What are the take-aways from Cantor loss?

Cantor was too far "left" for the Limbaugh Party and not anti-immigrant enough. 

I'm still trying to get a handle on Cantor's defeat in Va.'s bright red 7th Cong. Dist. The obvious is that Cantor, the most conservative member of the GOP House leadership, was just too far "left" and not anti-immigrant enough for the Limbaugh Party.

It's too bad, in a way. Cantor was one of my favorite foils here at Small Talk. It was back in January that Cantor launched a verbal attack on newly-elected N.Y. Mayor Bill de Blasio and went to bat for his hedge-fund school reformer friends in N.Y. I noted then that

“America is in the midst of an education revolution," [Cantor told] the Brookings Institute, referring to the unfettered growth of privately-run charter schools and school vouchers going to private and church-run schools.The real irony has this self-proclaimed anti-Washington, anti-gummint, local-control advocate trying to bully a city mayor and a local school district.

I love the way these guys always frame themselves as r-r-revolutionaries. Wasn't that the battle cry of the two nazi crazies who murdered the two cops in Las Vegas after coming off the Bundy ranch?

They pinned onto the other officer's body a note saying something to the effect of "this is the beginning of the revolution."

I guess Cantor's revolutionary days are just about over.

While it was only one low turn-out primary in one state (Lindsey Graham beat T-baggers easily in S.C.), it demonstrates the potential power and discipline of the gun-toting racists and anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-immigrant groups, who have been encouraged by recent perceived victories, court decisions, and the Obama administration's retreat in its confrontation with Bundy's racist militia. 

The Cantor defeat was a sign that,  despite Citizens United and the best efforts of the Koch Bros., big money campaigns don't always win, especially in a low turn-out election. I would qualify that last comment by pointing out that Cantor's opponent David Brat, who teaches courses on Ayn Rand at Randolph-Macon College, was the beneficiary of millions of dollars worth of free right-wing radio time (in particular Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham gave loud support to Brat), underwritten by the Koch Bros.

Cantor's defeat could open  new possibilities for Democratic candidates to make inroads in red Tea Party states. But unlike the Tea Party, an independent, Democratic movement can't be a white one organizationally or ideologically, and must have labor out in front. Neither can it be just a progressive tail on a Democratic Party dog.

It's worth noting that education issues played an important role in Cantor's defeat. Like Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, Cantor was an outspoken supporter of Common Core Standards, which have become a litmus-test issue for conservatives who view the national guidelines as usurping local control of schools. In the congressional campaign, Brat criticized Cantor for supporting centralized educational reforms, including Common Core. This Tea Party victory could be a nail in Bush's presidential hopes, giving more or less a free ride for Hillary Clinton or whoever.

As I pointed out in my Bridging Differences dialogue with my friend Deb Meier, I hope my fellow progressive critics of Common Core don't go looking for allies among the likes of Brat and the Koch Bros. crew. It should go without saying ... but it doesn't.

Randi tours Chicago with Karen Lewis. Leaves blasting the mayor.

"It feels that the Chicago mayor wants to kick the public [school] system in the teeth at every opportunity."

AFT's Randi Weingarten and NEA's Dennis Van Roekel have been trying to ride two horses at the same time, courting approval from Obama/Duncan while bucking their own rank-and-file in their support for Common Core. Feeling increasing pressure from below, they recently shifted their stand and now say they still support CCSS but "not how they're being implemented."

So CTU Pres. Karen Lewis took Randi on a tour of some Chicago schools to show her exactly how they're being implemented. Spending time with Karen seems to have had some affect. Randi responded by opening up on Rahm Emanuel (better late than never) saying "it feels that the Chicago mayor wants to kick the public [school] system in the teeth at every opportunity."

 Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of a Teachers, has supported Common Core. But on a Monday she defended the CTU's recent resolution calling on state officials and the AFT to reverse their approval, saying she had been expecting the move for months. "People keep asking for help, asking for resources, and none of that is forthcoming in Chicago," Weingarten said at the national Education Writers Association seminar in Nashville on Monday evening. -- Early & Often

After the CTU passed it's anti-CCSS resolution, Duncan used two of his former assistant ed secretaries, Carmel Martin and Peter Cunningham as attack dogs to go after the union. In her May 17th Sun-Times commentary, Martin, who served as Duncan's former assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development, stooped about as low as one can go by insinuating the union was in bed with Glen Beck and the Koch Bros. Cunningham immediately joined in. He responded to a critical tweet by me this way:

@mikeklonsky @CarmelatCAP Simply pointing out that CTU is aligned with Beck and Koch against #CCSS and contrary to views of many teachers.

