The conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute has published a paper commending President Obama for standing up to teachers’ unions.
The paper compares President Obama’s support for school choice and evaluation of teachers by test scores as a “Nixon-to-China” paradigm shift.
In other words, the paper suggests, Obama’s education policy has done a full pivot, aligning it with the traditional GOP agenda.
Can anyone explain this?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Can anyone explain this?”
Sure, Obama is part of the undermining of democracy in favor of corporate interests. The corporate powers they couldn’t get another George Bush elected, so they put George Bush in liberal clothing, got him elected (the first black president, no less) and laughed all the way to the bank. I wish I could claim this line as my own, but I’m stealing it from one of your commenters: Obama isn’t the “least of the evils”, he’s the *more effective* of the evils.
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Ugh. “The corporate powers *realized* they couldn’t….” Sorry.
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We have always had one party in this country. Both the Democrats and the Republicans represent the 1%. During the New Deal and the Great Society the economic system was still able to give concessions to the 99% through the Democratic Party in the interests of social peace. The economic crisis no longer makes this possible and people can now see that we have only a Democratic-Republican Party which represent the 1%.
We need a political party that represents the 99%!
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Another party? NO, the power lies with the people in the Constitution. IF the people would demand the power instead of handing it over to their elected officials, no 3rd party would be needed.
We have the foundational document. It’s the people running the parties that have ignored their limits.
AS teachers, it is critical you go back to the founding documents, read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers along with the Constitution and teach real civics to these kids.
Without a strong foundation in civics and U.S. History, we will continue to watch this Oligarchy grow.
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None of the founding documents define the party system.
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I think this question was discussed several posts ago, on the topic of whether Obama would walk with the CTU. Let’s face it–Obama is a Progressive: he believes that orderly business is the best for America, and has no time for unions or any serious social programs. The failure of progressivism became manifest with the Great Depression, and it’s come again with the Great Recession. Capitalism is too corrupting to be tamed by progressivist policies, as our “bipartisan” president wants. We need a new New Deal, not more of the patrician progressives.
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Well your first mistake is to blame capitalism. THis is crony capitalism we are witnessing, not a free market capitalist society.
Free market allows the people to pick the winners and losers. That’s what drives excellence and success.
Now what you see is a corrupted political system that picks the winners and losers.
If you want a New Deal then you will get more corrupt politicians. That’s MORE power to the govt.
You can’t have it your way. There are no SAINTS i the Govt. that will protect you. YOu have to leave it up to the people !
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MOM,
“Crony” capitalism is just corrupted capitalism. The fact that crony capitalism has returned after deregulation only proves my point. The problem is the free market is just an ideal; in real life it’s too easy for players to collude to distort the market to their advantage. The first thing they do is corrupt the political system to give them unfair advantages and protect their gains.
As Madison wrote in Federalist #51: “If men were angles, no government would be necessary.” We deregulated; but we didn’t get smaller government, and we didn’t get more honest government. We got government that works for the benefit of the rich, whether the public wants it or not. Just look at what’s happening in Tennessee–The people said no to charters; so the governor pushes for laws to overrule the public and force in the charter schools to be paid for with public money. In Maine, our Tea Party governor gets laws that give tax payer money to private charters, no questions asked, using legislation drafted and flogged by corporate charters and ALEC. That’s not the free market making choices; that’s the rich corrupting politicians to cheat the public using the illusion of a free market.
The New Deal brought important reforms and oversights that gave the US 70 years of stable banking and economic growth. The corruption came with the deregulation and the 1%.
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I believe that comment about the more effective evil originated from Glen Ford who also said: “Unfortunately, the First Black President’s ability to push forward the Right’s agenda makes him the “more effective evil.” Obama may pay lip service to unions but his actions or lack of actions speak volumes that are not supportive of unions, to say the least. Ford’s web site:
http://blackagendareport.com/blog/101.
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It’s neither a GOP nor Democratic agenda, but the Neoliberal economic agenda – deregulation, financialization, de-unionization, privatization, globalized trade that
favors the corporations that write the trade agreements, etc. – that is embraced by both political parties.
When NAFTA was passed in 1993, it passed the House of Representatives by one vote, with House Whip David Bonior openly opposing the White House, and even some Republicans voting against it. That would be unthinkable today, with neoliberal economics firmly established as the consensus view in both parties, despite it’s catastrophic consequences for living standards here in the US.
President Obama, along with Cory Booker, is the poster child for the new Black political class, creations of the foundations and real estate interests, going back to his early days making sure that Chicago was safe for the Pritzkers, and that the black poor were moved out of the urban core.
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“Nixon to China”? More like Obama’s Vietnam War. Many have contended that President Lyndon Johnson allowed the escalation of that war to occur because it appeased the powerful military industrial complex while his administration’s work on domestic issues like civil rights and poverty, which also ruffled the feathers of powerful interests, found some headway. In other words, as long as Wall St. could profit off a war in southeast Asia, power brokers wouldn’t mind so much that government money was also being diverted to poor people. Maybe Obama is making the same sort of move, although this time taking on the challenges of healthcare and withdrawing from failed wars while allowing the corporations to use public schools as their new playground. Just a theory . . .
