Randi, Lily, and Their Common Core Fidelity
I was in Chicago this past weekend for the second annual conference of the Network for Public Education (NPE).
(A number of videos of conference sessions will be available here. In the first video, the session to which I refer in this post is around 2:10:00.)
One of the sessions I attended was the Sunday morning keynote (April 26, 2015) in which education historian and NPE founding president Diane Ravitch interviewed both National Education Association (NEA) president Lily Eskelsen Garcia and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten.
Both Garcia and Weingarten support the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which seems to be (now) chiefly embraced by Democrats (seehere, and here, and here)… and by Republican Jeb Bush.
During the Sunday NPE interview, Ravitch asked both Garcia and Weingarten to state their positions on CCSS.
Weingarten went first. She stated that she did not support a “federal” CCSS.
Word games.
As it stands, only two days after her statement above, on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, Weingarten is the opening speaker for the very-pro-CCSS Center for American Progress (CAP) “revealing” report entitled, “How Teachers Are Leading the Way to Successful Common Core Implementation.”
The idea of CCSS’ merely suffering from “poor implementation” is an idea near to Weingarten’s heart for years now. So, if America could just experience a handful of teachers “successfully implementing” CCSS, that would prove that CCSS homogenization of American education is the way to go.
CAP president Carmel Martin will also be participating in this CCSS implementation yard sale, even though in September 2014, she defended CCSS with astounding cluelessness in this Intelligence Squared debate in New York City.
Indeed, this is not the first Martin-Weingarten summit. The two came together to negotiate a position on “testing and accountability” in the initial Senate-proposed reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) in Randi, Lily, and Their Common Core Fidelity | deutsch29: