NYS Department of Education and PTA Collude in Silencing Parents

Whoops. A State Department of Education event designed to recruit parents into the new Common Core agenda in schools has instead triggered a parent revolt. Echoing Rochester's late August protests over Common Core, parents downstate have discovered that they too are being shut out of education policy discussions. When parents came to a packed PTA Town Hall meeting in Poughkeepsie recently to talk about Common Core with NYS Education Commissioner King, they discovered it was not a Town Hall meeting at all. Instead, King monopolized the microphone for over an hour and a half, pushing Common Core merits until parents' opportunity to speak during the two hours was reduced to a mere 23 minutes. In between parents who were able to voice their opinions, King interjected his own comments, reducing speakers' comment time even further. The few parents allowed to speak did so respectfully, but all were clearly against the Common Core. See for yourself. Within hours of this first meeting, New York State PTA suspended the remainder of Commissioner King's series of Town Hall meetings across the state. They declared that the Commissioner had "concluded the outcome was not constructive for those who chose to attend" and that it was hijacked by "special interests".

Let's look at this more closely. The New York State PTA, whose mission is to empower families and communities to advocate for all children, has canceled a series of meetings where many parents want to advocate for their children. How do meeting cancellations of important and controversial education policy align with the PTA's mission to support parents? King, who scheduled a series of Town Hall meetings - a term given to public meetings whose purpose is to voice opinions - dismissed the outcome as "unconstructive".  How are such meetings unconstructive for a public that wishes to speak about education policies that were adopted and implemented without field-testing or democratic process? Clearly the goal of listening to people was not King's aim or else he would have been delighted at the strong parent turn out and sharing.

What's happening here is much more worrisome than is at first evident. Although the national PTA has officially passed resolutions against the kind of high stakes testing that Common Core requires, sponsoring and canceling Town Hall Common Core discussion meetings at King's request indicates that the New York State PTA is more beholden to the State Education Department's agenda than to their own mission of supporting parents' voice and advocacy for their own children. Why? Perhaps it is the millions of dollars in special interest money paid to the national PTA by the Gates Foundation several years ago to help position it as a "key player at the front line of education reform" (in case readers are unfamiliar with the lingo, "education reform" is shorthand for pro-Common Core, high stakes testing, and teacher evaluation tied to students' scores). Interestingly, a visit to the PTA website shows that the press release describing Gates foundation award monies to the national PTA has been removed, although the reference is easily found on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation site.

We'll see how far the Gates financial inducements can go. Commissioner King has his Common Core sales work cut out for him because PTA parents are furious and now planning actions all over the state.

Article published in Smugtown Beacon October 15, 2013. Smugtown Beacon