Squabbles tearing the "bedfellows" apart

EEP's house of cards

There appears to be trouble brewing in EEP land. The unprincipled alliance between the "strange bedfellows," N.Y. Chancellor Joel Klein, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Republican wing-nut, Newt Gingrich, now appears to be coming apart at the seams. Shortly after the trio appeared at the White House two weeks ago, along with Mayor Bloomberg and Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan, preaching to their small choir the gospel of school privatization and unlimited mayoral control, the wheels began coming off.

First Gingrich twittered that Obama's Supreme Court appointment, Sonia Sotomayor, was "a racist." This put Sharpton as well as Duncan in embarrassing positions. How could Duncan be seen on stage, embracing the wing-Newt at the same time the wing-Newt was going off on his boss' most important pick? While Gingrich was forced to "take back" his abusive statements about Sotomayor, his attacks on Obama's policies have become even more strident and Limbaugh-like.

Meanwhile, Sharpton refuses to support Bloomberg's mayoral-control push. This also distances him from Duncan who has been threatening districts with loss of stim dollars if they refuse to give (urban) mayors control of the schools.

What a tangled web we weave...

More from Levy

I had to chuckle reading the NYT this morning. There was an op-ed piece by former N.Y. Chancellor and Wall Street (Citigroup) lawyer, Harold Levy, offering us the "5 ways to fix schools." And here I always thought there were 7.

Levy, who obviously hadn't yet discovered the 5 ways while he was still in power, now wants to make it "mandatory" that all kids go to college for a year. I suppose he hopes that will keep them out of the job market and off the unemployment line for a while longer and hopes that the feds will pick up the cost of tuition ($8,000 average for state colleges and $25,000 for private). As for those kids who want to take a year off after high school, to work or travel? I suppose we could arrest their parents. How will this "fix" schools? Maybe Levy will tell us later.

Levy, you may recall, helped engineer the back-door shipment of $500K to Sharpton via hedge-fund school reformers DFER which apparently bought Sharpton's temporary allegiance to the "bedfellows" club at EEP.