WASHINGTON — Vice President Biden yesterday accused Mitt Romney of carrying out a “full-blown assault” on educators, telling the nation’s largest teachers union that the Republican Party thinks they’re “selfish.”
The spirited defense of educators came as President Obama hopes to fire up working-class and union support in a bus tour that kicks off in Ohio right after the Fourth of July.
“There’s a pretty uniform view held by Mr. Romney and the Republicans in the majority in Congress today — they criticize and they blame you, they make you the fall guy,” Biden told the National Education Association’s annual convention in DC.
“They should be thinking of ways to make your job easier, not more difficult. Instead, they hector, they lecture, and they blame you,” he continued. “I can’t think of a candidate for president who’s ever made such a direct assault on such an honorable profession.
“They don’t understand why you chose to teach in the first place. Honest to God, I don’t think they get it,” he said, claiming that the Republican plan for public education “is to let the states use [federal] Title I dollars to boost enrollment in private schools.”
Has there been any administration that has used teachers as scapegoats more than this one?
The Obama administration's signature education program, Race to the Top, is all about a "full-blown assault" on teachers, making teachers' jobs more difficult, blaming them for all the ills of the education system (and society, for that matter), scapegoating them in public (the Secretary of Education endorsed the publishing of bogus teacher ratings in the LA Times) and firing them (both Arne Duncan and Barack Obama celebrated the firing of the Central Falls teachers.)
Biden isn't wrong in his "assessment" of Mitt Romney's attitude toward teachers or Romney's education policies.
But he must assume teachers are the dumbest people on the planet to sit and listen to the shit he was slinging at the NEA yesterday without calling him and his corporate-whore boss on it.
Every accusation he made against Romney is true of Obama as well.
The sell-outs in the leadership suites at the NEA and the AFT (and the UFT and the NYSUT) have decided to endorse Obama out of political expediency and cynicism.
Sure, Obama sucks, goes the notion, but at least he's not a Republican. At least he's not Romney.
Sorry, that argument doesn't hold water.
Barack Obama is the most anti-teacher president ever.
His Race to the Top program has transformed public education so that by 2014 nearly every child in this nation is going to take 35+ standardized tests a year in math, ELA, social studies, science, art, music, foreign language, and physical education not for diagnostic purposes but simply to evaluate, grade and fire their teachers.
In addition, this administration has bragged about how easy they are making it for testing vendors to sell their wares nationwide because they have standardized the nation's curriculum via the untested Common Core "State" Standards.
Was the Common Core promoted to improve public education for students or vending opportunities for Barack Obama's corporate education backers?
Dunno, but I do know that teachers all across the nation will be evaluated on how well they teach this untested curriculum, or at least, how well their students test on it.
Moreover, the administration has promoted the use of value-added voodoo on teachers, with Arne Duncan hailing the publication of bogus value-added data of teachers that was generated by the LA Times that led to the suicide of one veteran LA teacher.
No one at the USDOE or the Obama White House ever took responsibility for that.
The administration has made teacher evaluation systems that use value-added measurements a "must" for states to get a waiver from No Child Left Behind Regulations.
If states fail to evaluate their teachers using a VAM, they fail the NCLB waiver process.
This has all been put into place because Barack Obama believes there are hundreds of thousands of "bad" teachers across this country that need to be fired.
That's why both Duncan and Obama not only cheered the firing of the teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island, they have put in place policies that ensure teachers all across this nation will be scapegoated and fired in the next few years.
On Teacher Appreciation Day, Barack Obama ignored unionized teachers and instead cited the greatness of charter schools.
He couldn't be bothered to visit the NEA convention to sling his own shit and instead sent Biden.
The policies this administration imposes, the words this president uses and the treatment of teachers that he exhibits tells you everything you need to know about the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on education.
There ain't a damned bit of difference between the two that matters in the long run and if you care about public education and care about schools and teachers, you would best serve the cause by calling up the Obama White House and telling them how full of shit you think Biden and his corporate-whore boss are.
Oh, and vote for somebody other than Obama/Biden/Duncan/Gates/Broad/Walmart/Bloomberg in November.
Because if you pull the lever for Obama/Biden in November, you're getting the policies of Duncan/Gates/Broad/Walmart/Bloomberg as well.
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