordered on outright hostility, it seems that Obama has called a truce — one that several education experts noted comes just in time for the midterm elections, when teachers unions can be a powerful Democratic ally.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan disputed that there’s any political motivation. “This is part of that continued outreach,” he told POLITICO. “That’s the furthest thing from our mind.”

Sure that's the furthest thing from their minds.

With Obama's support level now at 42%, with Dems about to get hammered in the midterm elections and lose at least the House and perhaps the Senate too, and with the economy turning back toward recession and unemployment, underemployment, foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies all rising to Herbert Hoover levels, suddenly the Obama administration is using the shills at Politico to put out the message that they're making nice with teachers again.

And they're saying it has NOTHING to do with the midterm elections being right around the corner and the administration needing the teachers unions' turnout operations to get people out to vote.

And of course the union heads at the AFT and the NEA are willing to play along like some abused housewife with blackened eyes and broken bones - oh sure, everything in this sham marriage of convenience is A-OK!!!

But this is all bullshit.

As Fred Klonsky points out here, Arne Duncan just gave administration approval to the McCarthyesque tactics the LA Times is using to "name names" and out supposedly "bad teachers" by using some jive ass value added assessment that is full of flaws.

And Obama is NOT backing down on Race to the Top or any of the other failed reforms he has backed like adding standardized tests to every grade at every level, tying teacher pay and evals to those tests, and closing schools and firing teachers based upon those tests.

All of those "reforms" will be in the NCLB Jr. re-authorization Obama plans for the post-midterm period.

Not to mention that Obama only signed the teacher jobs bill because the money was NOT taken from his Race to the Top/Fire Teachers/Close Schools program but instead was taken from the mouths of hungry poor families with children.

In fact, he vowed to veto any bill that took money from RttT instead of from some other program - like food stamps (which the administration itself suggested.)

And then he got allies like Katie Haycock at the Education Trust to put out the meme that teachers unions were responsible the food stamp cuts.

Except that she was lying - Obama was responsible for those cuts.

That's Barack Obama with a "B".

The man Dana Milbank called a bully in last week's Kaplan Test Prep Post:

"There's an attitude that if you aren't with us, you are against us -- and therefore against children and reform," a Democratic friend of mine who runs an education advocacy group in Washington told me. The administration, she said, "tries to bully and condemn any opposition, even if it is from groups that should be their allies."

I don't know what the writer in Politico is talking about.

The war between the Obama administration and teachers continues unabated, the abusive relationship continues, and as soon as the midterm are over, Obama will be punching teachers in the face once again and knocking their teeth out just like he has done since he got elected.

So enough with the jive ass propaganda put out by the administration and happily published by Politico.

You can support Barack Obama and ed deform Dems this November because you're afraid that the Republican alternative is even worse.

But DON'T make believe that Barack Obama or the Obama administration have suddenly changed their tunes and are friends of the teacher.

Once a wife-beater, ALWAYS a wife-beater.

And when it comes to education policies and teachers, Barack Obama is one nasty, vicious wife-beater.