Here’s a the tease for another vapid “analysis” by the Times. The Republican Party wondering if it will criticize Obama during the midterms is like the Pope agonizing over converting to Judaism, Rob Ford debating whether to put a rock in his pipe, or a bear wondering if he’ll shit in the woods. To give you an indication of how hard the Times had to work to gin up this “debate”, the one guy they quote on the “no criticism” side, John Linder, was the head of the NRCC in the late 90’s. That’s when he lost the same “debate” with Newt Gingrich over whether to criticize Bill Clinton.
Republican Stupidity
Nope, You Wouldn’t Belong
Sad to watch on several levels.
Because Cleveland and Chicago both begin with the letter “C”
Colin Woodard, a newspaper reporter in Maine, did a great series on the school reform industry (cyber charter division). Looks like the reporter may win a Certificate of Excellence or a trophy or something, but sadly nothing like the huge cash rewards school reform industry insiders are raking in on cyber charters. He’s obviously playing for the wrong team. He may have attended our Failed and Failing Public Schools Full of Failures, which would explain his lack of ambition:
Stephen Bowen was excited and relieved. Maine’s education commissioner had just returned to his Augusta office last October after a three-day trip to San Francisco where he attended a summit of conservative education reformers convened by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which had paid for the trip.
He’d heard presentations on the merits of full-time virtual public schools – ones without classrooms, playgrounds or in-person teachers – and watched as Bush unveiled the “first ever” report card praising the states that had given online schools the widest leeway.
But what had Bowen especially enthusiastic was his meeting with Bush’s top education aide, Patricia Levesque, who runs the foundation but is paid through her private firm, which lobbies Florida officials on behalf of online education companies.
Bowen was preparing an aggressive reform drive on initiatives intended to dramatically expand and deregulate online education in Maine, but he felt overwhelmed.
So was a partnership formed between Maine’s top education official and a foundation entangled with the very companies that stand to make millions of dollars from the policies it advocates.
In the months that followed, according to more than 1,000 pages of emails obtained by a public records request, the commissioner would rely on the foundation to provide him with key portions of his education agenda. These included draft laws, the content of the administration’s digital education strategy and the text of Gov. Paul LePage’s Feb. 1 executive order on digital education.
A Maine Sunday Telegram investigation found large portions of Maine’s digital education agenda are being guided behind the scenes by out-of-state companies that stand to capitalize on the changes, especially the nation’s two largest online education providers.
K12 Inc. of Herndon, Va., and Connections Education, the Baltimore-based subsidiary of education publishing giant Pearson, are both seeking to expand online offerings and to open full-time virtual charter schools in Maine, with taxpayers paying the tuition for the students who use the services.
At stake is the future of thousands of Maine schoolchildren who would enroll in the full-time virtual schools and, if the companies had their way, the future of tens of thousands more who would be legally required to take online courses at their public high schools in order to receive their diplomas.
The foundation’s Digital Learning Now! initiative receives funding from Pearson, K12, textbook publishing giants Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, and tech companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft, and digital curriculum developers Apex Learning and IQ Innovations iQity.
“One of the striking things about these reforms is the extent to which they remove control of the schools from democratic governance and turn them over to corporate decision-making and appointed bodies. Education policy is now being made to some degree by people who have a financial stake in what they are making policy about.”
School reform industry initiatives are always presented as “transformative” and “innovative” but what comes clear when one follows the industry for a couple of years is the relentless sameness of the agenda from state to state and year to year. This is a problem for reform industry marketing efforts, because they seek to portray privatization as grass roots and bottom-up or at the very least state-specific, but it is none of those things. You have your Course Choice in Louisiana and your Value Vouchers in Michigan, sure, but the only difference is the brand names. Ohio has the same cyber charter scam Jeb Bush tried to impose in Maine, and the Ohio scam has been running continuously for a decade. Voters in Idaho had the good sense to repeal the Jeb Bush Maine-Florida-Ohio-(Your State HERE) plan by referendum after it was imposed. That was in 2012. Did reform industry hacks get chased out of Idaho and go directly to Maine?
