America's Most Disgusting Political Ad:
In a stunning smear, a GOP group chaired by a prominent Republican strategist and funded by the state Republican leadership, has sent a mailing to Florida voters accusing an elementary school teacher running for state legislature of enabling child molestation because she is in a teacher’s union.
The mailings attack Karen Castor Dentel, an elementary school teacher in Maitland, Florida, and the Democratic challenger for the 30th District State House of Representatives seat. Because she is a member of the Florida Education Association, which opposed a 2011 bill that eliminated tenure for public-school teachers, the mailer says she would “rather protect bad teachers and the union” than “young and impressionable students.” One one side of the mailing is a picture of convicted serial child molester Jerry Sandusky — who as an assistant football coach at Penn State would not have been protected by any Florida public school teacher’s union; the
other side shows a picture of her and the other says:
Karen Castor Dentel’s priorities are clear:
* Use tenure policies to protect bad, burnt-out, longtime teachers at the
As the election plays itself out this coming week, we as educators continue to work on behalf of children and our communities as a whole. Whatever the outcome of the vote, the work goes on and our efforts must continue. So I want to keep this post simple and straightforward. Whatever your political persuasion, there are certain objective, observable realities we can all agree on in looking across the education landscape:
