Mike Petrilli, the CEO of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He worked in the George W. Bush administration. On school issues, he is a supporter of school choice; the TBF Institute sponsors charter schools in Ohio.
Yet Mike cannot vote for Donald Trump. He doesn’t like Hillary. Not one bit. But he is a #NeverTrump guy to the end.
He writes:
First, I would worry about the immediate impact of such an outcome on America’s growing non-White population, especially our Latino and Muslim fellow citizens.
While plenty of evidence indicates that not all Trump voters share his racist, Islamophobic views, that will be cold comfort to the communities he’s skewered on the campaign trail.
A Trump victory would make many feel attacked and rejected by their countrymen. Already his statements are making some racists feel comfortable spewing hatred in public.
Other Republicans, he knows, will hold their noses, vote for Trump, and hope for the best. Mike won’t take that chance.
Trump is a clear and present danger to our society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“many feel attacked and rejected by their countrymen”
Welcome to our teaching world, Petrilli.
I don’t believe for a minute Fordham is moderating. I think much of their attacks on online schools and vouchers has little to do with education, and everything to do with eliminating competition and strengthening market share.
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Many (if not most) so called “think tanks” are little more than corporate lobby organizations that have nothing to do with actual “thinking”.
Why anyone should listen to any of these folks on any matter whatsoever is a complete mystery.
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Fordham has generally been more RINO than Teabilly. CommonCore really has confused them. Kind of fun to see them fight amongst themselves, really.
Similarly, Trump is a problem for the GOP establishment, some Teabillies, and lots of other folks on the right.
Now if only progressives could get moderate Dems to wake up to the disaster that is HRC. We might get a real president.
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Trump/Pence would be an unmitigated disaster for this country on so many levels including education.
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Joe, if you have a pair of candidates who WON’T be a disaster, particularly for education, please enlighten us.
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To Bernie supporters who refuse to vote for Hillary because she’s not what you want her to be, please think of her as a useful tool that can get you further down the road to where you want to be:
“You have to go through life with more than just passion for change; you need a strategy.
. . .
“[C]hange requires more than righteous anger. It requires a program, and it requires organizing.
. . .
“[Y]ou need allies in a democracy. That’s just the way it is. It can be frustrating and it can be slow.
. . .
“And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right.
. . .
“You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.
“And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress.
“That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/obamas-howard-commencement-transcript-222931
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Fordham’s management team, relative to inclusion and diversity?
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The few times I’ve read Petrelli’s pontifications on serving children children disabilities, his position is segregating them according to test scores. That’s illegal under IDEA, but “choice” .
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My reference was to, what a photo array of the Fordham management team, might show about inclusion. Because I don’t know the answer, I phrased it as a question.
The profit side of reform philanthropists’ interests, seldom, if ever, reflect proportional representation of America’s demographics, which makes their claims about concern for minority employment appear inconsistent with walking the talk.
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This country is clearly on the verge or in the throes of a major transformation.
This whole Trump thing is very temporal. Has to be.
We’ll get to the other side one way or another. The ride has already been very bumpy.
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Even if Mike Petrilli doesn’t vote in this election, that is a Republican vote that Donald Trump will not get, and The Donald can also lose the election of too many Republicans don’t vote.
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Lloyd, but what about all of us Democrats and Independents who would sooner gnaw off our hands and feet than vote for either Trump OR Hillary?
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The Democrats have the edge if the same ratio in each party does not vote.
23 percent of register voters are Republicans
32 percent are Democrats
It’s obvious that the election will be decided by the 39 percent who are independents.
“The biggest change in partisan affiliation in recent years is the growing share of Americans who decline to affiliate with either party: 39% call themselves independents, 32% identify as Democrats and 23% as Republicans, based on aggregated data from 2014.”
What I want to know is how the Democratic Party is holding on to so many registered voters compared to the GOP? I became an independent voter decades ago and am not affiliated with any political party.
According to Politico.com 1 in 4 Bernie Sanders supporters won’t vote for Hillary Clinton. How many voters is that?
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
This is what fivethirtyeight.com has to say on who supports who in the Democratic Party. Interesting reading
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-hidden-importance-of-the-bernie-sanders-voter/
And how many people actually support Trump?
“You have to consider the fact that Trump supporters — passionate as they may be — are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of America.”
