Jan Resseger has established a reputation for writing well-researched, fearless articles about unjust education policies. In this post, she reviews a new book about the roots of corporate education reform. I have already ordered it.
She writes:
I remember my gratitude when, back in 2010, I sat down to read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which connected the dots across what I had been watching for nearly a decade: the standards movement, annual standardized testing, the operation of No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish, Mayor Bloomberg’s promotion of charter schools in New York City, and the role of venture philanthropy in all this.
Now over a decade later, many of us have spent the past couple of months worried about pushback from the charter school sector as the the U.S. Department of Education has proposed strengthening sensible regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program. We have been reminded that this program was launched in 1994, and we may have been puzzled that a federal program paying for the startup of privately operated charter schools originated during a Democratic administration.
Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College, has just published a wonderful book which explains how the New Democrats—Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the Democratic Leadership Council—brought a political and economic philosophy that sought to end welfare with a 1996 bill called the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” and envisioned privately operated charter schools to expand competition and innovation in the public schools as a way to close school achievement gaps. Geismer’s book is Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. The book is a great read, and it fills in the public policy landscape of the 1990s, a decade we may never have fully understood.
In the introduction, Geismer explains where she is headed: “Since the New Deal, liberals had advocated for doing well and doing good. However, the form of political economy enacted during the new Deal and, later, the New Frontier and Great Society understood these as distinct goals. The architects of mid-twentieth century liberalism believed that stimulating capital markets was the best path to creating economic growth and security (doing well). The job of the federal government, as they saw it, was to fill in the holes left by capitalism with compensatory programs to help the poor, like cash assistance and Head Start, and to enact laws that ended racial and gender discrimination (doing good). In contrast, the New Democrats sought to merge those functions and thus do well bydoing good. This vision contended that the forces of banking, entrepreneurialism, trade, and technology… could substitute for traditional forms of welfare and aid and better address structural problems of racial and economic segregation. In this vision, government did not recede but served as a bridge connecting the public and private sectors.” (p. 8)
Geismer devotes an entire chapter, “Public Schools Are Our Most Important Business,” to the Clinton administration’s new education policy. She begins by telling us about Vice President Al Gore’s meetings with “leading executives and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. The so-called Gore-Tech sessions often took place over pizza and beer, and Gore hoped for them to be a chance for the administration to learn from innovators of the New Economy…. One of these meetings focused on the problems of public education and the growing achievement gap between affluent white suburbanites and students of color in the inner city…. The challenge gave venture capitalist John Doerr, who had become Gore’s closest tech advisor, an idea… The tools of venture capital, Doerr thought, might offer a way to build new and better schools based on Silicon Valley’s principles of accountability, choice, and competition… Doerr decided to pool money from several other Silicon valley icons to start the NewSchools Venture Fund. NewSchools sat at the forefront of the concepts of venture philanthropy. Often known by the neologism philanthrocapitalism, venture or strategic philanthropy focused on taking tools from the private sector, especially entrepreneurialism, venture capitalism, and management consulting—the key ingredients in the 1990s tech boom—and applying them to philanthropic work… Doerr and the NewSchools Fund became especially focused on charter schools, which the Clinton administration and the Democratic Leadership Council were similarly encouraging in the 1990s.” (pp. 233-234)
As she explains, the Clinton administration bought the idea that charter schools would be an effective way to end poverty. It encouraged the growth of the charter sector, not realizing that it was creating an industry that would fight accountability, lobby for more federal funding, and ignore frequent scandals and frauds.
It is a cautionary tale that reminds us that the best way to fight poverty is to raise incomes, create jobs, and support labor unions that will defend the rights of working people and advocate for higher wages and benefits.
I think it’s worth knowing that the ‘change’ was in the works for decades. Some people noticed that Americans were spending huge amounts of money on public schooling, and they wanted to get their hands on it. And, so, they developed a plan.
