It’s not a crisis for everybody

The Bush/Cheney boys at Exxon Mobil post the biggest quarterly profit ever.

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Charters’ right-wing threatens Obama

Yes, there is a wing-nut faction within the charter school movement and they are among the most rabid of the anti-Obama attack dogs. They’re called the Center for Educational ReformJeanne Allen. The CER board is a collection of school profiteers, including Edison’s Chris Whittle, headed by John Danielson from Chartwell (Rod Paige’s consulting group), educational free-marketeer John Chubb and Kevin Chavous from the D.C. lobbying group of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP (also a charter school operator in Chicago).

CER started out as a pro-voucher group, but like many on the right, once they saw that vouchers were a dead issue, they shifted their focus over to charter schools as a way to attack teacher unions and to promote privatized school management.

Obama supports charter schools. But he opposes vouchers and doesn’t make a fetish out of charters. He’s an advocate for strong charter school accountability and supports teacher unions and collective bargaining rights for teachers. That's enough to make him a target for the CER.

Here, they threaten to cut Obama off, for what they say is his unwillingness, if elected, to “punish” state governors who favor strict accountability of charter schools. If he won't do it, CER calls on the Democratic Party to cut off funds for Obama’s campaign:

He'll also have to show us that he's willing to punish Governors like Ohio's Ted Strickland who has worked hard to stop charters in their tracks in his state. If the standard bearer for a party allows their own party leaders in states to take a pathetic stand on reform, their access to the party's benefits should be cut off.

Maybe that demand won't pan out so well.