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2015/12/17/opinion-how-many-people-actually-support-trump-fewer-than-you-think/
What does that fraction look like. Well, how many votes did Trump get during the GOP primaries?
Trump: 14 million popular votes
Cruz: 7.8 million
Rubio: 3.5 million
Kasich: almost 4.3 million
14 million for Trump vs 15.6 million for his competition but there are more than 145 million voters in the U.S. and 126 million voted in 2012.
Another measurement is Nate Silver’s predictions that change daily several times based on a complex algorithm and a lot of data.
Currently Hillary has a 63.5 percent chance of winning to Trump’s 36.5 percent. But a lot can chance before November 8 and somehow Trump is gaining ground and Hillary is losing. What can we learn about that? Lie and lie to lie support your lies is the best way to come out a winner — and never, never admit you lied.
But how many people belong to this group (according to Abe Lincoln) — You can fool some of the people all the time?
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Lloyd, you don’t hear Hillary lying just about everytime she opens her mouth? She’s perhaps a more skillful liar than Trump, who appears willing to let fly just about anything that occurs to him. But Hillary is a GIFTED liar.
And yet unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and many others, she is NOT a skilled politician: many people see through her persona and sense that she’s untrustworthy. That alone might just account for her declining numbers. It’s not Trump: you could put up ANYONE against her and she’d be losing ground. The more people hear her, the less they trust or like her. That’s not JUST GOP/Teabilly bias, racism, and misogyny: it’s also people smelling a very large rat in a $12,000 Armani pantsuit.
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“It’s not Trump: you could put up ANYONE against her and she’d be losing ground.”
The fact that she is losing ground to Trump is proof positive for that.
If you selected someone randomly from the street to run against Trump, I’d bet they would actually do nothing but gain ground from now til November.
They might not win the election, but they would almost certainly not lose ground to Trump.
Being able to do the latter actually takes quite some talent.
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Petrilli is right. Don’t support emboldening feelings of racism. Trump is cavalier and careless with his words.
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TC: He’s half-right, unless he’s not voting for HRC either.
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Trump is obviously not going to win the election if he is counting on “conservative” insiders in the Repugnant party. These people only believe in using public resources for personal gain, developing a world economy that lowers the standard of living for the average American, and enriching the already rich in obscene ways.
That is the same agenda of Hillary Clinton.
The automatic labels of racist, bigot, and misogynist are PC BS.
We spent the Bush years getting kicked in the backside by NCLB. Then you got your dream President, and he turned us around and kicked us in the face.
I would rant on, but I know it is a complete waste of time with you lemmings.
Good luck with your ignorant “progressive” ideas.
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So for whom are you voting with your informed “reactionary” ideas, FL?
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p.s.: I think Hillary is a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist, too. But do you deny that all three apply to Trump? You have some conservative/ reactionary/libertarian or other “non-progressive” candidate who ISN’T all three of those things? DO TELL!
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MPG, We are at the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the federal government. I think the federal government is the greatest threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You think the federal government should be used to further your version of progressive utopia.
I will vote Trump because he stands the best chance of limiting the role of the feds in my life. Pence’s election as VP will be a gift to the people of Indiana.
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Wow, nothing like having my political philosophy explained to me by a stranger who doesn’t know me or my political philosophy.
But if we’re talking about opponents of “big government” and its dangers, keep us from the Republican Party starting at least with Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a cutter of government was Saint Ronnie.
What Republicans like to cut is the parts of government that slow the rape of the average American and the physical environment by big business and oligarchs. When it comes to protecting the rich and seeing that they get an ever-growing percentage of the pie, that’s a different story. Lots of military, lots of weapons, lots of police, lots of laws that ruin small people and lots and lots and lots of prisons. Yeah, small government; sell that fairy tale to another Teabilly, ‘kay?
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Sorry, but I have read your posts and your views don’t seem opaque. I am not a believer in the Republican brand. I just stated that I was choosing the candidate with the least probability to use government to screw things up even more.
You labeled me a reactionary, which was a lazy attempt to discredit my view that progressivism through federal policy is devoid of merit. I didn’t express any indignation. If you want to maintain some air of mystery, don’t talk so much.
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I didn’t label you, FL Teacher. You wrote “I would rant on, but I know it is a complete waste of time with you lemmings.