But (just like the overthrow of Roe) it took time because Public Schools (and the Post Office, and National Parks) were very popular with the vast majority of the population. The creeping leaches played the ‘long game’ and now it’s rather late in the game.
And, yeah, the Clintons were (are?) a problem. They ripped the Democratic Party away from the working class.
Agree! I think the country could have reversed course on “trickle down/Reagan-omics” with the right administration. Instead, Clinton (and his wife) were elected and the country was open for world wide spending and business. Grift abundant on both sides with tax $$$ allocated to private business entities to do government/social services. One big $$$$ orgy. Since then, politics has become more about who wins and what Wall Street wants instead of what is good for the public that it’s supposed to serve.
Daedalus– “ the Clintons… ripped the Democratic Party away from the working class.” Assume you’re talking the white working class, but how would this be true? The white working class vote for Reagan was 28% in 1980; it was the same for Bush in 2004; for pres elections in between, that group’s Republican vote ranged 24%-26%.
Well, you could be right. The Clintons, however, made no attempt to regain the working class. And, by ending ‘Welfare as we know it’, there was at least a subset of that ‘class’ who were pushed into further poverty. And, of course, he did nothing to curb that ‘giant sucking sound’ of jobs going overseas, with the attendant shutdown of our production facilities.
No, I didn’t mean “White working class”, however. I really meant to say the 50% of the American population that has no net worth.
And the opposite is happening. Poverty is increasing. The United States is becoming even more divided by class and race.
“Do charter schools affect school segregation by income? According to new research published this week, public schools in the United States are becoming more separated based on class — and the expansion of charter schools may add to this imbalance.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/do-charter-schools-increase-socioeconomic-segregation/
“Charter schools suspend children with disabilities at a higher rate than public schools, and there have been many cases of inadequacy due to a lack of resources, experience, and insensitivity.”
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/05/battle-over-charter-schools
“In evaluating some of the statistical studies that seek to compare the performance of charter and public schools, recent investigations conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University reveal that students’ test scores may prove that public schools are now outperforming charter schools. The Stanford analysts compared reading and math state-based standardized test scores between charter school and public school students in 15 states, as well as scores in the District of Columbia. Experts found that 37 percent of charter schools posted improvements in math scores; however, these improvement rates were significantly below the improvement rates of students in public school classrooms.”
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/charter-schools-vs-traditional-public-schools-which-one-is-under-performing
“better schools based on Silicon Valley’s principles of accountability, choice, and competition…”
Tell that to the engineers at Apple , Google and other tech firms whose salaries were depressed by the illegal price fixing schemes dreamed up by Steve Jobs and other tech titans.
Tell it to the American engineers who have been displaced by cheap labor brought in from abroad under B1B visa obtained under false pretenses (the claim that no qualified Americans are available for the positions).
Tell that to all the small companies who have been driven out of the marketplace by monopolistic practices of companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple.
The idea that Silicon valley operates on principles of accountability, choice and competition is just a joke. Their only “principle” is profit.
As she explains, the Clinton administration bought the idea that charter schools would be an effective way to end poverty. It encouraged the growth of the charter sector, not realizing that it was creating an industry that would fight accountability, lobby for more federal funding, and ignore frequent scandals and frauds.”
Can we dispense with the bullshit?
Bill Clinton might be a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them and the idea that neither he nor anyone in his administration could foresee any of the things that happened with charter schools is just NOT credible.
Having been governor of Arkansas for many years, Clinton was certainly aware of the potential for (if not likelihood of) fraud and all the other things
It really is an insult to the intelligence of the reader to imp!y otherwise.
Bill wasn’t called ‘Slick Willy’ for nothing. You can’t tell me he wasn’t aware of the opportunity for fraud (and kickbacks).
SomeDAM As you suggest, I used to think that someone like Clinton was incapable of being dumb in this and other regards.
