John Thompson has a good article at Huffington Post asking why President Obama did a “Nixon-to-China” maneuver with education.
That phrase “Nixon-to-China” comes up again and again, and Thompson makes a telling point: It describes a political decision, not an education policy. The President’s education policy is indeed very little different from that of the GOP. As Thompson puts it, “It is a political gamble designed to beat up on two of the Democrats’ most loyal constituencies, teachers and families with children in urban schools, to show the “Billionaires Boys Club” that the administration could be tough on its friends.”
Is this a wise political strategy? “Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “reforms” opened the door to Scott Walker’s and John Kasich’s attacks on collective bargaining. Worse, Duncan and President Obama mostly stayed silent as workers fought back in Wisconsin and Ohio. Had the administration joined with workers, perhaps the Wisconsin recall election would have been won. Regardless, if the administration remains silent in Chicago, fed-up teachers could stay home in droves. That would be a case of chopping our noses to spite our faces, but it would be understandable if teachers allowed our outrage to rule.”
Hopefully, the President has told the Mayor to settle, and to do so without humiliating the teachers.
But the question will remain: Why is the Obama administration wedded to the carrot-and-stick policies of the GOP? Why is it so devoted to handing public schools over to private management despite the lack of evidence that private managers in non-union schools are more successful than public ones?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They’re DINO’s and we’ll be staying home or voting Green, Justice, or better yet for ourselves. If you look at what this administration has done to civil liberties through NDAA; then their position on education makes sense. They aren’t democrats and their belief system certainly doesn’t jive with what the old democratic party used to believe in.
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I’m thinking of voting for Mickey Mouse….
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It is a self-imposed delusion that Obama is not conservative. Look at his record on education, LGBT rights, Guantanamo, refusal to prosecute the banks who brought down the economy, etc.
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The education issue is further complicated when you have ‘liberals’ backing you up.
See: 5 So-Called Liberal Pundits Who Are Attacking Teachers.
http://www.alternet.org/labor/5-so-called-liberal-pundits-who-are-attacking-teachers?akid=9391.1073613.dmGFIH&rd=1&src=newsletter709929&t=3
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I think “Nixon-to-China Moment” just isn’t true and reflects either ignorance of history, intellectual laziness, or political sloganeering by the press.
As I recall from the press reports of Nixon’s visit to China, being just old enough then to appreciate such things, the choice to establish direct talks with the PRC at the highest levels was a bitter pill for a Republican Party that had long embraced Henry Luce’s vision of American dominance in Asia. The GOP had long wanted to destroy communist China; so the idea of Nixon even considering establishing full relationship was an anathema. As David Halberstam recounted so well in his last book “The Coldest Winter”, it was the GOP that accused the Democrats of “losing” China after the 1949 revolution; the wing of the party lead by Henry Luce goaded MacArthur into ignoring Truman’s orders to stop his advance into North Korea well short of the Yalu in 1950, thereby leading China’s entry into the war, because they secretly desired a full invasion–even using nuclear weapons–to remove Mao; and it was the McCarthy wing of the party that did so much to purge the best Asia hands from the State Department during the witch hunts of the ’40s and ’50s.
As for Obama and Democrats, while it’s certainly true that the Democrats have, prior to Bill Clinton and the DLC anyway, supported unions, they have fought them as well. Has everyone forgotten how Harry Truman tried to break the steel workers strike with the National Guard, even taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court? And even when supporting the unions publicly, most Democrat presidents worked behind the scenes to bring management and union bosses together to avoid strikes. So, a Democrat showing little outward support for a union strike itself isn’t really new or shocking the way Nixon’s trip to China was.
The fact is that Obama is a progressive in the form that progressive movement developed during the early part of the 20th century. We seem to have forgotten that the progressives were very much the brain child of Mark Hanna, Republican strategic mastermind and Karl Rove’s ideal, as a mechanism to diffuse the growing populist and socialist movement in America at the end of the 19th century. Like Obama and the Clintons, and the Romneys, the progressives were the intellectual elites, who believed they could set laws and structures to reform capitalism and suppress the labor and socialist movements by controlling the economy through regulation. The were the friends of the bankers and industry in the sense that they worked to preserve these institutions in the face of demands for wholesale change; they saw themselves as the adults who would keep the children in line. Thus the progressive movement was very much patrician, elitist, and technocratic. (Sound like Obama?)
The progressive movement became thoroughly compromised with their campaign to support Wilson’s decision to join the First World War. After the war came the red scares that essentially rendered the progressives useless, since big business could now bait the public directly.
From what I’ve seen most people confuse the progressives with the New Deal which was a wholly different movement. The New Deal was far more accommodating of trade unions and “socialist-type” policies to address the humanitarian crisis caused by the Great Depression and the subsequent tarnishing of capitalism. In fact, many progressive were against the New Deal; and many New Deal supporters were dissatisfied with the progressives. Although technocratic like the progressives, the New Deal aimed at a much more fundamental change to the American economy, although still keeping a basically capitalist system.
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From the Huffington Post article: “After all, educators’ economic suffering has not been as bad as that of most workers.”
As one of many unemployed teachers, I question this statement. With school districts cutting costs, there are a lot of teachers who found themselves unemployed. No, we can’t all be fired, but “downsizing and turnarounds” have definitely taken their toll.
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Even if that were true (and, like you, I highly question it), so what? So teachers need to feel the pain just like everyone else? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on lessening everyone’s pain, rather than finding new people to join it?
I really shudder for this country if that’s the way people are thinking. Not to go all Godwin, but I’d guess that’s the way people were thinking in 1930s Germany too.
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Clarification: when I say “even if that were true”, I’m referring to your quote from HuffPo, not your second paragraph. Sorry if that was unclear.
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There’s video out there of Nixon and Kennedy both talking about how shamefully underpaid teachers are during their debates.
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Kennedy and NIxon Debate Education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmVSD_-9TxM
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correction Nixon …my fingers were flying because it’s Friday!!
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Diane,
I think Greg Pasat answers your question, “Why is the Obama administration wedded to the carrot-and-stick policies of the GOP?” in his op-Ed “The Worst Teacher in Chicago” when he writes:
“Obama believes what Duncan believes and what Romney believes: there’s no need for universal education and no need to spend money on it. Yes, they like to say that “children are our future.” But they mean the children of China are our future, the Chinese kids who will make the stuff we want and the children of India who will program it all for us.
After all, how much education does some obese kid from Texas need to stack boxes from China in a Wal-Mart warehouse?
Education is no longer about information and learning skills. It’s now about “triage.” A few selected by standardized tests or privileged birth will be anointed and permitted into better and “gifted” schools.
The chosen elite are still very much needed: to invest in India and Vietnam, to design new derivatives to circumvent the laughable new banking laws, and to maintain order among the restless hundred-million drop-outs squeezed out of the colon of our educational system.”
http://www.nationofchange.org/worst-teacher-chicago-1347463241.
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…that was the best expression of the plight of the down-trodden…the worker bee children and the stocker/stackers to be …makes me sick..and will be controlled w/ gmo foods and drugs..any radicals will ”disapear”.. to special camps or prisons or death….accidental of coarse….smh..
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