Someone Tell Merryl Tisch - The Public Doesn't Hate Teachers

Regents Chancellor and testing doyenne Merryl Tisch used the following argument to support tying teacher evaluations to test scores:

Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, said that because of the new “scientific, objective” evaluation system, the public would see that teachers were being held to a rigorous standard and would not dislike them so much. “I’m seeing a much more positive focus about teaching, and I like that,” she said.

Regents Chancellor Tisch either believes, or wants people to believe, that the public does not like or trust teachers because the systems used to evaluate them in the past have not been "scientific" or "objective" enough.

Here is how Stephanie Simon in Politico describes the findings of two recent polls on education:

Amid all the rhetoric these days about failing schools and ineffective teachers, one more poll finding stands out as notable.

Asked how they would grade the school their oldest child attends, 71 percent of public school parents in the PDK poll said “A” or “B.” The AP-NORC survey got similar results, with 76 percent of respondents rating their child’s current education as good or excellent and 82 percent giving their child’s teachers high marks.

“Most of the time, parents have faith in teachers,” said Helen Gym, co-founder of the advocacy group Parents United for Public Education. “You would never know that from listening to the ed reform debate.”

Nope, you sure wouldn't know that most of the time parents have faith in teachers - not from listening to the ed reform debate, not from hearing politicians talk about teachers and schools, not from hearing or reading or watching stories about education in the news media.

And you certainly wouldn't know that most of the time parents have faith in teachers from listening to Regents Chancellor and testing doyenne Merryl Tisch, who, as I said earlier, either truly believes or doesn't really believe but wants people to believe that the public has no trust or faith in teachers.

But as we see in the PDK/Gallup poll, as we see in the AP-NORC poll, as we saw in Port Jefferson last week when over 1,500 parents, students and teachers joined together to protest Ms. Tisch's Common Core testing regime, as we are seeing all over the country as parents join with teachers to fight back against the Common Core standards, the testing mania, and other privatization efforts of plutocrats like Merryl Tisch and the functionaries of the plutocracy like NYSED Commissioner John King, parents see through these lies from the corporate education reform movement that teachers are to blame for many of the problems in schools today and parents truly like their children's teachers and have respect for them.

I have had Merryl Tisch in my sights ever since I read that statement she made to Michael Winerip in the NY Times.

It was one of the more despicable statements made about teachers and, even though it is obviously false (year after year, the PDK/Gallup poll shows similar findings about how the public feels about teachers), Tisch has gotten little pushback for making it (outside of a couple of posts on this blog, at any rate.)

I haven't posted that Tisch statement about the public "disliking" teachers in a while, but I'd like to bring it back into the public square for a bit.

Merryl Tisch is co-chair of Bill Thompson's mayoral campaign to replace Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City.

The UFT has endorsed Thompson, so many teachers may be open to voting for him.

But before they do, it is important to remind them that Thompson's co-chair, Merryl Tisch, despises teachers herself and is on record smearing them as "disliked" by the public.

If you are a teacher, do you want to help elect a man as mayor who has such a person co-chairing his campaign?