Look who’s leading the attack on the Democrats’ education platform and giving new life to already discredited New McCarthyism tactics against Obama. It’s none other than that voice of the Ownership Society, Investors Business Daily(“Obama’s Little Red Schoolhouse”).
The article’s title alone is enough to tip you off about the emerging McCain/Rove campaign strategy. And, of course IBD isn’t saying anything that the Clintons and EEP Democrats aren’t whispering behind the scenes.
Swiftboating...
The IBD article follows the lead of the new best seller by swiftboaterJerome Corsi, Obama Nation, which was produced and directed over at Simon & Schuster by none other that neocon hack Mary Matalin. Corsi is now making the rounds of wing-nut and openly white-supremacist radio talk shows, rallying his troops.
Troops send dollars to Obama at 6:1 ratio
The nonpartisan Center For Responsive Politics reports that deployed U.S. troops are contributing to the Obama campaign fund at 6-to-1 over McCain contributions. Anti-war libertarian Ron Paul , who suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has also received more than four times McCain's contributions from the soldiers.
Michael Moore’s 6 sure-fire ways for the Dems to lose in November
Sage advice to Democrats in Rolling Stone on how to lose — as if they really needed any.
One of the first articles carried on the new local Chicago Huffington site has schools CEO Arne Duncan opposing the student boycott on opening day.
I am very grateful for the attention [Meeks] has brought to this issue," Duncan said. "But I think we can fight this battle and win this battle without doing anything that puts students on a course of behavior that is self-destructive."
Did you get that? He's grateful to Meeks for calling attention to the issue, but he opposes what Meeks has done to call attention to the issue. Hmmm.
Duncan also never explains why students organizing to protest inequities in the system, is “self-destructive.”
School reformer says no to Meeks' boycott
PURE's Julie Woestehoff, has a letter in today's Trib. After reading it, I'm not clear why PURE is opposing the one-day boycott and protest. Julie points to PURE's long history of struggle against the funding inequities in the system, calls for "targeted" direct action, and says, "our sentiments are closely aligned with Rev. Meeks." But...
Finn attacks the boycott, Sharpton, and “noxious causes”
There's no confusion about where he stands. He's not "grateful" to Meeks. Nor are his "sentiments closely aligned" with Meeks. Rather, Fordham wing-nut Checker Finn is breathing fire. I haven’t seen him this angry since his pet Reading First project was unmasked for the swindle it was.
This time Finn is pissed that Chicago’s black community is finally doing something about the current funding crisis in inner-city schools. His target of course is Meeks and the 50 other black ministers who are leading a one-day boycott to dramatize the funding inequities—more specifically, the growing gap between city and wealthy white suburbs and schools. But interestingly, he saves his real venom for another black civil rights leader who sits 1,000 miles away—Rev. Al Sharpton:
The Reverend Meeks, a politician who leads a church on Chicago's South Side, has received support for his plan from the Reverend Al Sharpton, a wannabe politician who leads all sorts of noxious causes and whose association with this one makes laughable his recent "commitment" to improve the academic achievement of minority and low-income pupils.
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?"
Speaking to reporters about the situation in Georgia, Sen. John McCain denounced the aggressive posture of Russia by claiming that: "in the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."
Amen, brother John. But what if the Russians just call it a "surge"?
On the same wavelength—Cheney/Goering In an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz back in March, Veep Dick Cheney was asked his thought on surveys showing about two-thirds of Americans stood opposed to the war.
Raddatz: Two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
Cheney: So?
Raddatz: So — you don’t care what the American people think?
Cheney: No,I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.
"The People Can Always Be Brought to the Bidding of the Leaders"
“Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship...
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Joe Williams has politely corrected me (see comment below). I misread his quote from the Dem's party plank where he (they) use the word "choice." It was from the 2004 plank--not 2008. I unfairly accused Williams of manufacturing the word "choice" in describing the 2008 plank. I apologize.
I guess I was thinking back to other Williams' phony statements, like the one in the NY Sun, trying to make Obama out to be a voucher supporter. Sorry Joe. I should have read more carefully and not have have presumed you were doing it again.
But tell me, how do you feel about the new platform NOT using the word, "choice" and not supporting vouchers? With all that hedge-fund $$$ behind you, why doesn't DFER have more juice with the campaign?
The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.
Cost of War
The next time you are told that your school can’t afford computers for every student, you’ll know the reason why. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance professor Linda Bilmes, the total cost of the Iraq War will be over $3 trillion. That's enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every household in America or enough MacBooks for a bridge to the moon 2 MacBooks wide.
The latest version of the 2008 Democratic National Platform is filled with the usual general platitudes so that different and often contending interest groups can read into it what they will. But its education plank, “A World Class Education For Every Child,” is pretty good. Thus, it can’t be making the voucher supporters at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) very happy. Despite all the lobbying and bundling by these hedge fund Republicrats, the plank makes no mention of their favorite strategy-- vouchers.
Nevertheless, DFER’s Joe Williams is practically wetting himself over the words “promotepublic charter schools” found in this year’s plank as opposed to the phrase “support public charter schools” which was in the 2004 platform.
But still, the word change from support to promote still begs the question for Williams, so he simply adds the word “choice” into his own representation of the plank, on his blog—as in "support public school choice, including charter schools.”
But if you read the actual education plank in the 2008 platform, nowhere will you find the word, “choice.” Actually, choice is a perfectly fine word and is sprinkled generously throughout the platform, ie. in the health care plank, social security, etc… So its omission from the ed plank was obviously intentional--making clear once again that the Party and candidate Obama, while supporting (and promoting) PUBLIC charter schools that are accountable, aren’t voucherites.
All this leaves the disgruntled Williams with only one option. He skips over all the usual political wheeling and dealing and debate within the platform committee and adds he own language to fit Republicrat scenario. One can only wonder why he didn’t throw in the V-word as well?
For the most part, I like the Dems’ education plank. It is pro-teacher, critical of the failed policies of NCLB, and it promises, "an end the practice of labeling a school and its students as failures and then throwing our hands up and walking away from them without having provided the resources and supports these students need."
In this sense, it fits will with the Bolder, Broader policy group’s approach in not putting all the weight for reform on schools alone. Instead, the draft platform presents its ed plank in the context of a broad expansion of efforts to provide health care, fight poverty and work for equal rights.
My question for Democrats is—how can you offer all this and still support an escalation of the war in Afghanistan?
Ragging our book
Thanks to our friends at the Rag Blog for running Jill Davidson’s review of our book:
Documenting the ways that “the progressive grassroots educational reform movement for small schools has been hijacked by business groups, right-wing ideologues, and the ideology of the Ownership Society,” the Klonskys throw readers into the deep end of the small schools movement, the threats posed by corporate and governmental encroachment on public education, and the toxic ground on which privatization forces have co-opted small schools for corporate gain, both in the authors’ home turf of Chicago and elsewhere.
It's not easy being a Chicago alderman and having to work on Daley's plantation. With Mayor Daley still controlling jobs and the purse, an alderman has to walk the line between Daley patronage and the demands of his/her community. Case in point-- Black Caucus alderman yesterday, SUPPORTING, but afraid to ENDORSERev. Meeks' proposed first-day-of-school boycott. The boycott idea, to dramatize the funding disparities between city and rich suburban schools, has drawn broad community support and was embraced by ministers from 50 West and Southside churches yesterday.
Comparing Marshall's 46 percent graduation rate to New Trier's 99.8 percent rate, Rev. Marshall Hatch of New Mt. Pilgrim Church denounced disparities in which students on the North Shore have thousands of dollars more spent on them than Chicago schoolchildren. "Money does matter," Hatch said. "The funding disparity, of course, brings not only unequal investment but obviously unequal outcomes."
But it's drawn fire from the mayor, governor and other politicians who've been sitting on their hands while state funding for schools remains at a political impasse in Springfield.
Not the first time
1963 CPS boycott flyer
This isn't the first time Chicago school students will have stayed home to protest the inequities in the system. Some 45 years ago, civil rights groups led boycotts by African-American school students protesting segregated, overcrowded schools, the use of trailers as classrooms, and the policies of the notorious Supt. Benjamin Willis. Willis and the board filed injunctions against the movement and used many of the same arguments being heard today--"kids shouldn't miss a day of school," "kids are being used," etc... But the boycott came off and more than 100,000 African-American students stayed home.
Those early school boycotts marked the beginning of a sustained protest movement, the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965-1966, that culminated in the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's arrival in Chicago to lead the struggle for equal opportunities in education and housing.
The newest pacifist
Don't you just love the idea of George Bush preaching pacifism to the Russians. That's chutzpah.
"I said this violence is unacceptable," Bush told US broadcaster NBC, in reference to an exchange he had with Putin while they were attending Friday night's opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics."I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia and that we strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia...I was very firm with Vladimir Putin."
How about John Edwards’ plea the other day that he was being “99% honest” when he denied his tryst with a consultant (yuck!).
Now, here’s my data-driven question for you. If 99% honesty isn’t enough, what percent is enough?
And speaking of politicians who sneak around (and aren’t even 99% honest about it) on their faithful, but seriously ill wives, what kind of man would do a thing like that and still think he could run for high office without consequence? I’ll direct that one at John McCain, Rudy Giuliani (actually he was the sick one), and Newt Gingrich.
But the problem is, technocrat Rhee and Mayor Fenty are in league with Ownership Society privatizers bent on replacing public with privately managed (non-union) charter schools and vouchers for Catholic (non-union) schools. That means that the pay provisions of any new contract won’t be worth the paper they’re written on as budgets are slashed and closed neighborhood schools are replaced by charters or vouchers. Any D.C. teacher could then be fired without due process, especially in schools marked by Rhee for closing. As the teaching force moves from public to charter or Catholic schools, teachers are subject to the pay scales, work rules, and whims of the private management companies and parents and communities can like it or lump it. This is especially true as charter caps are lifted and charters handed out freely to the Archdiocese.
If D.C. union prez George Parker bites on Rhee’s cynical proposal, without a plan to keep public schools public, I think he and the union are through. I’m sure other urban districts will be watching closely.
Are they really for choice?
Conservatives call themselves “choice” advocates for public school reform. Let's see how many of them support choice when Rev. Meeks brings 200 bus loads of Chicago inner-city kids up to suburban Winnetka and tries to enroll them in a wealthy, white North Shore high school, to call attention to the enormous funding disparities.
The death of comedic genius Bernie Mac (Bernard McCullough) brought to mind a Chicago Tribune article written back in 2002 by David McGrath, Bernie's old English teacher at Chicago Vocational High School.
I've used this article from time to time in my ed courses or as discussion starters with fellow educators. It was an instructive piece for me, about innate but untapped brilliance in lots of inner-city kids--brilliance that isn't always apparent. You often have to dig to find it and that's really difficult in huge high schools like CVS was back when Bernard McCullough played the class clown in McGrath's classroom. 4,000-student CVS became the first Chicago high school to be restructured into smaller learning communities.
McGrath writes:
As I listen to his mishmash of South Side dialect and convoluted usage, I wonder how much of it is comically purposeful, ironically fortunate or vindictively calculated as rebellion against my efforts as his freshman English teacher in 1972 at Chicago Vocational High School on the Southeast Side. Were it the last, I could hardly blame him; for Bernie Mac became a success in this world in spite of and, possibly, because of this first-year teacher's inexperience, naivete and inability to manage the class in Room 180 in which Bernard McCullough launched a coup to become "king" of eighth-period English...
...He could have earned A's for his papers' content but always rated an F for the sentence structure and the punctuation. Always an F for the mechanics--a shortcoming I judged to be a consequence of his attention deficit (though ADD had yet to be coined), when it really may have been, instead, a manifestation of his all-consuming need for unrestrained self-expression. He was bursting back then, and there was no stopping him.
When Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald died a dozen years ago, a magazine published interviews with a few of her former teachers. Like Bernie Mac, Ella never connected with school and dropped out at an early age. "If only we knew we had an Ella Fitzgerald sitting right there in our classroom," said one of them sadly.
McGrath puts it this way:
I failed him. Not by giving him an F, but by not knowing or soon enough learning how to nurture his gifts. I think how if he had come to my class when I had three or four years of experience, I could have channeled his force into wonderful avenues of creativity and leadership. And then I think how maybe I did after all--channeled it straight out of the classroom, out of the school, out of the establishment, putting it on the stage where not 28, but 28 million can be led to laugh at themselves and forget the reality for a while.
There's never any easy, cut-and-dry lessons or answers when it comes to teaching. But I think McGrath's experience with Bernie Mac is worth some consideration.
In Chicago, you don’t hear too much lately about Daley/Duncan’s school Renaissance 2010. The reason? With only a year remaining for completion of the business-model reform plan, they’re running out of money to pay for it. No such problem in rich Chicago suburbs a few miles up the lakeshore.
With all the power wielded by the Mayor and Democrats, especially in this election year, nothing has been accomplished in the area of school funding or leveling the playing field for Chicago’s420,000 mostly black and Latino students. And you can bet that the anti-tax Civic Committee that’s been pushing so hard on privatization, isn’t going to kick in or push for a more equitable tax policy.
*******
Rev. James Meeks, whose southside Salem Baptist Church has about 25,000 members, has emerged as the leader of a dynamic, community-based movement for adequate and fair funding. At a huge downtown rally Thursday, he continued his call for a school boycott on the first day of classes, Sept. 2.
He plans to take boycotting students up to New Trier High School in the wealthy suburb of Winnetka, in an attempt to enroll them at a school where there’s nearly three times the number of tax dollars spent per child. He also wants to flood the Chicago Stock Exchange, Mercantile Exchange, Chase Bank, Fifth Third Bank, and the Aon building with students and parents until some action is taken. While that can't make the Civic Committee very happy, Meeks' call is meeting with enthusiastic support in black neighborhoods and churches.
But Daley and Duncan are frantically attacking Meeks' plan. Gov. Blagojevichwishes Meeks would disappear (under his administration, the state’s share of school funding has dropped under 30% for the first time ever). School Board President Rufus Williams has been out scrambling for media in an attempt to counter Meeks' boycott call, claiming that missing the first day of school will lower student test scores and cost the district money.
If you’ve ever been in a Chicago school on the first day of classes, you know what’s wrong with the first argument--more chaos, missing school buses, and classroom mix-ups than any real teaching. Kids will learn much more lobbying for public school funding--even if it's not on the test. There may be some truth in the second, but if that’s a real concern, the Mayor, Williams, and the schools CEO ought to be standing with Meeks, not against him—or at least offering a better strategy.
Why aren’t they?First, Meeks has upstaged the Mayor and has rightfully assumed the leadership position in the movement to save our schools, while Daley, Duncan (who lined up behind an underfunded NCLB) and a divided CTU are stuck in political sand of their own making. Second, Daley needs this kind of publicity during his quest for a Chicago Olympics, like a fish needs a bike.
Finally, where are the school reformers and the powerhouse foundations at this important point in CPS history? Are they really joining Daley in opposing the boycott?
Dana Goldstein assesses Chris Whittle’slatest morph from Edison Schools into Edison Learning Inc.;from being a for-profit manager of urban charter schools into the hopefully-for-them, more profitable distance-learning business.Writing at American Prospect, Goldsteinsays of Edison’s hustle and flow:
…ultimately, for a company that never managed to get past the "ick" factor associated with for-profit public schools, diversification is probably a sensible goal, both in terms of finances and branding…Edison has always been as consumed with managing its image as it has been with managing schools, hence its very appropriate change in name. The question remains at what cost to the real bottom line -- educating kids
I may be wrong but, isn't this Edison's second round of reinventing itself in the past year? I remember reading about the first on the San Francisco Schools blog--what sounded like a half-baked attempt called E2 . It seems that profit margins were shrinking and Whittle was being handed his shorts by competing CMOs Aspire and KIPP.
The shake-out continues.
Choice a felony in Florida? Not likely...
Fordham’s Mike Petrilli is shedding crocodile tears over Broward County’s supposed criminalization of “choice.” All the district has done is what wealthier, mainly white districts have done everywhere, to keep out the poor and children of color; namely, the board gave administrators the right to report families trying to sneak children into better equipped and staffed schools in areas where they can’t afford to live. Since school boards can’t pass laws or prosecute anyone, the claim that they are making “choice a felony” is pure demagogery, and Petrilli knows it.
This backdoor attempt at school desegregation has nothing to do with criminalizing choice—at least choice the way Petrilli means it: school vouchers and privately-managed charter schools. Not only is Petrilli’s version of choice not illegal, it’s become practically a way of life in Broward and other Florida counties under Govs. Bush and Crist. And, I might add, with poor results.
…Fordham demagogy
Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick is black. He grew up poor, won a scholarship to a private school and then went to Harvard. Good going, Guv. But to Checker Finn & Gadfly, this means that Patrick is obligated to support school vouchers and privately-managed charters as part of his new school reform plan. But Finn knows full well that winning a scholarship is not the same thing as using public funding to support private schools.
Thomas Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew:How conservatives rule, is well worth reading, even though it has little new to offer on the role of the neocons in public education, NCLB, testing or school reform. However it does affirm much of our generalanalysis of Ownership Society politics. He does offer the reader some cogent insights into conservative corporate/government sub-contracting and so-called “mismanagement," especially in Post-Katrina New Orleans, the current economic crisis, and reconstruction in Iraq. There’s also some good info on right-wing think tanks and foundations, for those like us who keep one eye on such things.
Frank also manages to pick up the same good William Bennett story that we did. It seems that when former FCC commissioner Reed Hunt asked Bennettfor help in getting legislation passed to pay for internet access in every public school classroom, Bennett reportedly refused.
According to Hunt:
He told me he would not help because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capacity, new tools for success. He wanted them to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.
Frank is a contributing editor at Harpers. You can hear his recent interview on Fresh Air, here.
A national pro-voucher group called All Children Matter has raised $2.1 million -- nearly $1.4 million of it from the Arkansas heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton -- to elect pro-voucher legislative candidates here this year.
The daughter of Wal-Mart's founder wrote a check for $836,000 in May to a group working to pass two questions on the November ballot to expand school vouchers in Florida. Alice Walton's donation was the largest single check among nearly $12-million raised in Florida in the past three months by interest groups and individual candidates for state offices.
Kette gets it
Eduwonkette has been right on the money lately. She’s one of the few ed bloggers who really gets the significance of the divide between the two new policy formations, the Broader, Bolder Approach and the so-called Educational Equality Project (EEP). Her latest include some stinging exposes of the phony achievement –gap reports coming out EEP-er Joel Klein’s office (she even manages toturn the test-crazy Klein into a post-modernist), plus research by Suet-Ling Pong supporting BBA’s proposition that,
…postulates that school improvement—which includes holding schools accountable for students’ learning and development—can’t do it alone. Rather, investments in communities, families and other social institutions that shape children’s lives outside of formal schooling are critical to moderating the powerful linkage between socioeconomic advantage and children’s learning and development.
Merrow’s table
In answer to Sherman Dorn’s “who’s missing” question, from here it appears that to have a seat at John Merrow’s table , you have to be white (absolutely), not a teacher (definitely), and a member of a right-wing think-tank (most likely). As PreaPrez sez:the panel is so right, “it threatens to fall off the edge of the earth.” Bolder, Broader’s Weingarten and Ravitch make some decentcomments about swamp called NCLB, but nothing really new or helpful here.
******
Russo, on the other hand, links to an interesting interview with Chicago Teacher Union’s Julie Washington. She went to a charter school conference and came back with some fresh insights.
