Betsy and Randi and Bears Oh My!

Betsy and BodyGuard Flee Three Protestors, US Marshals Brought In

Betsy Blackwater tried to slither into a D.C. school through a back door and was turned away by a crowd of about 5 protestors and several reporters trotting alongside her in case she said something stupid enough to merit jotting down. Instead she was hustled back to her black Suburban with a look of constipated angst furrowed into her brow. She's now being protected by U.S. Marshals in case another retired teacher or angry parent drops a "Shame!" chant on her or stretches their arms across a doorway to block her.

After taking a lame stab at humor  -- Where can I find the pencils? hee hee hee --and being twitter roasted 50 ways from recess, she's come out with her first impressions of the teaching profession and trust me you will not be surprised. "Teachers," it seems to the billionheiress by injection of the Amway fortune, "are waiting to be told what to do." Here's the entire quote in her own imbecilic words: 

“They’re waiting to be told what they have to do, and that’s not going to bring success to an individual child,” DeVos told a columnist for the conservative online publication Townhall. “You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.”

Mmmm, yeauuuuh. An incredibly bizarre take on the profession coming from someone who's never practiced it, has no background in it nor in its administration and has never allowed any of her own precious spawn to be exposed to the professionals who've dedicated their lives and careers to it. Teachers do their jobs and teach. If they wait to be told anything it's to divine the latest nonsensical gotchas contained in the latest round of arbitrary and capricious directives from the whatever reformy top down bureaucrats hold sway over their district and/or state ed departments. 

How many data points do I need to include in my SLO's this time? How many artifacts do I need to unearth from the bottom of my coffee saturated messenger bag and by what measure do I bet against myself to move students from arbitrary point A to capricious point D in whichever unrealistic interval of time I am allowed with kids who don't come to school, come to school and sleep or come to school 4 levels below their grade level? Yeah Bets, if you think you caught a whiff of teachers waiting on something, trust me they're not waiting on you to come rolling in on your white horse of the edupocalypse anointing us with vouchers and your wealthy white privileged version of the Jayzus, no, far from it. The only thing teachers have learned over the past, what? 10 years? is what exactly are the arbitrary and capricious gotchas du jour by which teachers will be attacked and declared unfit to practice their profession? THAT'S the ONLY time I see teachers WAITING for anything Besty. They find out what hoops they're forced to jump through to keep their jobs then they do it and return to teaching kids. 

Of course she managed to toss in a couple of edu buzzwords to try and make herself sound credible. "Empowered" "Great Teaching" Too bad she couldn't have handled Al Franken's simple question about her position on the Growth vs Proficiency debate. It would've earned her some of the cred she's trying to find on Ebay and in ed reformer crib notes. 


To be fair Devos didn't have to visit a school to make the comment she made. Based on the reports from teachers who described her visit to the school -- they did eventually find an unguarded side door to sneak her into -- the teaching Devos witnessed had nothing to do with her statement. She's just trying to lay down her opening line of rhetoric upon which she will complain that unions are interfering with great teaching and labor contracts are too restrictive to allow great teaching. Surely this will be followed up with plans to offer vouchers to schools who aren't bound by unions and contracts. We'd all be disappointed too if at some point she didn't decide that these contract and union bound schools were receiving far more in federal funds than they truly deserve. We've seen it already. We know it better than she does. 

If there's any one party running loose on the public ed scene who needs to simply STFU and GTFO it's this dipshit who completely mischaracterized what transpired and in typical slimeball fashion is already trying to suck up to the reformers:


Just heard a protester blocked & almost knocked Secy @BetsyDeVos down at Jefferson.We don't condone such acts.We want her to go to pub schls

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) February 10, 2017

No. We Don't Want That. And you heard wrong Randi. Nobody came anywhere near her. Get your facts straight before you shoot your mouth off. Better yet get your facts straight then shut it. Your remarks can only make things worse for teachers. Collect your hefty paycheck and go back to rescuing the Nigerian school girls or trying to attack the Nurse's Union for daring to support Bernie Sanders. Yours is the last voice we want to hear in any discussion of public education. Your eruptions only serve to remind us that we need to dismantle and retool teacher unions as badly as we need the same with Democrats if we're ever going to support them again in anything.