Oh yes, did anyone mention--McCain's a maverick?

'Equal access to education has been gained'--McCain

“Education has become the civil rights issue of this century,” says John McCain, proving once again that even the finest of words can be turned into meaningless clichés in the mouths of demagogues.

"The bunch who brought us 'No Child Left Behind' now claims that education is 'the civil rights issue of this century,'" says Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington.

McCain says that the battle for educational equity is over. He wants to put it behind us and replace it with vouchers, privately-managed charters, watering down of teacher quality and certification standards, imposition of merit pay, as well as an end to collective-bargaining rights and union contracts.

Here's all that in McCainspeak:

“Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.”

What demagogue McCain won’t do is mention NCLB, which he voted for but now hides from. While most Republican leaders, like McCain’s top ed advisor Lisa Graham Keegan, still back NCLB testing madness, McCain won’t mention it during the campaign as he tries to distance himself from Bush. I can’t really blame him.

But Sec. Spellings assures us that McCain is not one of the old-line libertarian conservatives who used to rail against the DOE and big government. No matter than many Republicans oppose NCLB-driven federal involvement in local schools, they still appreciate the billions in ed dollars that were funneled to like-minded education contractors over the past eight years.

“I think he’s more a different kind of Republican than he is the federalist, abolish-the-Department-of-Education kind of Republican,” the secretary said in an interview in Minneapolis. “He voted for No Child Left Behind. He’s been supportive since.

Oh yes, and did anyone mention that McCain is a maverick? Remember, he "reached across party lines" when he signed on to Education Equality Project (EEP), the Democrats’ version of the Ownership Society.