Good luck with your ignorant “progressive” ideas.”
So I just turned around “ignorant” and “progressive” and went to the trouble of putting “reactionary” in quotation marks so that you couldn’t possibly miss what I was doing.
And yet, you did. I just asked for whom you were voting.
Then I asked you for some non-Hillary candidate who didn’t have the trifecta of qualities that are usually applied to Trump and every other GOP candidate (I can’t imagine why!!!) and you remained silent on that score, even though I was happy to state that I think Hillary is all three of those (and worse). I don’t think you really answered, though you did say you were voting for Trump without addressing how he shapes up on the racism, sexism, and misogyny scales. I can’t blame you.
What I most definitely didn’t do was “label” YOU at all. If you insist upon that, that’s your issue, not mine. And I contend you are in no position to accurately label me. Given your misreading of my previous comments, that’s not much of a reach on my part. And let’s not forget the blanket name-calling of “lemmings” and “ignorant” you offered up in a late-model Huff(mobile).
If those politically-charged terms you reject as “PC BS” are just that, it should be a snap for you to deny that they apply to your chosen candidate. But I suspect you know just how risible and absurd it would be to do so in light of his near-daily forays into nearly every one of them. Whether I believe he’s really any one of them really doesn’t matter. Millions do. And then there are all those who couldn’t care less about that yet seem to despise him anyway. RINOS, is that what they’re called? All these labels. A person can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
One of the best things the Common Core has done is help demonstrate that people can oppose the same thing for radically different reasons. Could be that both the Left and Right have the whole thing wrong and that Obama, Duncan, Gates, and the rest really have it right. But if the latter isn’t true (and I don’t believe it is for a nanosecond), I can’t help but ponder how unlikely it is that you despise the Common Core or anything else in education for the same reasons that I might. And since I’m so transparent, I look forward to having you explain my constantly evolving thinking on it all. Save me the trouble of crafting another blog piece or guest column in WaPo.
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Cool. Then he and I have something in common. I won’t vote for Trump, either.
But then, I won’t vote for Hillary, either. Bernie or Jill, never some shill.
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What are your views of Hillary Clinton?
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I think I’ve made my views of HRC crystal clear in this blog’s comment sections. They are not favorable. She’ll never get my vote. I don’t think anyone should vote for either the presumptive Republican or Democratic nominee: they are insults to the intelligence, decency, and vision of the American people and the world as a whole.
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Thanks, I thought maybe you were on the fence.
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There are two choices, bad and badder. The odds are strong that one of them is going to be the next president of the U.S.
If you want to make a statement, vote for a third party candidate, Green or Libertarian, etc., or don’t vote at all. Actually not voting doesn’t make a statement because too many already don’t vote. If everyone that dislikes bad and badder voted for a third party candidate, then bad and badder would probably not get elected.
But don’t complain if badder gets elected, and who is badder is an individual opinion.
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Personally, I always liked Boris Badenov. Natasha Fatale, too.
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Does Boris represent Trump and Natasha Pence? And if you write one in for your presidential choice, which one of these cartoon characters would it be?
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Please, Dollink, Pottsylvanians could NEVER be Republicans. Or faux-Democrats. We’re Democratic-Socialists, of course.
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Then everyone who doesn’t want to vote or can’t vote for HRC and The Donald, should write Bernie Sanders in.
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I’m still hoping that between now and November, the multiverse will branch off and we will somehow find ourselves in a universe where Bernie and Jill team up in a third party run against both Trump and Clinton.
I know it’s not likely, but maybe the recently increased energy of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN will cause the branching.
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Of course, if the LHC causes a black whole or rift in space-time, we won’t have to worry about the election outcome anyway so there’s always that to hope for too.
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If the earth becomes a black hole, it will also be a “black whole” for us
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So many conservative pundits and politicians are running away from the monster they spawned. Talk about sleeping in the bed you make.
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RATT: well, I didn’t make the Trump bed and need not lie in it. But I sure as hell didn’t make the Hillary bed, and I’m not sleeping in that bed-bug infested dump for love or money.
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I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils. I plan on writing-in Bernie.