THEN along came SCJ Roberts and his idea that a democratic state has no stake in (secular) education of its citizens. I’m still banging my head on the counter over that one. CBK
I used to believe just the opposite: that smart people like Bill Clinton are capable of overlooking things that their very jobs (eg, Governor of Arkansas) depend on seeing.
But alas, we all eventually grow out of our naivete, even though it took me a long time.
I also don’t buy that Roberts is not perfectly aware of what he is doing.
He wants everyone to think otherwise because it allows him to perpetuate the myth that he is somehow above the fray.
Roberts has been playing the “disingenuous” game since he stepped on the court.
I actually prefer folks like Thomas who tell us what they really think.
Not surprisingly, Roberts is also play the hair splitting game with the Roe decision.
He wants everyone to believe that even though he concurred with the majority on backing Mississippi’s near total ban on abortions after 15 weeks, he “really” didn’t/doesn’t support overturning Roe.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a really low tolerance for such bullshit.
And Roberts is a bullshit artist of the first order. I suspect that is actually what got him his Chief Justice position.
Scratch that. I don’t suspect. After watching his confirmation hearing, I know.
Should be” H1B visas”
With Silicon Valley, your only choice is “Our crap or nothing” .
Their idea of competition is a race with only one entrant.
And they are accountable only to the accountants.
Yep.
I used to work as an engineer in high tech in the Boston area so I am intimately familiar with this stuff.
One of my housemates had the full time job of getting H1B visas for foreign engineers and scientists .
And I know from first hand experience the sort of games these companies play to make sure that when they list a job, only foreign nationals are somehow (magically) qualified. One of the primary tricks is to be highly restrictive with required degrees and training, when the reality is that most skills (particularly in software development) can easily and quickly be picked up “on the fly” by anyone with problem solving skills.
The very best programmers I ever worked with actually did not have CS degrees. In fact, the CS grads were among the worst problem solvers I encountered. The scientists, mathematicians, engineers and even philosophy majors were much better because they would really think about a problem before jumping into “coding” the way Many CS grads often do.
Lots of CS grads are little more than coding monkeys.
And I worked with lots of programmers with lots of different backgrounds, so had a pretty good cross section to draw my comparison from.
One of the primary reasons I am very skeptical of stuff like self driving cars (along with the fact that I was recently run off the shoulder by a Tesla driving down the middle of the road with no centerline) is that I know that a lot of the people working on this sort of stuff have a truly frightening lack of understanding of what they are doing.
And the fact that a lot of the control systems for selfdriving vehicles are now developed with deep learning (neural nets) — pretty much black boxes that no one really understands operationally– just reinforces my skepticism.
Belief in tech is no more reasonable than any other form of thaumaturgy.
SDP, RE: h(1)B visas, I still like this article 8 yrs later: IEEE Spectrum’s article “The STEM Crisis is a Myth
Click to access STEMcrisismyth.pdf
First, I hate the designation ‘STEM’. It implies that science (inductive logic), math (deductive logic) and engineering (science applied to making stuff) are all the same, and it adds ‘tech’, which used to be engineering.
We have plenty of people competent in math, and engineering (depending upon your definition) and ‘tech’. Unfortunately, as a society, we eschew the broader picture. We don’t want ‘thinkers’ to get in the way of our oligarchy. Therefore, we need to ‘import’ only what is necessary to make the next hydrogen bomb.
KEY points all
Diane From the note: “As she explains, the Clinton administration bought the idea that charter schools would be an effective way to end poverty. It encouraged the growth of the charter sector, not realizing that it was creating an industry that would fight accountability, lobby for more federal funding, and ignore frequent scandals and frauds.”
BACK TO THE CORE: One great difference between democratic and fascist states is that the fascist is LESS influenced by others’ propaganda, arguments, and wants, if at all. For fascism, if you want change, you cannot have it unless you kill the authority-guy. Whereas in a democracy, to remain democratic, leaders HAVE TO understand the principles that allow democracy to stay over generations. And there’s the rub:
At the core of it, the Clintons (it seems to me) made the critical error of identifying the power of a democratic state with capitalist-only principles, rather than with the principles that are embedded in dead and dying idea of “for, by, and of the people.”
