You won't see Andy Cuomo criticizing white suburban soccer moms like Arne Duncan. Duncan needs only the support of Barack Obama. Cuomo's overarching goal is to become Barack Obama, and to do that, he needs votes. A whole lot of them. He can't go around alienating large swaths of Americans, labeling them by sex and race. This is particularly true when parents of young children in NY are watching their children fail in massive numbers.
Now Cuomo could take the POV of NY Times op-ed writer Frank Bruni, that we're coddling our children by complaining they take tests for which they're totally unprepared. On the other hand, if some teacher gave my kid a test for which my kid were unprepared, I'd be at the school in a New York minute. I don't blame parents for complaining. I blame Arne Duncan for categorizing them by sex and race.
So here's the thing--it will be good if Cuomo does something about this other than grant a little lip service. It appears he's being pushed in the right direction. There's a grassroots uprising against this Common Core nonsense and it appears he notices it when he licks his finger and holds it up to the wind. The problem with someone like Cuomo, who opposes a millionaire's tax and has the gall to compare it to his Dad's principled stand against capital punishment, is he has no core principles. He does whatever is expedient, and whatever he feels takes him one step closer to the White House.
But I don't doubt that, whatever he does or doesn't do, he'll throw us under the bus in a New York minute the moment it's convenient for him.
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