The view from right field

Are the neocons dead?

Have they folded up tent after their devastating loss in November? Uh uh, says Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the Jan. issue of the American Conservative.

Heilbrunn wonders if, having destroyed the Republican Party, the neocon movement, which has its origins in the left, will re-emerge once again inside the Democratic Party? He speculates that they may have some "liberal interventionist" partners within the new State Department. He didn't, but well could have also suggested that they look for an open door through education reform with pro-voucher, privatization Democrats who are trying desperately to pull the new administration in their direction.


Bush and NCLB were too liberal for these conservative think-tankers

Hess from the American Enterprise Institute & Petrilli from the Fordham Foundation, accuse George Bush of selling-out the right-wing on NCLB. The very things that attracted some progressive educators to No Child, are the things H & P hated the most, ie. its equity language, talking about closing the racial " achievement gap" and its civil rights orientation (H & P call it "pie in the sky") write these Gingrich-ites, in the National Review Online.

The compromises that the administration struck, however, ultimately led Bush to champion a law that dramatically expanded the federal role in education; adopted an explicitly race-based conception of school accountability; focused on “closing achievement gaps” to the exclusion of all other objectives; proffered a pie-in-the-sky civil rights-oriented approach to school “accountability” (even for students with cognitive disabilities and English language learners); created a burdensome federal mandate around teacher qualifications that hampers outfits such as Teach For America; devised a compliance apparatus that is even more burdensome than the previous regime; and significantly increased federal spending on education.

War production vs. real economic recovery

The U.S. spends as much on the military in a single year as it did on the entire $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the military-industrial complex is hungry for more.

New Defense Secretary Robert Gates is already pushing Congress for massive increases in defense spending for new military hardware. We'll see how Obama and the Democrats respond, especially in the face of the worsening economic crisis and a war on two fronts that is sucking the U.S. economy dry.

From AlterNet:

"War production doesn’t create real economic health," Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies recently wrote in a commentary. "What do all those fancy missile systems, space weapons, battleships, even tanks and Humvees, produce other than a lot of dead Iraqis and dead Afghans?"

Instead, Bennis argued, government ought to "bail out our battered economy [by providing] real jobs to soldiers drafted by lack of opportunities, and [by redirecting] the hundreds of billions of war-spending into green jobs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, training new teachers and building new schools."

Quotables

Small schools contend for space in N.Y.

New York was where the modern small-schools movement began. But Bloomberg/Klein’s version has turned a great idea into an ownership society quagmire with new small schools and charters run by management companies, competing with traditional neighborhood schools for space, autonomy, and shrinking resources.

From Sunday’s NYT :

Getting along is often complicated by a power imbalance between the “host” school and the newcomers. The hosts are often large schools in the process of being shut down after being branded failures, with teachers and students who resent being eclipsed by the favored new small schools.

Stuff Happens...

New L.A. Supt. Ramon Cortines, who replaces Admiral David Brewer, is interviewed in the L.A. Times:

You served as interim superintendent in Los Angeles for six months in 2000. During that time, you developed a decentralization plan that never really went into effect. What happened?

Where I was naive, and where the board was naive, is that when you decentralize -- and the board has approved it and all the unions have bought into it -- you think it will happen. And it didn't happen.

The Real Arne

Peter Campbell is a parent, educator, and activist, who served in a volunteer role for four years as the Missouri State Coordinator for FairTest before moving to Portland. He ponders, on the PPS Equity blog, “Who’s the Real Arne Duncan?”