While reading about the new “Taj Mahal” high school for 1,600 students, being built in super-wealthy Newton, Mass., at the estimated cost of $200 million, I couldn’t help but think back to the 19-day hunger strike in the immigrant Chicago neighborhood of Little Village. There, faced with huge and overcrowded schools, hunger- striking mothers ultimately won the battle. There was finally a wonderful new modern campus of small schools for this underserved neighborhood.
Newton, a city of 83,000 located seven miles west of Boston, was settled in 1630 as part of Cambridge, the home of Harvard University. Residents enjoy two symphony orchestras and a median household income of $101,001, twice the national figure, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. At $112,875 a pupil, Newton North will be the most costly school in state history, according to the authority.
No hunger strike needed here.
Housed Katrina evacuees in toxic Philly school
Now we learn that former Philly schools CEO Paul Vallas used a known toxic school site to house evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. Buried in the middle of an unrelated Daily News story, is this shocking information about Wanamaker Middle School, which is still on a list of 12 Philadelphia schools that have elevated levels of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the electric transformers at the school.
The district closed Wanamaker in June 2005, citing declining enrollment and environmental issues. But the building was reopened a few months later to temporarily shelter Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
More irony--Vallas now runs the district in New Orleans.
Inside Chicago’s school “Renaissance”
Rev. Meeks and other black ministers are calling for a school boycott on the first day of school to bring attention to the gross inequities between inner-city schools and predominantly white north shore schools 6 miles up the lakefront. School reformers and CEO Duncan are critical of the boycott idea. They say it won’t help kids pass their upcoming tests. But what’s their alternative strategy?
From ABC News:
"I grew up in the CPS system, and as a father, it's really disgusting to send a child to a school that doesn't even have toilet paper [or has] 20-year-old books. It's despicable," parent Lewis Roy said.
This country’s long history of slavery and racial discrimination has left a deep imprint on our society and on our culture. A great example is the phrase, “playing the race card.”
In this political campaign, and in our alleged "post-racist society," the implication is that the first person to play the card—that is, to talk about race—loses the game.
In post-racist America, race is a game. Racism doesn't exist any more. The trick is to win the game without getting caught playing the race card. Get it?
Of course the McCain campaign (and the Clinton campaign before them) talked about race all throughout the campaign. When Barack Obama was forced to distance himself from his minister and "throw him under the bus," that's talking about race. When, for example, John McCain came out in opposition to an Arizona bill which would allow for limited forms of affirmative action, he was talking race.
But when Barack Obama gave a speech in which he humorously anticipated the obvious upcoming McCain/Rove low-road election tactics:
"You know, 'He's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name,' you know, 'he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
…he may not have said anything about race, but he’s, you know, “playing the card.”
McCain/Rove are happy to play out the game metaphor. Rove's boys are no strangers to the game and know, in the short run, it's worth about 10 points in the polls and can easily counter the bounce Obama got on his European trip.
McCain acts shocked at Obama's play. He’s stunned, that anyone would bring up the very idea of his campaign debasing Obama and the black community in such a way—especially that stuff about the dollar bills. McCain even praises Obama: "he's nice," "popular (like Paris Hilton)," "a well-spoken superstar." But Obama is definitely “playing the race card, right off the bottom of the deck” by being the first one to allude to racism in the campaign.
The network and cable morning news jocks all nod in affirmation. “Yup, it’s the race card all right.”
Not one of them one asks, where did Obama come up with that dollar-bill stuff? How could he even think that McCain/Rove would pull such a racist and underhanded stunt?
HERE’S HOW…
Obama won't call the McCain/Rove gambit, racism. He's too polite, too forgiving. But I will.
Reading today’s NYT front-page story on the war in Afghanistan gave me a flashback to the Soviet-Afghan war when the Times was covering the collapse of the invincible Soviet 40th Army. Soon after their defeat at the hands of Mujahideenguerillas in 1989, the entire war weary U.S.S.R. collapsed, its economy in ruin and popular discontent at highest point. Are you listening Barack?
