Education, where the Bush era assault on public schools and teachers unions continues apace, so despite the demonstrated fact that charter schools do not produce better results, and despite the fact that the focus on testing has produced widespread fraud, Obama is doubling down with privatizing education in the same way the Dick Cheney privatized core military functions.
What’s more, a former George H.W. Bush Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, is now denouncing these policies:
DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I think that what happened in New York City is—shows that the direction he’s taking is wrong, because everything he is proposing in Race to the Top and also in his blueprint will rely on exactly the kinds of methods that led to a massive fraud in New York state—that is, that Race to the Top is requiring states to judge teachers by the student test scores, and we now know, based on this immense fraud in the city and in the state of New York, that the test scores are not reliable. So teachers will be judged by unreliable data, and we’re going to dismantle the teaching profession in pursuit of this mechanical fix that won’t work.
If there is lower class of scum than the war profiteers like Halliburton, who profit off our wars, it’s the Education profiteers like the Edison schools, who profit off our children.
There might be an excuse if this crap worked, but it doesn’t, and since No Child Left Behind was implemented, the racial and economic gaps between children have widened, because the educational reform establishment believes that the only thing that needs to be done to fix schools is to f%$# teachers.
Still think Obama is "immeasurably better" than Bush?
Maybe Nader's point about Tweedledee-and-Tweedledum starts to look less as an outrageous exaggeration and more like a reasonable approximation of reality?
Naders point that we must actively make things worse (hence his working indirectly for Bush) because eventually things will get bad enough that ordinary people will somehow or other rise up and create a better society.
I do not subscribe to his philosophy.
> Naders point that we must actively make things worse (hence his working indirectly for Bush) because eventually things will get bad enough that ordinary people will somehow or other rise up and create a better society.
Did he actually say that or is that your interpretation?
Anyway, I am not that interested in Nader personally (or even in third parties in general), as much as in the point that the lesser evil is very evil, and not much less – we need alternatives.
You know my suggestion – sortition. If you don't like it, that's ok, but you do need to come up with some alternative. Otherwise, you either go with the status quo which is insanity (doing the same thing over and over and hoping that something will change), or despair altogether.
He actually said that, something to that effect.
Can't find it right now.