Former Duncan assistant Carmel Martin, says CTU in bed with Beck and the Koch Bros. 

I'll leave it to readers to decide who really speaks for Chicago teachers, Cunningham or Lewis and the CTU's elected delegates who, after much internal debate, passed the resolution on Common Core unanimously. Perhaps Cunningham would like to run against Lewis in the next union election. Place your bets.

The slime-ing of the union reminded me of when former Bush Sec. of Ed Rod Paige, called the teacher unions "terrorists" and when former N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg likened them to the NRA.

BRIDGING DIFFERENCES... I've been having a running dialogue over at EdWeek with my pal Deb Meier, see her piece, "Don't Write Off Everyone in the Tea Party" (good advice) over the issue of tactical alliances with the far right-wing opponents of Common Core. We both (especially me) oppose any such formal alliances. But while the teacher unions and community-based organization are in no danger of being mistaken for T-baggers, the question has come up among some in the anti-testing, anti-CCSS movement.

Just to be clear, I'm not just talking about engaging right-wingers in dinner party or bar stool conversations (see John Thompson's comment at Bridging Differences).

I have been pushing for us to draw a clear line between why and how we oppose Common Core and the testing madness that goes along with it. If for not any other reason than to get clear ourselves. Confusing our opposition with that of anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-public school right-wingers can only serve to discredit our arguments. The CTU resolution on Common Core offers a great critique from the teachers perspective.

CASE IN POINT...Check out anti-CCSS fanatics, like an Alabama Tea Party leader saying a vote for Common Core will damn lawmakers to hell, the American Family Association warning that children won’t “survive” Common Core, Eagle Forum saying it will promote homosexuality, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) calling it “socialism,” and WorldNetDaily saying it will turn America into Nazi Germany. Glenn Beck believes the educational standards are “evil” and designed to “train us to be a serf state” under the rule of China and Islam.

Then there's Tea Party Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant who claims that Common Core will turn our children gay. Forgive me, but I just don't see any common ground or much room for engagement there.

BTW, I've actually heard the same thing about eating graham crackers.

T-Party's version of gun-control

Aistov Alexey/ShutterStock

In case you were thinking that we ought to be more like the Tea Party...

Here's the way the tea-baggers handle policy debates within their D.C. group called FreedomWorks.

WaPo reports: 

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant [later identified as former Capitol Hill cop, Beau Singleton -- M.K.]  escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news. 

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back.

Right-wing Illinois Billionaire Richard Stephenson, founder of the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America and a director on the FreedomWorks board, agreed to commit $400,000 per year over 20 years in exchange for Armey’s agreement to leave the group.

Take-aways:

• The Tea-Party is not just a group of regular folks who want their taxes lowered and the size of government reduced.
• Wing-nut Stephenson, a pal of the Koch Bros., has a vested interest in private health care and has good reason to use the tea -baggers in his war on ObamaCare
• The aptly-named Dick Armey isn't to big on gun control. 

Duncan's Law

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. -- NYT

All of Duncan's Race-To-The-Top stimulus money handouts, his speaking tours with Newt Gingrich, his embrace of T-Party govs like Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, none of that could buy him the credibility with Congress he needed for re-authorization of No Child Left Behind.

Duncan & Spellings

NCLB is a law that even he now calls a “slow-motion train wreck.” But Duncan has been a vocal supporter of the test-and-punish law since the Bush days, when he, as Chicago schools CEO, journeyed to D.C. to buddy up with then Ed Sec. Spellings. Remember, it was Spellings who declared the law, "99.9% pure" while Duncan cheered her on.

Now embarrassed by the 2014 proficiency mandate and his own projected 82%  national school failure rate, Duncan is taking the law into his own hands. About 38,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools fell short of their test-score targets under the federal law last year, and Duncan has predicted that number would rise to 80,000 this year. That doesn't provide Obama with much of a record to run on in 2012 -- does it?

While maintaining the worst aspects of the law's of test-and-punish provisions and using them to promote massive school closings, teacher firings, and conversion to privately-run charter schools, Duncan is offering waivers to the states based on Jeb Bush's Florida model, which even brother George wouldn't tolerate. While Jeb was governor, many of the state's A or B schools were considered "failing" by NCLB standards. 