The reform industry leader who implemented the Chicago Mayor’s mass public school closing order yesterday is not a local or state leader but a national one. She parachuted into Chicago to close their public schools after school closing stints in Cleveland and Detroit. The parents, students and teachers in Chicago who fought so hard and so bravely to keep their local schools were first ignored and when they made so much noise they could no longer be ignored they were blatantly lied to, but they don’t have to wait to see what’s in store for them. They can look to Cleveland or Detroit where identical reforms were imposed to see where this is headed. By my count, Cleveland has now endured “transformational” “innovative” reform industry experiments for the last 13 years, and after all that the public schools there are fighting just to survive. We all know the rules, don’t we? Markets can’t fail they can only be failed, and the solution to failed market-based reforms is more market-based reforms.
Because Cleveland and Chicago both begin with the letter “C”Post + Comments (66)
Same As It Ever Was
Something Has Been Lost
Just to amplify an issue related to Mistermix’s post below about austerity peacock Tom Coburn’s announcement that he would seek to offset federal disaster relief funds to Oklahoma with budget cuts elsewhere (Pentagon exempted, naturally). Let’s pause to consider what it means that Coburn issued this statement while bodies were still being pulled from the rubble in his home state, an activity that is ongoing.
A spokesman for the senator claimed that Coburn was merely being consistent about his position on federal disaster aid. That’s a lie: Mrs. Polly at Rumproast provides links to accounts of Coburn questioning and delaying disaster relief to other states while accepting funds for Oklahoma. It’s no surprise that Coburn is a liar and a hypocrite: That’s what we expect from politicians. It’s what our grandparents expected, and their grandparents too.
But what does seem somewhat novel — to me, at least — is the brazen callousness in today’s breed of Republicans, a rigid orthodoxy combined with a rich man’s insulation from trouble that renders them utterly indifferent to the fate of others, even those who look like them and share their origins and cultural pretensions.
Coburn is retiring after his current term: Maybe he’d be less quick to rush before the cameras to display his austerity plumage if he had to stand for another election. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true anymore. His real political masters, Koch Industries, et al, will applaud his haste to emphasize what’s really important in the face of a natural disaster, which is to keep corporate tax rates low and gut regulations on industries that contribute to extreme climate events.
And even if voters remember some other austerity peacock’s callous disregard for an unfolding disaster in some future election (doubtful thanks to the flood of corporate money that swings most elections), the heartless pricks who are voted out of office can transition seamlessly into cushy private sector influence-peddling gigs.
There’s really nothing new to see here, I suppose, but I can’t help but feel that something has been lost nonetheless: basic human decency, fundamental accountability — or at least the need to pretend that these quaint notions are relevant.
[X-posted at Rumproast]Thursday Evening Open Thread
(Narration mildly NSFW)
Speaking of spiky yet oddly lovable primitive predators from before the dawn of time, Dave Weigel reports “Witness the Devastating Impact the Benghazi Story Has Had on Hillary Clinton’s Poll Numbers“:
Public Policy Polling has come out with some of the more trollish-yet-useful polls of the 2016 race. (By definition, any 2016 poll conducted in 2013 is trollish.) Because they always put a ballot test in the questionnaire, PPP’s robots get a pretty lean, accurate measure of what people think of the candidates as candidates, not as famous people….
No wonder that, as Dan Amira reports in NYMag, “Mitt Romney’s Chief Strategist Thinks Hillary Clinton Would Lose 2016 Democratic Nomination“. (Or at least, he’s willing to say that to the National Review.)
***********
Apart from prodding the h8terz, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: Couldn’t Find It on A Map
(Mike Thompson via GoComics.com)
Why I love Mr. Charles P. Pierce — “The Greatest. Poll. Ever“:
I am going to print out this poll and, perhaps, put it on my wall in a gilded frame. I hope every cable teevee haircut who plans to ride the Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! train to riches and fame and glory does the same thing because this is the best result in a poll in the history of results from polls. Forty-one percent of Republicans polled believe that this is the biggest political scandal in American history. (And roasting on adjoining spits in hell, John Mitchell, Harry Daugherty, and the members of the Whiskey Ring have a collective sad.) But that’s not the truly golden part. That would be this, as PPP shows a gift for deadpan comedy I had not anticipated.
One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.
Am I a bad liberal if I assume that some considerable percentage of these people couldn’t find New York or San Francisco on a map, either?
Or their own arses, even with their heads stuck up them?