The war on education

I sometimes become less aggravated by the Obama administration when I read articles like this one by Paul Krugman  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/opinion/24krugman.html In his Sunday NY Times Op-Ed he reports that while many progressives are unhappy with how conservative (read: right-winged) and corporate the Obama administration is, the corporations are actively supporting any and all opposition to the Obama administration and are throwing money at Republicans who are willing to take them on. It's not surprising that the corporations are unhappy with this administration because the banks and oil industry are the spoiled children in this country. They believe they call the shots-- and they aren't far from the truth. That they have to lose anything (like conceding to any Healthcare bill or even 1 cent in higher taxes) is pissing them off and they are, frankly, tantrumming. And perhaps the worst thing about this is what it actually says about the United States today and it's leadership--  we are so far from any kind of governing that provides actual protections for the people that we don't even recognize conservative politics when they aren't radically far right (i.e. the Bushies). It should apparently, according to the right, be the norm for corporations to set their own standards of what they consider safe. 

But then I read an article like the series in the New York Times Magazine this weekend and I am ready to impeach the bastard. The front page reads: "Are Teachers' Unions the enemy to reform?" The magazine talks about Obama's new "Race to the Top" Program. The theme is clearly anti-teacher and aimed at holding teachers responsible for their students (poor) performance. One of the "reformers" is Jon Schnur, who " . . .runs a Manhattan-based school-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the United States. Schnur, who is 44, became interested in education when, as an editor of his high-school newspaper, he read a draft of an article from a student who had transferred from a Milwaukee public school to his school in the suburbs. “She was savvier than any of us on the editorial board, but the draft was just so terribly written,” he told me. Schnur added that “the more I got to know her, the more I became obsessed with why public education hadn’t reached people like her.” After graduating from Princeton, he worked in the Clinton campaign and then landed an education-policy job in the Clinton administration."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html?scp=1&sq=teachers%20unions&st=cse

For more on the Race to the Top program:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/05/18/32race-judges.h29.html?tkn=SUSFlYb7SleV%2BGWwu7vg3FWogJauXXaKIhMW&cmp=clp-edweek

I'll be writing more on this topic in my education pages linked at the top.