Now, instead of junking the Bush-era law Duncan is encouraging every state to apply for a waiver which he personally could approve-- or not. The Duncan waivers would come only if he deemed that a state was following the "reform" guidelines prescribed under Race To The Top, ie. school closings, mass teacher firings, and more charter schools.

The problem for Duncan is that without any more stim money in his pocket and with massive cuts in the education budget anticipated in the wake of the Obama/Boehner debt deal, he has no juice. NCLB is a dead law walking and Duncan's own future is very much in doubt. He has already lost most of his base of support on the left and now the right is opening up on him.

From the Times:

“It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. He called Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”  

Unfortunately, the real victims of all this top-down educational tyranny will be the cash-starved schools themselves operating under confusing federal mandates and a rudderless Dept. of Education.

Pres. Obama, it's time to dump both NCLB and Arne Duncan. 2012 is drawing near.

It's time to hit the streets to save our schools

No more golfing with Boehner!

Thousands will rally today at noon in front of congressional offices. Make the call Wednesday for the National Call-in Day.Then it's on to Washington for the Save Our Schools March on July 30th.

We're demanding an end to the holding of the country hostage by Republican loonies whose only concern is cutting taxes for their wealthy patrons. If they win, it's likely to be the end of the road for public education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Turn out today at noon. Find your representative's office here. Download signs here. Better yet, make your own!

Duncan's Alter boy spearheads personal assault on Ravitch

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild- mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week. -- Jonathan Alter 

Diane Ravitch is right on point with her critique of corporate-style school reform and with her exposes of so-called "turnaround miracles."

How do I know she's hitting the mark? Arne Duncan is using the full power of  the DOE's overstaffed and over-budgeted PR department to launch personal attacks on Diane.  Even during the Bush administration, when hack journalists like Armstrong Williams were paid big bucks to promote No Child Left Behind, I can't recall former secretaries of ed using willing writers to launch such vicious personal vendettas against individual critical educators.

Duncan's version of Williams (paid or unpaid) is know-nothing edu-hack writer Jonathan Alter, blogging for Bloomberg (how perfect!). Alter has proven himself the perfect lap dog for Duncan and Bill Gates. If either of them farts, Alter is right behind them, sniffing the air and writing joyously about the sweet aroma filling the room.

In this latest diatribe, Alter calls critics of Race To The Top and corporate reform "obstructionists" (ooh sizz, if only it were true). Digging deep for some profound historical reference, Alter compares Ravitch to Whittaker Chambers, the alleged communist turned anti-communist back in the 1940s. Could you stoop any lower or be any more obscure?

Alter claims that Ravitch "moved the other way, from right to left." I suppose that's a terrible thing now that the administration, and Duncan in particular, are moving so quickly to the right. Remember Duncan's April "salute" to Indiana T-Party Gov. Daniels' school reform initiative, which produced the nation's most far-reaching voucher program?

Alter also claims that Ravitch "now uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions."  Phony empiricism? How can empiricism be phony? And what makes the current arguments of the nation's unions "tired"?  Their arguments sure resonated in Wisconsin.

Empiricism as a theory of knowledge demands that we provide evidence to back up our claims. Diane Ravitch has been out front with her criticism of reformers' claims of "miracle" successes made with little or no evidence to back them up. She has hit particularly hard at claims that schools alone can close the so-called "achievement gap," without regard to problems of poverty and racism and other out-of-school conditions. In her NYT op-ed piece, Ravitch takes apart with precision, a number of those claims and exposes lots of data-fudging. She remembers all too well, the way the Bush administration touted the so-called Texas Miracle as a way of spinning its own reform agenda. Alter and Duncan try to counter, claiming such exposes amount to "insulting teachers, principals and students." They're wrong,  Educators don't need mythology to validate their work and don't appreciate being used for political spins.

What an upside-down picture of the ed-world Duncan and his apparatchiks have created, a world where liberals and pro-union activists are the enemy and teacher-bashing T-baggers like Daniels are warmly embraced. With the 2012 elections coming up, I would suggest that President Obama press his ear closely to the education ground and quickly figure out whose message is resonating with the nation's nearly 8 million teachers, and who they feel is insulting them and their profession -- Diane Ravitch or Arne Duncan.

Remember, Mr. President. Teachers vote. We'll see you in D.C. July 30th and make sure our voices are heard.

