It’s Simple: One Gov. Candidate Believes in Education; the Other Doesn’t.

The subtitle of a recent Washington Post article (“Virginia gubernatorial candidates take different approaches to education”) might well have been: How to dumb down reports of flaming radicalism by happy talk. The article says the differences in the two’s “approaches” are pronounced. The problem is that Ken Cuccinelli doesn’t actually have an educational approach, platform or policy. Being a privateer isn’t having an education policy. It’s education system exploitation. It’s a school piracy policy which seizes the assets of publicly funded buildings, equipment, and student dollars. But don’t call that education. Cuccinelli represents the gutting of education in Virginia. Cuccinelli doesn’t know what education is. Importantly, he supports the opposite of it.

There never were good intentions about the Cuccinelli approach to “starving the beast” for Grover Norquist, instead of really educating Virginia’s children. It is Cooch, after all, who wants to use schools to indoctrinate kids in the most extreme pseudo-religious hatred for other human beings. It is Cooch who wants to tell educators what they can and cannot discover in science labs. It is he who rides herd on scientists he has a beef with, stifling any intellectual inquiry as he does so. It is Cooch who wants Virginia to face the climate future blindly rather than face up to and be ready for their climate futures. It is Cooch who aspires to be climate denier-in-chief for Virginia. And it is Cooch who wants to teach creationism and rewrite history books. This is the stuff of the Dark Ages. But it is not education policy.  

Every dollar siphoned off in corporate profits is a dollar not used to educate children. But schools-for-profit never were about real education anyway. They are about privateers and profiteers putting their hands out and interrupting the flow of tax dollars to schools.

Kids matter. Public schools matter. If Virginians support public education, there is only one candidate for them, Terry McAuliffe. Only one wants to infuse capital, sorely lacking (and lagging at 2009 levels) in public education. The other wants to use your tax dollars to fund for-profit companies and churches. The latter is NOT public education, or any approximation of it. Don’t let a history and science revisionist pretend to educate the children of Virginia.  He doesn’t know the meaning of such a serious and important responsibility.