My Question For Obama At NBC's Education Nation

Matt Lauer will be interviewing Barack Obama as part of the Education Nation Summit sponsored by Microsoft, the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Walmart, General Electric, McGraw-Hill and a few other giant corporations that stand to make billions off education reform.

You can send in questions to ask Hopey/Changey via NBC.

I sent in the following:

You recently signed a $23 billion dollar teacher jobs/Medicaid aid bill. You insisted that $11.9 billion dollars be cut from food stamps in order to pay for the bill. When Rep. David Obey suggested some cuts to the data system provisions in Race to the Top, you threatened to veto the bill.

So the food stamp cuts went through. Beginning in 2014, a family of three will lose $521 in food stamps a year.

My question, Mr. President, is why do you think creating new standardized tests for every subject at every grade level and building data systems to track the scores from those tests and use them to close schools and fire teachers is more important than feeding hungry children?

There is not one untruth in that question I wrote above.

Not one.

And yet, Obama will pontificate on NBC, along with many of the other "experts," about how teachers are hurting children by refusing to give on tenure, seniority, merit pay, charter schools, etc.

Meanwhile Hopey/Changey took $521 out of the mouths of a family of three so he could keep his precious data systems.

And somehow, the press has never called him on this.

Not once.

What hypocrites.

What jive.

All of it.

Superman.

Education Nation.

Zuckerberg.

Oprah.

The ed reformers are not interested in real solutions to address the real problems we teachers deal with every day in the school systems across this nation.

Instead they pontificate about bad teachers and spend millions on p.r. to bust the unions.

Make no mistake - that is ALL this jive is about.

Break the last powerful union in the country.

Rahm Emanuel said about the autoworkers "Fuck the UAW!!!"

You can be sure they feel the same way about the AFT and the NEA as well.

Worst vote I ever cast was for Hopey/Changey.

Frankly, I list that as one of the biggest mistakes in my entire life.

I had a bad feeling about him from the beginning.

I even blogged about that over at NYC Educator's site.

But in the end, the specter of President Palin had me pull the lever for Hopey/Changey, even though I suspected his education programs would be bad.

But never in my wildest nightmares did I think they would be this bad.

After the election, when Repubs retake the House and Senate, very little business will get done in Washington.

There will be lots of gridlock and the GOP is vowing to stop any new spending bill.

There will be little-to-no working together between the parties.

But one piece of common ground they will work will be teacher bashing.

Obama is vowing to end teacher tenure.

John Kline the soon to be House Education Committee chair says that IS some change he can believe in.

You can be sure they will attempt some carrot/stick jive to end tenure.

Want Title 1 money?

Get the unions to agree to abolish tenure.

And if the unions do not agree, the p.r. machine will move into motion and get the word out that teachers hate poor children and want to take their school money from them.

Never mind that Obama has already taken their food stamp money to save his precious data tracking machinery.