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He promised "change we can believe in"
Ohanian Comment: Diane Ravitch asks the question we must ask of all the corporate politicos of the democratic party: How come the Democratic party no longer has any ideas of its own? Whatever happened to change we can believe in?
"Better than Bush" was not good enough as the campaign promise. . . and now it turns out we're not even getting that.
Revolution.
by Diane Ravitch, Historian of education, NYU and Brookings
When Barack Obama ran for president, he promised "change we can believe in." He stood in front of a banner at every rally that said "change."
But, it turns out, in education he wants continuity, not change. Matt Miller wrote (The Daily Beast , April 28) that Obama's education policy "hits every Republican erogenous zone. The president is pushing charter schools, higher standards, differential teacher pay, alternative teacher certification, and even tenure reform in ways far beyond anything any president has attempted before." Reduce...
In other words, the Obama agenda is the Republican agenda but with lots more money to promote it.
Choice and accountability have been the heart of the Republican program since the Reagan years. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the Democratic party rejected that agenda. Now, under Obama, the Democratic party has adopted the Republican agenda and plans to use the stimulus money to push it farther than Republicans would ever have dared and farther than a Democratic Congress would have allowed. So, for example, President Obama has called on states to lift their limits on charter schools so that more students would attend schools that are privately managed with public dollars.
Most teachers hate the Bush-era No Child Left Behind program. They see it as a punitive effort to turn schools into joyless testing factories and to privatize as many as possible. To date, there is no evidence that the Obama administration intends to reject the major features of the Bush approach.
How come the Democratic party no longer has any ideas of its own? Whatever happened to change we can believe in?
— Diane Ravitch
The Arena
2009-06-13
http://www.politico.com/arena/
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