These two different sets of principles are best understood and implemented as in tension, but they are not necessarily opposed UNLESS we forget one and put the other in charge–which it what the Clintons did: Capitalism over Democracy.
As such, and regardless of the foot-hopping of earlier administrations, ON PRINCIPLE, the Clintons pretty-much gave away democracy to the capitalist-oligarchs–whether as merely forgetful or on purpose.
Old original principles (which many have understood from Jefferson to Eisenhower, at least) don’t just go away overnight . . . but once strangled and damaged by ongoing policy and law, they do tend to fade over a few generations, as any oligarch worthy of the title knows in their bones . . . hence, the long game and the absconding with, and death of, the American Spirit we are experiencing today. CBK
I agree. totally, CBK. Thanks. for your thoughts.
Cautionary Tale indeed. As the Clinton Administration began throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick for education I drew up a plan that would allow private entities to make on failing schools. My thinking was that if I could put together an organization to improve schools with a caveat of being given more schools that the local district was not improving, I would create an educational organization that would force the district to take underserved schools more seriously or lose dollars to someone else who would. A number of educators got together to look at this plan, but we didn’t take it to fruition. At the time I was a young teacher who had only served one school, one that was struggling at the time, for about a decade. I was ignorant and arrogant. It is easy to cast dispersions on the political choices of the past. What isn’t easy is learning from those mistakes and convincing those who invested in such an initiative to pull back, especially when profits come into play. When I became a school administrator I learned that our focus in regard to school improvement ignored the most significant adult in the school, that being the teacher. Public education made the problem even worse when it was determined that coercion and punishment were needed to force teachers to do a better job. Seeing that Silicon Valley was brought into the process explains the ongoing foibles of political and educational mismanagement we are struggling with today. The capitalist model of corporate tech is based on disruption that allows innovators to collapse while waiting for the one boondoggle that rises from the ashes to make them all rich. According to Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups-will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/?sh=348cbd5b6679, 90% of start-ups fail. Such a model promoted in the current public education policy maelstrom brings disaster for the majority of our school students. The Clinton administration was too focused on profit margins a a gauge for potential success. A successful school does not come out of the battle scars of disruption, but grows through a unified community. Competing for the scraps provided for public schools will never serve students well. Building a cadre of well trained teachers in a collaborative culture supported through professional pay, preparation time, and resources is the way to school improvement. Yes, it will be expensive but the results will be worth it.
Paul Bonner Worth repeating from your note:
“The Clinton administration was **too focused on profit margins as a gauge for potential success.” <–capitalist over democratic principles.
This point connects up with John Roberts’ FAILURE to understand the import of secular education of citizens for a democracy and so essentially as a compelling interest of the State. If democratic governments CAN work WITH capitalists, they are dead in the water if they let capitalists take over the ship like rats, which is what they did then, and are doing now as they grab the robes of religion to help them do their bidding in Congress, along with the very people who listen to their propaganda and, from all the bells and whistles that money can buy, don’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, truth from fiction, or the good from the bad. CBK
More from your note: “A successful school does not come out of the battle scars of disruption, but grows through a unified community. Competing for the scraps provided for public schools will never serve students well. Building a cadre of well trained teachers in a collaborative culture supported through professional pay, preparation time, and resources is the way to school improvement. Yes, it will be expensive but the results will be worth it.*”
Well said! Schools need a collaborative culture that supports teachers and instruction. Test and punish syndrome under the guise of better education impedes a rich and varied academic program for students and undermines innovative teaching.
nice intro sentence 🙂
The neoliberal values that guided the Clintons remain intact in current policies that include the privatization of public education. Instead of improvement through competition, charter schools formed mega lobbying groups that influence government spending. Entrenched lobbying is continuing to expand privatization despite the fact it has not improved education. What is worse once charters became normalized, they spawned worthless vouchers that provide inferior education to the poor and working class.
