Re: Diane Asks, What Would the Liberal Do?

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Yup, George Bush's silver-tongued rhetoric about determining is our children learning mesmerized inexperienced politicians like George Miller and Ted Kennedy into going along with NCLB.? And La Raza, the Mexcian-American Legal Defense Fund, the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, the Center for American Progress, and all the other liberal and progressive groups that support NCLB can't recognize a plot to destroy the public schools.

?

If you got any farther out you would be your own planet.



Art





 



-----Original Message-----

From: Horn, James <jhorn@monmouth.edu>

To: arn-l@interversity.org

Sent: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 7:59 am

Subject: [arn-l] Diane Asks, What Would the Liberal Do?















Conservatives are fleeing the burning NCLB ship, preferring to drown in open 

waters or, as in some cases, attempt to crawl aboard a rescue vessel, even if it 

seems to be occupied by liberals. Yuck!



Yesterday's op-ed in the NYTimes by Diane Ravitch shows what can happen when an 

arch conservative decides, for political/survival reasons, to become her own 

misunderstood version of a liberal. In accomplishing such a feat, Ravitch would 

have been well-served to continue her making-nice conversations with Deborah 

Meier long enough to find out what a real liberal would do with the crumbling 

privatization plan of NCLB, rather than letting Chester Finn's people in Central 

Casting come up with their caricatured version of the Liberal Solution.



Ravitch seems to think the old Bush charade of local control in education 

accountability, which has so far meant that states make and administer their own 

tests while the Feds hand out the punishment, should now be reversed so that now 

Central Planning will make/administer the tests, while the states and localities 

will take on the policing and accountability/sentencing roles. If this is what 

the Cons believe liberalism is about, their socio-political calendar has, 

indeed, been turned back to the the early 1950s.



The only people likely to be excited by Ravitch's proposed nightmare are the 

national socialists who have already decided to willingly sacrifice the Republic 

to preserve, at any cost, American economic hegemony around the world to benefit 

an increasingly-paranoid group of white, protestant CEOs.



Ravitch's piece, then, serves as nice propaganda salve for the shamed 

privatizers, who would now seem to be in retreat from their engineered plan to 

sacrifice a generation of children as a means to cynnically produce a political 

end.



If she were really interested in reversing roles, why not make the Feds truly 

accountable, rather than the states and local school districts? Why not give 

Washington until, let's say, 2030 to bring down the poverty scores in America? 

If we were were to focus on ending poverty in America, all this wasted time and 

money on the orgy of tabulation could be saved, because when poverty ends and 

family incomes go up, achievement gaps will narrow and real achievement for all 

will be realized. There is a candidate who has a plan for this, Diane--his name 

is John Edwards.



Diane's op-ed, however, called "Get Congress Out of the Classroom." still 

pretends that moving around the deck chairs on the sinking education 

accountability ship will somehow help. And the title of her op-ed belies a 

continuing denial of the fact that it was the Executive Branch that crafted this 

current debacle, rather than an out-of-touch and out-maneuvered Congress. It's 

just too bad that Ravitch did not use her broad influence seven years ago to 

publish an op-ed that might have been called "Get the White House Out of the 

Schoolhouse." If she had, she might have been high and dry at this very moment, 

rather than swimming for her political life.





 


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