Texas Republican Greg Abbott’s education policy roll-out would be hilarious if not for the fact that his policies will hurt so many children’s future. As telling of his character is his refusal to distance himself from the law-breaking welfare cowboy, Cliven Bundy and his racist remarks. Even Hannity put on an act of doing that.
Abbott decided to announce the next phase of his plan to bring more destruction to Texas education at a school he is fighting in court. Even if he had the where with all to find a school he isn’t fighting in court, it’s very likely that school would have declined the opportunity to be a backdrop for Abbott to roll-out the next phase of his anti-Pubic education policy.
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According to Abbott,
“The state should set high standards, provide tools for success, then get out of the way, Our public education system is too centralized, with too many one-size-fits-all solutions being pushed down from the top.”
Bear in mind, that Abbott already promised to push down from the top the one-size-fits-all “solution” of standardized tests to screen four year olds out of a future.
On Wednesday, he announced a few more ideas that completely contradict his own words beginning with a state takeover of 15 failing schools. Those schools would be converted to charter schools under the failed model used in Louisiana and Tennessee . Parents in those states learned the hard way their charter schools did not improve their children’s academic performance.
In the end, this policy proposes centralized control and the imposition of one size fits all solutions by corporations with profits as their first and only priority.
Abbott also proposed his version of California’s “parent trigger law” as a mechanism to convert the school to a charter school. As parents in California learned, this law is really a mechanism for private charter groups to get free school buildings through secret proceedings.
In other news, Attorney General Abbott has yet to distance himself from lawbreaker and racist, Cliven Bundy. He certainly had the opportunity to do so during his Thursday appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show.
This is the transcript of that exchange according to Abbott’s campaign website.
HANNITY: Well, I and this gets to the heart of it and I am really so angry about these comments by Cliven Bundy because…and I have been on eminent domain issues for years and we are going to show a lot of the cases I was involved in tonight on tv. And we played some of the audio on this program today and it angers me because now the liberal media is going to focus on his ignorance, which by the way, I totally concur with. And it obscures the larger picture here which is that it was such a volatile situation in my mind at this ranch that they are surrounded with 200 agents and then that attracted, you know, some of these nut cases out there and I thought somebody was going to die and it was getting so scary out their and I think now people are going to say, “see! All of these republicans were supporting a racist” No, we find his comments repugnant. But, I found the reaction of the government overreaching, by a long shot. What do you think?
GENERAL ABBOTT: (gasps) Well there are, there are three fundamental principles here: One is that the United States of America was built upon certain fundamental ideas – one is the rule of law and two is private property rights. Second, we are seeing both of those fundamental principles eroded, especially under the Obama administration. Uh, as a quick example and that is look at what has happened under Obamacare where the President came out and said “ok, now the law is passed. This is the law of the land after the Supreme Court upheld it and then after the Supreme Court upheld it, he, the President, continued to move and adjust and alter and change, supposedly, the law of the land. Now we are seeing the very same thing happen with regard to private property rights. Here in the state of Texas, we have had this Red River as the dividing line between Oklahoma and Texas. The land on either side of the Red River belonged to either Oklahomans or to Texans. Now we have, uh, the federal bureau of land management come in and sayin’ they have a right to maybe as much as 90,000 acres of this property that has belonged to private property owners in the state of Texas. So this is a a (sic) complete abdication of the rule of law and private property rights and this is contrary to the fundamental principles upon which this country was based.
Obviously, Hannity was pretending to distance himself from Bundy’s racist comments while still defending the cause that led the Tea Party and Republicans to rally around the welfare farmer. As obvious is the Attorney General’s willingness to support Bundy’s violation of the law and by his “gasp”, Bundy’s views on race. Of course, since Abbott pals around with white supremacist and law-breaker Ted Nugent and had racist Charles Murray advise him on education policy, this really isn’t very surprising.
Former contributor.
