Casey slanders me

One more example of the unions' true nature: Randi's former right-hand-person and current UFT leader Leo Casey, in an article calling for civility (www.uft.org/node/34054), accuses me of sexism at best, misogyny at worst.  Slandering me in an article about the need for greater civility – union hypocrisy really knows no bounds.  Here's the paragraph:

Civility in debate is not just good form, the sign of men and women who understand the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society. It is the foundation of meaningful debate. Reliance upon such rhetorical demagoguery is also a sign of the lack of substantive argument on the issues.  (Think Whitney Tilson, and the way in which he targets for personal attack women educators with whom he disagrees, from Linda Darling-Hammond to Randi Weingarten to Diane Ravitch.) To the extent that we tolerate it, from our own side as well as the other, we diminish the quality of serious public discourse on education.

The key word here, of course, is "women" – it's completely unnecessary to the meaning and intent of his sentence – unless of course he's accusing me of going after LDH, Weingarten and Ravitch BECAUSE they're women. 

 

For the record, I go after people who I think are supporting policies that hurt children, regardless of their gender.  For example, I've called Jonathan Kozol a "crackpot" and a "menace" (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/07/q-with-jonathan-kozol.html), Michael Winerip a "hack", "gutless weasel", "infamous for biased hatchet jobs", and "the worst education reporter in America" (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-education-in-public-school-efforts.html), and Matt Damon "hypocritical" and his recent speech "dopey" (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/08/debate-on-damons-speech.html).  Plus my three daughters would find the charge of misogyny hilarious…