The government continues to be influenced by neoliberal principles that serve the interests of wealthy individuals and corporations at the expense of the poor and working class. The latest neoliberal scheme is an attempt to privatize Medicare from the inside out. This new scheme is an addition to Medicare Advantage that lures elderly patients with cheap perks like health club members, but sometimes refuses to pay for expensive life-saving procedures that are normally covered under Medicare. The new scheme is a Trump administration product that I imagine comes from the twisted Wall St. brain of Steve Mnuchin. What is unfortunate is that the Biden administration is continuing this so-called cost savings model. Direct Contracting Services or ACO Reach is a product designed to financialize the healthcare of vulnerable seniors.
Under ACO Reach a private third party, generally a corporation affiliated with healthcare, buys the right to administer the Medicare of certain seniors. Any savings that are not spent in the annual Medicare plan goes to the third party administrator. You don’t have to be a genius to know that the way to save money is to deny coverage for certain services. This is a variation on the “pay for success” scheme. The third party is supposed to notify the seniors when someone has bought a contract on their healthcare, but it remains to be seen if this will happen. Anyone that does not want to be part of this pay for success scheme should contact Medicare and tell them you do not want your information shared with any other entity. Medicare is quite clear on what it will pay and won’t pay for. There is no legitimate reason for the government to allow a third party to insert itself into someone’s Medicare other than the creation of a corporate profit producing scheme which enables corporations to reach into seniors’ Medicare and extract value.
retired teacher Nicely said.
In my view, I see nothing inherently wrong with “public-private partnerships.” These becomes problematic when, in fact, the name becomes Orwellian code for low-life capitalist-only minded people saying: “I’ll get in the bathwater so I can slowly drown the baby.”
But then this is why Local, State, and Federal Governments need to keep the power, in law and in fact; and know (and implement) that what they say and do remains in the name of The People. I’ don’t want to kiss it goodbye, but it’s becoming more and more difficult in view of the generational effect of so much that evidently has gone missing today, even at the highest levels of government. CBK
Public private partnerships seem fine in theory, but they usually get derailed by the profit motive. Soon after charter schools were introduced we got to see how the profiteering snowballs. EMOs or CMOs are a financial product through which capitalists can move their money and hide their profits without public scrutiny or objection. ACO Reach is another example of how to take a public service like Medicare and use it to generate profit for corporations. There is absolutely no reason that a private profit seeking entity needs to be inserted into the program. As I mentioned, Medicare generally has clear guidelines for what is covered or not. American seniors do not need a corporation to take control of their access to healthcare. IMO this gimmick will fail.
cx: health club memberships
It is not possible to be generous and greedy at the same time. That’s common sense. There is no such thing as venture philanthropy. One cannot do good by doing well. Clinton used the White House to enrich himself. He did very well, but was certainly up to no good. It’s imperative to get all the tech moguls out of government and out of public education. They are doing too well, and people who think the moguls’ edu-tech products, from “reimagined” schools to online learning platforms, are doing any good frankly lacks common sense. I am so tired of corporate education meddling. I close with this: Reed Hastings can go fund himself. To borrow from Vonnegut, Reed Hastings and Bill Clinton can both go take a flying fuss at a rolling, data-driven, Arne Dunkin’ donut.
Bill Clinton removed the backbone of the Democratic Party. I was just reading an old article about the televised debate between true genius Gore Vidal and crypto-Nazi William F Buckley Jr. They neither sought bipartisanship nor tried to overturn elections when they disagreed fiercely. Imagine that.
