Chancellor Tisch Attacks Rob Astorino For Opting His Children Out Of State Tests

Yesterday the Cuomo Campaign sent State Senator George Latimer out to attack Westchester County Executive and GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino for announcing that he and his wife were joining with thousands of other parents around the state and opting their children out of the Common Core state tests starting today.

Today the Daily News reports that Regents Chancellor Tisch launched an attack against Astorino as well:

Astorino's pronouncement pulled immediate criticism from state Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, who told the Daily News in an email, "If you are against standards, you are contributing to our decline."

As is usual with education deformers, Tisch sets up a straw man argument here, equating Astorino's opposition to the Common Core State (sic) Standards with opposition to ALL standards, which is most definitely not what Astorino said in the video.

Watch for yourself:





Astorino very clearly states that we don't need lower standards in our schools, we need higher standards.

Astorino also clearly states that "many experts now agree that Cuomo's Common Core may actually lower standards for our school children over time" and points to the problems with "Common Core math for our younger children," which "wasn't developed properly."

He then tells a story of his children having trouble with their Common Core math homework and he and his wife having trouble helping them because "Common Core math methods left us all scratching our heads."

These criticisms of Common Core are widespread across the country - just google "Common Core" and "math" and see what comes up.

Chancellor Tisch may think creating a straw man argument for the Astorino opt out problem (Astorino doesn't want standards in schools) and knocking it down (he's contributing to the decline of this country with his opposition to the Common Core) will be an effective way to defuse it.

She is wrong.

Her dishonest and deceitful method of pushback will do nothing but fan the flames of the opposition against the Common Core, the Common Core tests, and the rest of the NYSED/Regents/Cuomo reform agenda.

This has been a problem with deformers since the beginning of the CCSS pushback.

Rather than honestly deal with the criticism of the CCSS, they have created straw man arguments about the opposition or tried to marginalize critics as wackos and crazies.

But as we can see from the burgeoning opt out movement, the growing opposition to the Common Core, and the anger aimed at the education reform movement, that deformer pushback strategy is failing miserably.

The deformer attacks against the opposition are getting shriller and shriller and it speaks to the desperation they're feeling over the impending demise of the education reform agenda they worked so hard to shove down the throats of America.