'What's so bad about social justice?'

Nancy Flanagan is a 30-year teaching veteran of Hartland, MI, in K-12 music education. She blogs at the Teacher Leaders Network. Here she asks a question many of us are asking as this, the dirtiest of all elections heads toward the finish line: “When did social justice get to be a bad thing?”

Who are these people who are snarling around suggesting that creating schools and curriculums to address the learning needs of inner city poor kids is some kind of left-wing plot? If I’m not teaching—ultimately—toward social justice, toward improved opportunity for each of my students, then why would I teach at all? I certainly wouldn’t do it for the money.

Randi & Chester

Now, if these two can unite behind Obama’s education platform, why can’t we have peace in the Middle East?

"The Obama package looks pretty good to me," said Chester Finn Jr., president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former education undersecretary in the Reagan administration.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten might not be campaigning door to door with Finn, but she agrees that the conversation about education has changed. She said the change really began when George W. Bush created a bipartisan No Child Left Behind law that gave the federal government an unprecedented role in public education. "Now you have an interesting array of people whom you can't really characterize," Weingarten said. "You have to talk in shades of gray. Things never get implemented in education when you talk about litmus tests."

(Source)

Déjà vu all over again

Michael Fellman at The Tyee.com

The resemblance of 2008 to the 1932 election is almost eerie. President Herbert Hoover, a true believer in laissez faire capitalism, had presided with almost complete passivity over the ever-deepening depression triggered by the 1929 stock market crash (when the Dow lost 87 per cent of its worth), and the ensuing industrial and banking catastrophe. Hoover had been preceded by 70 years of Republican hegemony, decades of wildfire capitalist development coursing along boom and bust cycles. Government had stayed clear of regulation while also handing out land and other resources to the private sector. The occasional Democratic president had played variations on Republican themes.