From the Times:
Six years after being driven from power, the Taliban are demonstrating a resilience and a ferocity that are raising alarm here, in Washington and in other NATO capitals, and engendering a fresh round of soul-searching over how a relatively ragtag insurgency has managed to keep the world’s most powerful armies at bay…
Another quagmire?
In case you missed it, there was a deadly bombing last month at India’s embassy in Kabul. Obviously, the work of the Taliban or Al Qaeda guerillas right?
Actually, it’s more complicated than that according to NYT reporters Mazzetti and Schmitt. The bombing, which has already intensified the ongoing conflict between nuke-armed Pakistan and India over Kashmir, and threatened the shaky partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan, may have been carried out and paid for by former CIA agents with logistic support from our partners in the War on Terror, the Pakistani secret security agency ISI.
According to the Times report:
American officials say they believe that the embassy attack was probably carried out by members of a network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose alliance with Al Qaeda and its affiliates has allowed the terrorist network to rebuild in the tribal areas… Jalaluddin Haqqani, the militia commander, battled Soviet troops during the 1980s and has had a long and complicated relationship with the C.I.A. He was among a group of fighters who received arms and millions of dollars from the C.I.A. during that period, but his allegiance with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda during the following decade led the United States to sever the relationship.
Mr. Haqqani and his sons now run a network that Western intelligence services say they believe is responsible for a campaign of violence throughout Afghanistan, including the Indian Embassy bombing and an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul earlier this year.
When do we get to find out just how “long” and how “complicated” this relationship with the CIA was (is)?
How do terrorists groups end?
This is the research question posed by the Rand Corp. and the counter-insurgents at Rand tell us how. They say, it’s NOT by waging a “war on terrorism.”
How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they join the political process. This suggests that the United States should pursue a counterterrorism strategy against al Qa'ida that emphasizes policing and intelligence gathering rather than a “war on terrorism” approach that relies heavily on military force.
A Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor, on Wal-Mart mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors to warn that if Democrats win the election, it will be easier for workers to unionize companies.
Bush’s former assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, Susan B. Neuman, has endorsed the new Bolder, Broader ed policy coalition.
I've now joined with a group of national experts, from diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise and political beliefs, calling for a "broader, bolder approach" to education. Our proposals (www.boldapproach.org) certainly include improving schools, but tie changes in classrooms to changes in the world outside.
Neuman, who was at the DOE back when No Child was passed, is now an ed professor at the U. of Michigan.
BS-nomics
Tip of the hat to Russo (I’m not like that ingrate, Liam Julian) for getting me to read the Freakonomicsreview of Good to Great by Jim Collins, one of the dozens of inane, but best-selling Ownership Society manifestos that have flooded the market during the Bush years.
Says reviewer Steven Leavitt:
Ironically, I began reading the book on the very same day that one of the eleven “good to great” companies, Fannie Mae, made the headlines of the business pages. It looks like Fannie Mae is going to need to be bailed out by the federal government. If you had bought Fannie Mae stock around the time Good to Great was published, you would have lost over 80 percent of your initial investment… Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500… it calls into question the basic premise of these books, doesn’t it?
Gee, if we can’t believe in the miracle corporations any more, what about miracle corporate-type school district CEOs and super-star principals?
Needed--“Creative capitalism”
Here’s Chairman Bill’s thoughts on all of this, in the latest Time Magazine:
…we need a more creative capitalism: an attempt to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off. We need new ways to bring far more people into the system — capitalism — that has done so much good in the world.
Bono showed him the way…
Bono, and frankly, I thought he was a little nuts. It was late, we'd had a few drinks, and Bono was all fired up over a scheme to get companies to help tackle global poverty and disease. He kept dialing the private numbers of top executives and thrusting his cell phone at me to hear their sleepy yet enthusiastic replies. As crazy as it seemed that night, Bono's persistence soon gave birth to the (RED) campaign.
OK, I’m sold. Hey Bono. Next time we go out drinking, could you pass along those phone numbers to me?
John McCain finally had something to say about public education. He wants vouchers—or does he? And he hates unions. That’s for sure.
