Merryl Tisch, Private Detective

From the Buffalo News:

Tisch was clearly frustrated with the week’s opt-out push, which she said was “ginned up” by telephone robo-calls by NYSUT trying to pump up the opt-out numbers. Tisch said “what we have here is a labor dispute” between NYSUT and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over the governor’s recent successful push to bolster the teacher job performance evaluation system and to make it harder for teachers to attain tenure.

Tisch said she expects the rhetoric in the days ahead to shift from opt-out to criticism that claims that this week’s tests are not reliable or viable.

“How that helps kids in school buildings or teachers, I don’t know,” she said. “The truth is it’s been well over a year since I’ve had someone talk to me about instruction and curriculum. Everyone has talked to me about evaluations. It has politicized a very sacred institution that should be held harmless to politics.”

Tisch said she ran her own quiet, informal survey, asking people she knows to talk to principals and superintendents to see if they were pushing the opt-out movement. To a person, she said, none were. “So I think to the best of what we know, superintendents and principals are caught in the middle of this groundswell, which I think is the direct result of a lot of misinformation and angry rhetoric,” she said.

And I'm sure that the people she knows who talked to principals and superintendents they know were completely frank in their discussions knowing those discussions might be going back to somebody up the chain.

It's like she's Miss Marple, ferreting out the criminals.

Second thing to note here: She says that opt out has politicized a sacred institution that was devoid of politics.

Who is she kidding?

Public education, public education policy, public education funding, instruction and curriculum - these are all rife with politics and have always been so.

The Common Core regime she put into place, the Endless Testing regime she promotes, the evaluation she supports - these are political and partisan by their nature too.

She's just flailing away here with the rhetoric, issuing a bunch of jive meant to take the blame off of her and her merry men and women in reform up in Albany and put it onto teachers, parents and the unions.

But the nonsense she's spewing is so self-serving, so absurd on the face of it.

It would be laughable if it weren't all so serious.