We’ll all be sleeping in the bed of one of them. “Oh Canada . . . “
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By January 2017, the people of the United States will have elected 45 presidents over a 228 year time span. Clearly the one of the most selective job positions on Earth. There is something fundamentally wrong with the idea that 2 out of 45 could be husband and wife. Can you spell “rigged game”?
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And that there are two pairs of fathers and sons, and one pair of grandfather and grandson. I think the Roosevelt connection is more distant and they weren’t from the same party. Most of the TR Roosevelts looked well down their noses at the FDR Roosevelts.
Had RFK not been shot, I’m sure we’d have had a brother-brother tandem as well.
However, I think we’re safe from having either Billy Carter or Roger Clinton. Chelsea, however, is another matter: she feels our pain, too, you know. All the way to the bank.
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I had a similar objection to the Bush cartel. But I personally find the husband-wife connection just a bit creepy.
Which democrat would you have preferred over HRC? The pickings were pretty slim during primaries.
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I would have been very comfortable with a Sanders/Gabbard ticket. Or Sanders and Nina Turner. I think I could support a Sanders/Stein ticket, too. Didn’t like the handful of other Dems who ran.
Before nearly every Democrat in Congress jumped on the HRC bandwagon, I thought that Sherrod Brown might be worth looking at. Or even Al Franken. Had they cloned and reanimated Paul Wellstone, that would have been sweet.
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Cancel that last comment. I know you are a Bernie guy like myself. Not the first time I was asleep at the wheel.
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Gun to your head:
Trump?
Hillary?
Bullet?
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Poor Lincoln
Everyone sleeps in his bed and he does not have any choice in the matter.
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Lloyd has a good suggestion. People need to quit demanding guarantees that their vote will not be the deciding vote. It will have meaning. not much, but some. Gun to your head:
Trump?
Hillary?
Bullet?
Could Gary Johnson save anyone from the bullet.
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In a word, no. Voting Libertarian is not an improvement.
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True, voting a libertarian into the White House would mean the Koch brothers would own it and before their puppet president left office, they would hold the deed.
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Joe, with just a few more votes in Florida, Al Gore would have been elected president in 2000. Every vote counts.
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Irrespective of Fordham.
When the “non-ideological”, Gates-funded, Aspen program, with the title, “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network”, met to discuss, an education agenda of noble intent (that had the potential to tap into a $1 bil. potential education business sector), did it seem odd to members of the group that US Senate interns, weren’t’ reflective of the U.S. population?
“People of color make up 36%, of the US population and, 28%, of the citizens of voting age. 7.1% of the interns are people of color.”
When the reform groups work the halls of Congress with civil rights groups, stickiness, seems to be limited to an agenda of profit making, not diversity of employment.
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Sounds like the entrenched and politically powerful are afraid Trump will ruin their game not the country because the conservative coalition has never spoken publically if their concern over communities of color in the past or Muslim innocents abroad who have suffered at the hands of military objectives as collateral damage!
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Is this post news?
Many Republicans fit comfortably in the DFER wing.
Trump’s boorish, money grubbing style, doesn’t match the image of refined gentlemen, which is how many Republicans, prefer to see themselves.
The recent photo of Paul Ryan with senate interns is compelling. Lots of verbiage in D.C. are creating minority opportunity, for work, through education (plans that profit Wall Street and Silicon Valley) but, few resume building jobs, for minorities, in Senate intern jobs.
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Most likely K-12 policy would be paralyzed, as an Education Department without any kind of mandate would feel powerless to act on any issue of importance without running it by the White House. ESSA implementation and everything else would grind to a halt. ” so………no more asking Bill Gates how high to jump when he demands privatization run by wealthy people?
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I’m happy that he won’t vote for Mr. Trump, but this doesn’t change how I feel about Mr. Petrilli or the Fordham Institute one bit.
That’s quite a needle Mike is trying to thread there–he supports policies that are disastrous for children, teachers, and schools, but won’t support Trump who would be disastrous for children, teachers, and schools?
Got it, Mike. I hope this makes you feel better about yourself when you look in the mirror.
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There are myriad takes on what comprises being “disastrous for children.” Petrilli can vote for Hillary, whom one Koch bro seemed to be comfortable with and about whom Henry Kissinger has spoken favorably, and still help screw over poor and minority kids for generations to come. Life is great when you’re with the status quo and 1%.
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