Can it really be civil rights and equity vs. “school reform”?

Obama’s ed advisors

There's lots of speculation about which of Obama’s education advisors (or wannabees) will hold sway once he’s elected. Will it be the more progressive Bolder, Broader types like Darling-Hammond and Tennenbaum, or those grouped around Klein and Sharpton at EEP? Here's how Edweek blogger Alyson Klein poses the differences, unfortunately basing her analysis mainly on the views of conservatives like Fordham’s Mike Petrilli:

On one end of the spectrum are those whom Mr. Petrilli and others characterized as “fairly traditional liberal” types, who have made their mark in areas such as educational equity and civil rights…And then, Mr. Petrilli said, there is a “younger, thirty-something crowd of school reformers…”

So, it's ed equity and civil rights vs. school reform. How could that have happened to the school reform movement?

More Bolder, Broader…

Russo got some feedback on Bolder, Broader from Chairman Larry Mishel and had to correct some of his own misconceptions. Mishel points out that BB is NOT against all testing and reveals a few things about BB’s more conservative rival policy group EEP. He also confirms my point about the Dem's draft Party Platform drawing on BB’s holistic approach to school reform.

Quotables

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (remember him?) who’s been hired by Fox News, was asked by if he’d take a cabinet post, if offered, in an improbable McCain administration?

"Why would I want to do that?" Huckabee says. "I'm gonna have a good life out here in the private sector," he says. "Why would I go back to telling everybody in the world how much money I make and . . . barely surviving to have some obscure cabinet post and have some 20-year-old from the White House telling me what I'm gonna do?"