Morning Shots

October 10, 2012

If Teachers Can Organize, Why Can’t Parents? That’s essentially the question that Doreen Diaz, president of the Desert Trails Parent Union, an organization formed to change failing Desert Trails elementary school under California’s parent trigger law, asks in a Washington Examiner column.

The frustrated parent compares the real life efforts of California parents to turn a school around to the movie Won’t Back Down, saying the movie makes union tactics seem tame in comparison.

So of course Doreen Diaz was excited to appear next to AFT President Randi Weingarten during a panel at Education Nation, where she could ask the union leader directly how she could justify the tactics being used to stop the Desert Trails conversion. Diaz:

“On the panel, she told me how she understood my frustration over my daughter’s education and how she shared my goals of giving her a great school. But after the lights and the cameras turned off, she left the stage and sent a tweet deploring the absence of parents who want “real” empowerment at the panel discussion. I had been sitting right next to her for the entire discussion. Her tweet made me feel just like our school district has made me feel for years: invisible.

It is Weingarten’s union that fights hardest against parent trigger laws, despite the fact we are fighting for the same right to organize that her teacher-members enjoy — a right we support.” Read More…

It’s a reflection of the state of the debate today that people immediately jump on a common Twitter mistake with an accusation of slander. In a recent op-ed in which I detailed a lengthy Twitter exchange about the upcoming movie Won’t Back Down, I quoted one of the many tweets assaulting the movie and it’s subject – the parent trigger. I mistakenly attributed the tweet “Shame on you for supporting a movie that sensationalizes locking kids in dark closets as ubiquitous ‘punishment’” to @stephrrivera instead of the actual tweeter @ColumWhyte. Instead of considering that I, like a lot Twitter users, had identified the wrong @username as the original tweeter, I was immediately accused of deliberate deception. Below is the entire exchange. I’ll let the record speak for itself.