Arrogance rarely meets its match when facing off against a liberal Seattle state representative talking about public schools. Democrats like Rep. Gerry Pollet strongly believe they have all the answers, even though it’s their own party which as the ruling majority in Olympia underfunded our schools for a generation, resulting in the state being held in contempt by the Supreme Court for failing to meet its constitutional responsibilities to provide appropriate funding.
Pollet rolled out the arrogant and bullying attitude last week so typical of those elected officials in the pocket of the teachers union, when he sent a blog around to his colleagues talking about the “learning moment” he gave to public charter school students who came to the capitol to try and save their schools. He taught them about their “privilege”.
Pollet’s allegiance the union (WEA) was very clear in his argument to one of the parents he met with: the “WEA is the greatest advocate in Olympia for providing the training needed for special needs students.”
Notice that Pollet doesn’t talk about helping the students themselves – instead he points out the WEA is an “advocate” for “training” for its members. After all, those pesky kids and their parents don’t pay union dues which wind up as campaign contributions to people like Pollet, so let’s not focus on them.
Pollet’s anti-student rant was outed by the liberal blog Publicola, which pointed out a few facts about his idea of the “privilege” of the students from the Summit Sierra public charter school: “Sixty percent of Summit Sierra’s students are on the free and reduced lunch program for low-income kids compared to 37.6 percent in Seattle schools.
“Forty percent are African American compared to 16.4 percent in the district.”
Pollet tried to slip out of his mistake by arguing with Publicola that it was using the wrong statistics to define “privilege”. He said it was unfair to compare the demographics of Summit Sierra students with the entirety of Seattle Public Schools, instead of just a few schools in the area where the school is located.
The answer to Pollet’s continued silliness was provided by a spokeswoman for pro-charter group Act Now for Washington, who said “the argument isn’t traditional (schools) versus charter…it’s how do we have a system that doesn’t fail our kids and doesn’t consistently fail low-income kids of color. No one forced kids to go to Summit. They needed help and had a choice.”
That’s a choice that Pollet doesn’t want these children or their families to have, because of their “privilege” evidently.
