With the Delaware gubernatorial election coming in less than eight months, the candidates have been very slow to speak about the issues. Especially about education. Congressman John Carney, long considered the favorite for Governor, finally talked about education in Delaware. His response to my question on a Facebook q&a today showed he is nothing more than a Governor Markell wannabe. As well, he didn’t answer a very important question on the minds of many Delawareans in regards to the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission.
Since things like this have a tendency to disappear on social media, I took screenshots of my questions and Carney’s reply.
Notice how Carney did not answer anything about opt-out, Smarter Balanced, Common Core, personalized learning, data mining, or special education. In short, he didn’t answer anything! He merely pulled the corporate education reform bible out and read their introduction. In Delaware, that “flexibility” is killing education and morale in schools. No one likes the Smarter Balanced and this mad rush to standardize every single child into a collective drone is causing major issues in our schools. Teachers are held to higher “standards” so they can get pushed out, slowly but surely. Personalized learning will turn the once proud teaching profession into a moderator for the machine. Carney really doesn’t have a clue about any of this and it showed today. Send him an email, any email about education, and you will get a similar response.
I was really hoping, as the supposed frontrunner for Governor, that we would hear something different from Carney. But it is obvious he is more concerned with the campaign donation crowd than everyday parents and students. I really wish someone would step up and mount a serious campaign against them. Apparently, all you have to do is just a bit of research and you are already ahead of him with this game.
Carney didn’t answer a key question about the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission’s redistricting plan.
To keep things in perspective, Laura and I were some of the first to ask questions. While I appreciate Carney’s willingness to give me non-answers, he ignored Ms. Nash’s questions entirely. Several other folks posted questions well after the q&a started and Carney took the time to answer them. Why wouldn’t he answer a question about WEIC when he sent a rep from his office to their meeting last night? It’s obviously on his radar if he sent someone to the meeting. Very curious! But really, what’s the point of asking again if he is just going to evade the question which he did on many of them.
Those running for office: this is exactly the kind of campaign strategy you don’t want to utilize. Ignoring questions or ducking around answering real questions is not someone I want to vote for!
For that matter, where is State Senator Colin Bonini? Why isn’t he doing events like this? To at least show an illusion of transparency? As the Republican frontrunner for Governor, I can count on one hand how many times Bonini has been front and center on the issues a Delaware Governor will have to face. I hear more from Lacey Lafferty on issues, even though I don’t agree with many of them.
Even Sean Goward has more to say than Carney or Bonini. Who is Sean Goward? He is the Libertarian candidate for Delaware Governor:
Can’t say I agree with everything he has to say, but I would vote for him over Carney or Bonini based solely on this introduction. We need more headstrong pissed-off citizen dads running the show! And headstrong pissed-off citizen moms as well!
Obviously, education will be a major stumbling block for Carney in a Governor election yet again. Markell trounced him on this back in 2008 and it helped Carney to lose in the primary. Now he is just doing a copy and paste of Markell’s Rodel tainted agendas. Don’t believe me? The Godfather of Delaware education blogging said so:
The Season Of Myths 