“Their rivalry fell within a deep well of historical tradition: Plato versus Aristotle pitting idealism against methodology; Jung versus Freud over the unconscious; Vavilov versus Lysenko over genetics and the environment. Or Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre… in marked contrast to the chumminess between Bill Clinton and George W Bush… When the cameras went off Buckley and Vidal, these guys didn’t go for a drink’.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/02/lost-heart-of-political-debate-gore-vidal-william-f-buckley-best-of-enemies
Yep. However who was responsible for putting in ‘Slick Willy’? I think our media moguls (new royalty) have played us like a harp, and we have allowed that (as we still do) by staring at our screens and letting their sewage seep into our brain.
Bill was the Dems answer to two terms of Reagan and one of Bush Sr. They decided they needed a centrist in order to win and they got one. Still didn’t make the far right happy but good enough for the middle grounders.
He also was the one who opened the gates to privately managed Medicare programs. We (NYC union retirees) are seeing the fruits of that with the imposition of an unwanted AdvantageCare Plus plan which we’ve, so far, been able to ward off on legal grounds.
Not a fan of Billy Boy, here. Beats Trump by a zillion miles (as does my hamster) but he really set some bad precedents which have proved far reaching.
I just listened to the “Now and Then” podcast where Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson talked about how the North simply tried to play by the rules in the 1850s compared to the Southern willingness to break norms and laws to reach their ends. This is exactly where we are today. The Democratic Party establishment has been losing at this game since at least Clinton. What the party doesn’t seem to understand is their unwillingness to use resources to forcefully counter this radical theocratic narrative is setting us up for greater violence. in the future. Every time the Republicans see an opening driven mostly by cultural issues, there are ads on You Tube or cable paid for by pernicious PACs that promote this narrative of the other. What do I hear from progressives? Aside from feigning outrage from a podium in Washington all I hear is crickets. There seems little sense of urgency.
Paul,
I gave up on the Democratic Party some years ago. I was actually the ‘vjce-chair’ or our county Party (in line to be in charge of that small unit) when I noticed this same ethic, and, rather that be a part of the facade, I quit.
But, where do we go?
I worked with the Democratic Party in Charlotte and it was quite maddening. I think the first thing that has to happen is that the national Democratic leadership needs to step aside and let the younger members of Congress take the reins. One critical mistake that came out of the Clinton era was this constant effort to get along in the attempt to lure moderates. This has resulted in public perceptions of a political party that doesn’t stand for much. Too many millennials are stepping away from political engagement because they don’t think the Democratic Party hears them. That being said, we just have to keep encouraging the Dems to wake up because right now, they are all we’ve got.
Paul Bonner Perhaps there is a distinction to be made in your argument?
That is, yes, the anti-abortion argument IS theocratic. However, I think it’s more than that. First, the anti-abortion people (in most cases I am assuming) are genuine in their efforts to protect (what they understand as) the unborn who have no political voice save for the mother’s acceptance, and especially where the so-called “partial-birth abortions” are concerned . . . never stops making me cringe at the thought of it on life-death issues alone, regardless of religious argumentation. The point: that’s not a necessarily theocratic-only response or concern about abortion.
Secondly, what in my view stinks to high heaven, and what IS an overreach specifically concerning outdated Catholic and other-religious doctrine, is making birth control an issue of law at all, much less as illegal. You don’t need a purely American spirit of self-reliance/responsibility to get your hair on fire about THAT one and in recognizing the incursions of Church doctrine on secular-democratic governments. How dare they.
In brief, flacking the Church is deserved on many scores, but not as the only source of anguish where abortion is concerned. The conflict with abortion is an interwoven cloth made up of the sometimes-conflicting laws that govern (a) family (the basic principle of generation) and (b) civic life (the basic principles of intelligence and excellence). These will always be with us.