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Interesting theory, but his healthcare “reform” was straight out of the GOP handbook too, and as far as withdrawing from failed wars, (a) in Iraq he only followed the deadlines set by the Bush administration while trying to get the deadline extended and (b) he’s escalated Afghanistan.
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Not to mention Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, etc. . . .
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I would take the AEI article will a grain of salt. This extreme conservative organization tends to twist everything to try to persuade the public that they have all the answers to fix what ails the US. They are on a mission to push their libertarian ideology onto all of us all.
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Of course The current reforms are not libertarian The reformers push them over local opposition
Diane
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As I mentioned in a previous post the basic elements of his Republican style policies are in his “Audacity of Hope” around page 133. The book was published I believe in 2005.
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That was the year he spoke at inaugural meeting of Democrats for Education Reform, the Wall Street hedge fund managers group. In his anti-union, anti-teacher book, Steve Brill describes the event, at a posh nyc apartment filled with prep school millionaires
Diane Ravitch
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Despite his experience as a community organizer – whatever that meant at that time – I believe that he has had no contact with the guts of teaching, particularly in urban and inner city schools. He has no real understanding of what the kids’ lives are like, what the schools are like, and consequently, the KoolAid tastes just fine. Some of the “logic” of school reformers sounds undeniable until you actually go into a school and see that such logic simply does not apply in real life. It’s theory only. But to someone as disconnected as Obama, it is compelling. He is naive, ignorant, and a product of a very different background. This is a case in which I think it’s fair to say that he’s not black enough. It’s impossible to spend any time at all in an inner city school or neighborhood and still accept the stuff that’s shoveled as “school reform.”
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At the risk sounding “hopey, changey” I was encouraged by the contrast at the conventions regarding education policy and reform. While the Republicans touted their expansion plans for charters and further privatization of public schools, the Dems focused on making college affordable. The words “charter schools” were not spoken at the Democartic Convention. Additionally, the NAACP and the party platforms in several states have condemned charters. The Stanford study and anecdotal evidence is abounding on the destructiveness of privately managed, publicly funded schools! Maybe, just maybe he will come out against charters in the same way he did marriage equality. He’s not perfect but he’s clearly more capable of listening and learning than the republican alternative.
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Joe Biden’s brother is president of the fastest growing charter chain in Florida, Mavericks. There are pictures of Joe Biden hugging Michelle Rhee. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Obama to come out against charters.
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I think Obama is a great orator, not a visionary. He will give a great speech, tell people what they want to hear, but ultimately the strings will be pulled by his corporate masters. Meanwhile, we fool ourselves into thinking that we have a choice in presidential candidates because they have different views on gay marriage and abortion. Obama finally came to the revelation that he supports gay marriage but said he would leave it up to the states to decide. Romney will claim he is pro life but he will also say it’s up to the states to decide. So in the end it really doesn’t matter. We have a choice between a talking suit who’s speeches we like or a talking suit who’s speeches we don’t like. Meanwhile, the corporations who reap millions in bloated government contracts and then declare themselves “nonprofits” to avoid paying taxes will keep robbing this country blind.
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I can explain this – Obama is a moderate Republican (e.g., continued Bush’s bankster bailout, renominated Bernanke, refused to hold even one bankster accountable for ’08 collapse, etc.)
Also, there’s no real pressure from the left to make him do anything progressive.
He gives us Race to the Top, teacher evals tied to test scores and a federal curriculum/federal standardized testing battery, and rather than withhold support and money, the NEA endorses him a year and a half before the election.
As Glenn Greenwald has noted again and again, if constituencies do not hold their politicians accountable, politicians will do whatever is expedient.
In Obama’s case, it’s politically expedient to Sista Souljah teachers and since the unions co-dependently support him no matter how badly he treats teachers and unions, he has no real reason to stop doing it.
I bet the CTU strike gave Obama and his advisers some pause, however.
Now it would be nice to take that momentum and hold his feet to the fire.
But frankly it’s too late.
The election is over. The polls in the states that matter have all swung to Obama, Romney self-destructs more and more by the day (doesn’t he make John Kerry look like Bill Clinton?), and Obama does not really need teachers to win this election any longer.
Opportunity lost.
But if union members would force their leaders to withhold support from teacher-bashing politicians in the future, no matter the party, you can bet that Dems would suddenly stop some of the bashing.
Because in the end, they really do need the union GOTV efforts at times, even as they need the hedge fundies’ cash.
There’s this tension between those two sides of the Dem party (Wall Street and the unions) just as there is a tension between two sides of the GOP (Wall Street and the religious fundamentalists.)
Unlike the GOP, which lately has conceded policies to the religious fundamentalist side of the party, Dems keep jiving the unions on policy and only talks nicely to the unions when they need something.
Holding the Dem convention in a right-to-work state really symbolized how the Dems see the unions today – as afterthoughts who will always be there, no matter what.
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The “Nixon to China” thing is kind of Ironic. So basically policy masters are also looking to outsource education from the institutions that have supported communities to low-wage cheap factory model education that will rob our country of jobs, quality, stability and flood our market with…
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