He also endorsed the Klein/Sharpton so-called, Education Equality Project and chided Barack Obama for so far refusing to sign on. He even tried to play Obama off against more conservative black politicians like J.C. Watts, Corey Booker and Harold Ford.
That’s pretty much what he had to offer to the Urban League convention yesterday where, according to the AP wire story, “he drew gasps and grumbles during a feisty question-and-answer session” after attacking Obama for “defer[ring] to teachers unions, “instead of committing to real reform.” He drew more gasps when he held up former N.Y. Mayor Rudi Giuliani as his model crime fighter and repeated his claim that "the best equal opportunity employer in the country is the U.S. military."
Up until now, McCain has been reluctant to mention the V-word during the campaign, because of the unpopularity of school vouchers. He, like Bush and the Republican leadership, have always favored school vouchers to support private schools, but have been reluctant to push for a federal voucher policy and instead have only used vouchers as a wedge issue (like flag burning or gay marriage). But under pressure from ultra-conservatives (see David Brooks recent NYT column), egged on by the Gates/Broad Ed in ’08 campaign, and hoping to get even single-digit support from black voters, McCain finally came out of hiding on vouchers and a few other ed policy issues.
Again from AP:
Although McCain touts the idea of school choice, he is not proposing a federal private school voucher plan as have President Bush and other voucher advocates. McCain does propose to expand a voucher program in the District of Columbia, his advisers saying he no longer seeks a nationwide voucher program because the No Child Left Behind law has helped to give parents and students more choices.
As for affirmative action, McCain was just as (un)forthright:
McCain, in response to a question, said affirmative action was "in the eye of the beholder." He did not mention that he supports an anti-affirmative action referendum on the ballot in Arizona…He also, “apologized anew for voting against the enactment of a federal holiday honoring the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1983.
Please Join us in Celebrating the Heartland Cafe's 32nd Anniversary. Monday evening August 11, 2008 beginning at 7 pm. Great music: The ChicagoCatz, Funk, Soul, R & B
Everyone Welcome. Accepting donations to Barack Obama for President and/ or Heartland Cafe Green Roof Fund.
Katy Hogan and Michael James Co founders & Directors
Notice how the tone of the campaign is rapidly changing? Yesterday’s NYT editorial explains why we’re back on the “Low Road Express.”
*****
Look who’s endorsing McCain’s education plan
Surprise, surprise! It’s the WSJ. But Phillisa Cramer, posting on her new Gotham Schools blog can't help buy be surprised by one part of their endorsement:
I was surprised to see that its editorial suggested that McCain cite Edison schools’ performance in Philadelphia as an example of a successful privately-run alternative to public schools — because no one, not even Edison’s leaders, disputes the company’s failure.
Can muscle philanthropy be “democratized?”
In chapter 4 of our book, we describe the role of the new muscle philanthropists. Now, Christine Ahn, senior fellow at the Korea Policy Institute and member of NCRP's board, calls on social- justice activists to engage the foundations more than we are doing now.But her exposes can’t make the big top-down muscle foundations very happy.
So let’s think about the super-rich and the tax benefits they get. In 2006, Warren Buffet donated $30 million to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Three trustees—Bill, Melinda and Mr. Buffett—along with Bill Senior and now the new President of the Foundation—will decide how to allocate $3 billion-plus that the foundation is required to payout each year (Plus because Buffet mandated that his funds be spent down). Mr. Buffet gets huge tax write-offs, the Gates Foundation a huge infusion, and the public? We get to see how the Gates Foundation will invest in solving social problems.
Well worth the read.
1,000 educators in Ky.—GONE!
The state of Kentucky, which only a decade ago was on the cutting edge of school reform, is now on a race to the bottom with budget cuts now pushing nearly 1,000 teachers and staffout of their jobs.
In Pulaski County, the budget crunch will mean larger class sizes. Somerset Independent Schools, which has 1,460 students in three schools, cut 16 teachers and district staff. As a result, the average class size will increase from 20 to 28 students, said Superintendent Teresa Wallace.
Michael Moore’s 6 sure-fire ways for the Dems to lose in November