However, finding the right relationship between A and B in this case of abortion, is singularly near-to impossible where the intrusions of one cannot NOT mean some kind of break with the other. And we are not the first group of human beings who thought it “best” to dispense with their young. The more honest thing to do would be to call abortion murder and claim the right to the mother, rather than scientizing birth or employing silly euphamatics. CBK
The ongoing reflection forced upon us by Friday’s SCOTUS ruling has gotten me thinking the historic struggle Judeo-Christian tradition has with sexuality. I read and discuss the Bible frequently and one ongoing theme, from Genesis to Paul’s letters, is this ongoing consternation about human behavior and how it relates to sexual relationships (The Greeks could never understand such an obsession). This traditional angst is evident in the contemporary evangelical interpretation of sin. What we are seeing is not Theocratic in a particular denominational way, but through the insistence of certain people, predominantly men, that humans are distinct from the rest of creation, thus arbiters of God’s will. Through this line of thinking there are certain values relating to sexual behavior that are acceptable for human kind and other behaviors that are deemed “animal” that can only be remedied through punishment and condemnation. If we used what we actually know about biology and social behavior, we would agree to teach meaningful sex education and have established community institutions that support family planning on a broad scale. The appropriate understanding of us as sexual beings would be far more effective in reducing sexual misconduct and, by extension, unwanted pregnancies. The self imposed ignorance of our sexual selves is exemplified by a rabid minority now over represented by a SCOTUS that sees their role as our moral magistrates. Certainly Theocratic in practice and perspective.
Paul Bonner Thank you for your thoughtful reply. To be extraordinarily brief, I don’t disagree. It’s just that I think a huge many, even abortion advocates, are queezy about abortion, especially later ones; though I think rightful decisions abound insofar as those decisions are THEIRS. But I don’t think getting rid of religious influences will get rid of our queeziness about aborting our children, aka: “fetuses.”
I was talking about public and personal views, then, which are not all or even mainly religiously based; though queeziness does not commonly translate into hard and fast law; and not about SCOTUS as your last note seems to refer to.
On SCOTUS, I still love the institution, but I am regularly sick to my stomach and cannot even SEE a picture of Amy or Brett or Clarence or Ginni without a visceral response; whereas, I have grown up with a basic respect for the Court. That’s all gone now, though the institution must remain standing, and I fear what comes next. CBK
I like this summary: “Clinton and his allies routinely referred to microenterprise, community development banking, Empowerment Zones, mixed-income housing, and charter schools as revolutionary ideas that had the power to create large-scale change. These programs, nevertheless, uniformly provided small or micro solutions to large structural or macro problems. The New Democrats time and again overpromised just how much good these programs could do. Suggesting market-based programs were a ‘win-win’ obscured the fact that market capitalism generally reproduces and enhances inequality.”
These are neoliberal ideas. Privatization of public services was well on its way before Clinton came along. What sucked was that Dems hadn’t already figured out where that was leading after 12 [Rep admin] yrs of it. Compare the expansion of private prisons that began in 1983. You see very similar stats as on charter schools: today about 8% inmates in private prisons, which have been shown over a number of studies to provide no cost-savings; privates skim off the least-expensive-to-control inmates, pay lower wages & provide less staff training– & less staff– etc. Plenty of negative results were in by the early ‘90s, and various states had already started applying controls/ monitoring/ brakes to reduce their role.
But Dems just jumped in with both feet , & painted out an old “Republican” sign with the words “New Democrats.”
Didn’t you know that Saint Jimmy Carter is blameless but the Clintons are evil when it comes to neoliberalism.
nycpsp– Yep, it’s interesting, isn’t it? On many issues, you can draw a straight policy line from Ford to Carter to Reagan [& even some political maneuvering common to Carter and Reagan]. I mainly remember Carter for deregulation, so I was reading up on it, & was surprised to find it was Ford– with major input & support from Ted Kennedy and Stephen Breyer– who kicked the effort off, aggressively, & set things in motion; Carter continued his model. These 2 items were helpful: http://www.jthtl.org/content/articles/V5I2/JTHTLv5i2_Crain.PDF
https://www.salon.com/2011/02/08/lind_reaganism_carter/