 ^^^^^^

Here's some of the comments following Alter's piece:

"This is perhaps the most mendacious essay I've ever seen." -- Robert D. Skeels 

" Speaking of straw men, Jonathan Alter, you have just provided a textbook case in media manipulation:."--Nancy Flannagan

"Your opinions are everything that working people have fought against for years." -- J-soh K-ritz

"I wish Jonathan Alter would take a job for a single semester at an urban middle school." -- Anthony Cody

And more...

Taxing

A rare day. Three interesting articles in today's Sun-Times

1.. "Super rich see federal taxes drop dramatically"

The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

 2. Richard Roeper's usually vapid column offers some pretty good insights on the GOP's racist presidential front-runner, Donald Trump. Just when you feel like you've had you fill of Obama doublespeak, along comes the alternative.

Taking a break from boasting about his relationship with “the blacks” as if he’s in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and doesn’t know it, Donald Trump recently bragged to Rush Limbaugh that he knows how to handle the Chinese. “I made a lot of money with the Chinese, believe me,” Trump told Limbaugh. “Both in terms of selling them very big apartments — I sold one for $33 million recently to a Chinese gentleman . . . I made a lot of money with the Chinese, and I know the Chinese very well. By the way, they don’t love us.”

3. This AP wire story reveals that the big partisan battle over the debt limit is a phony war, staged so that the leaders of both parties, each afraid of their base, can save some face.

Geithner told ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Republicans told President Obama in a White House meeting last Wednesday that they will go along with a higher limit. “I want to make it perfectly clear that Congress will raise the debt ceiling,” Geithner said in the interviews taped Saturday and aired Sunday. He said the leaders told Obama that they couldn’t play around with the government’s credit rating. “They recognize it, and they told the president that on Wednesday in the White House,” Geithner said.

TFA diversity

Heather Harding, subbing for Hess, offers an interesting perspective on difference between TFA's  base and it's top (Kopp).

A colleague--also a woman of color--recently heard Diane Ravitch speak about current reforms and was shocked to be painted as part of the "conservative, neoliberal, free market, hedge fund manager capitalists" who are "ruining" public education. Having never thought of herself as The Man and only identifying with the vision of closing the achievement gap, it seemed a hard pill to swallow. 

Hey Edweek. How about making this a permanent switch?

Have you heard...?

1960 Woolworth sit-ins

...We're in the "post-racial" era

Except that in Kentucky, the Limbaugh Party just picked a T-Party senate candidate who would like to roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, Rand (named after Ayn?) Paul thinks the law impinges on the freedom of businesses to refuse service to African-Americans, gays, disabled, if they so choose. Paul is also (no coincidence) a big voucher/charter proponent. He obviously feels that through privatization, schools will no longer have to admit ELL and special-needs students, if they so choose.

Already being done, Rand.Thanks anyway.

Then there's my new favorite wingy think-tanker, AEI flack Rick Hess, leaping to defend Supt. Horne's ban on ethnic studies in Arizona. Hess, it seems, favors and enforcement of  white "unum" in the curriculum. Hess has now earned his own SmallTalk tag (below) along with Finn, Petrilli and a tiny handful of other wing-nut ed experts. But I still can't understand how this paid flack for AEI gets his own blog at Edweek.

Both Hess & Horne should make common bond and unum with the Texas school board as they move to rewrite the state's curriculum standards to (among other things) replace mentions of "slavery" with the words, "triangle trade."

Ironically it's former Bush Sec. of Ed and Houston Supt. Rod Paige, of Texas miracle fame, who is now quoted as being critical of the board's rewrite. I say, ironically, because it was Paige who paved the way for all this, when as the nation's schools chief, he tried to force his own Christian fundamentalist religious beliefs on the nation's schools.

Largest protest rocks the capitol, "Save Our State!" "Save Our Schools!"

Coverage sucks

Today's news coverage of yesterday's 15,000-strong mass protest in Springfield was pathetic. The Tribune's headline screamed, "THRONGS AT RALLY CRY: 'RAISE MY TAXES.'" If you read the online edition of the Trib, even that's story has been pulled by this afternoon. The rally, the largest ever at the capitol, never happened, it seems. My delivered Sun-Times didn't even cover the protest. The online edition? (wait...I'm checking) Nothing.

I couldn't help thinking--what if was a Tea Party ("we don't want to pay taxes for no stinking schools") rally of 500 with Tom Tancredo drawing cheers by telling the President to go back to Africa? How different the press coverage would have been, with several prime-time correspondents reporting directly from the rally and T-baggers all over the morning news shows proclaiming that they're "just plain folks" protesting big government.