As the Bush gang moves out and the new administration moves in, there is the pressing issue of how now do we categorize the Bush dogs of the Democratic party? There is always the time-tested guideline "if it looks like, smells like, tastes like, then..." And is this the guideline to judge the President-Elect? Clearly his paramount concern is to occupy the center-right, regardless of the necessary policies this country in crisis requires. This is pretty much the same political territory that our current crop of Bush dogs occupy and certainly many of the certifiable worst, right-leaning, Bush-excusing in Congress and elsewhere have been recruited for his DLC-heavy right-leaning administration. Even on the matter of the stimulus, Obama and his economic team are on the right of the Democratic party with their new trickle-down stimulus proposals. His latest appointments include Sanjay Gupta who has proved his mainstream bonafides by his gratuitous and specious attacks on Michael Moore's "Sicko". John Brennan, the outspoken torture apologist has made his way back into the administration and Admiral Blair has apparently a sordid history of defending and promoting the blood-soaked hands of the Indonesian military in its massacring the East Timorese (described here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0110/1231515470074.html as follows)
"Congress cut off ties to the Indonesian military in 1999 after
paramilitary groups backed by the military and supported by the US had
killed more than 200,000 people in East Timor over a period of 20
years. Admiral Blair, who was US Pacific Command chief, told the Senate
armed services committee in March 1999 that the Indonesian military had
played "a difficult but generally positive role" in East Timor.
The
following month, he met Gen Wiranto, the Indonesian military commander,
offering his support for a restoration of US relations while groups
backed by the general rampaged through East Timor, attacking a church
and executing dozens of civilians."
Now we also hear from the Black Agenda report about Obama's basketball partner who is to become Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Please read what they say about this truly execrable choice:
Did Barack Obama Just Appoint An Underqualified Stooge and
Privatizer Secretary ofEducation?
"The short answer seems to be "yes." Before
being appointed CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan never saw the
inside of a classroom as a teacher. This is probably a good thing, since Duncan does not possess
the academic qualifications to be even a substitute teacher. Worse still,
Duncan's idea of improving inner-city schools in
Chicago is
handing them over to corporate-run charter schools or converting them to
military academies. This, says longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt,
is not the change we voted for"
It seems to me using the guidelines above that indeed Obama has become for the purposes of being Chief Executive a Bush dog.
Arne Duncan graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in sociology in 1987. Puts him above most teachers in academic qualifications.
Duncan has extensive experience in educational policy and management, but has not been a teacher. And he is not going to be a teacher now he is dealing with policy and management.
In 1992 Duncan became director of the Ariel Education Initiative, a program to enhance educational opportunities for children on Chicago's South Side that was started by John W. Rogers, Jr., and in 1998 he joined the Chicago Public Schools. He became Deputy Chief of Staff for former Schools CEO Paul Vallas in 1999.[14] In 1996, along with Rogers, he was part of a network that funded and supported Ariel Community Academy.
As far as Blair goes if he did all this stuff wrong re East Timor would somebosy please tell me why the Clinton administration either didn't have him fired and demoted. And why after he supposedly disobeyed orers he was sent back again to East Timor. Somebodies story on this guy is ass backwards.
You seem quite knowledgable. I will tell you what I know from fairly public sources concerning Blair and Duncan and if you have more information I hope you will share it. Let me start with Admiral Blair. The following is from an article by Allan Nairn in the Nation dated September 9, 1999. (Here is the blurb from the article describing Nairn's credentials: "While the Indonesian military's thugs continue their rampage in East Timor, most foreign reporters have fled the country. As of September 7, frequent Nation contributor and award-winning journalist Allan Nairn was believed to be the only US reporter still there. Nairn left the besieged UN compound and walked the streets of Dili, where he hid in abandoned houses as he observed troops and militia burning and looting. Nairn has been writing about the troubles there for years. In 1991, after being badly beaten by Indonesian troops while witnessing the massacre of several hundred East Timorese, he was declared a "threat to national security" and banned from the country. He has entered several times illegally since then. In his Nation dispatch from East Timor on March 30, 1998, Nairn disclosed the continuing US military training of Indonesian troops implicated in the torture and killing of civilians. He filed this report by satellite telephone to The Nation through Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!")
As to Nairn's description AT THE TIME (not now I emphasize) concerning the good Admiral:
"US officials say that this past April, as militia terror escalated, a top US officer was dispatched to give a message to Jakarta. Adm. Dennis Blair, the US Commander in Chief of the Pacific, leader of all US military forces in the Pacific region, was sent to meet with General Wiranto, the Indonesian armed forces commander, on April 8. Blair's mission, as one senior US official told me, was to tell Wiranto that the time had come to shut the militia operation down. The gravity of the meeting was heightened by the fact that two days before, the militias had committed a horrific machete massacre at the Catholic church in Liquiça, Timor. YAYASAN HAK, a Timorese human rights group, estimated that many dozens of civilians were murdered. Some of the victims' flesh was reportedly stuck to the walls of the church and a pastor's house. But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on Liquiça, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance.
According to the cable, which was drafted by Col. Joseph Daves, US military attaché in Jakarta, Admiral Blair "told the armed forces chief that he looks forward to the time when [the army will] resume its proper role as a leader in the region. He invited General Wiranto to come to Hawaii as his guest in conjunction with the next round of bilateral defense discussions in the July-August '99 time frame. He said Pacific command is prepared to support a subject matter expert exchange for doctrinal development. He expects that approval will be granted to send a small team to provide technical assistance to police and...selected TNI personnel on crowd control measures."
Admiral Blair at no point told Wiranto to stop the militia operation, going the other way by inviting him to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Blair told Wiranto that the United States would initiate this new riot-control training for the Indonesian armed forces. This was quite significant, because it would be the first new US training program for the Indonesian military since 1992. Although State Department officials had been assured in writing that only police and no soldiers would be part of this training, Blair told Wiranto that, yes, soldiers could be included. So although Blair was sent in with the mission of telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, he did the opposite.
Indonesian officers I spoke to said Wiranto was delighted by the meeting. They took this as a green light to proceed with the militia operation. The only reference in the classified cable to the militias was the following: "Wiranto was emphatic: as long as East Timor is an integral part of the territory of Indonesia, Armed Forces have responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the region. Wiranto said the military will take steps to disarm FALINTIL pro-independence group concurrently with the WANRA militia force. Admiral Blair reminded Wiranto that fairly or unfairly the international community looks at East Timor as a barometer of progress for Indonesian reform. Most importantly, the process of change in East Timor could proceed peacefully, he said."
So that was it. No admonition. When Wiranto referred to disarming the WANRA force, he was talking about another militia force, different from the one that was staging attacks on Timorese civilians. When word got back to the State Department that Blair had said these things in a meeting, an "eyes only" cable was dispatched from the State Department to Ambassador Stapleton Roy at the embassy in Jakarta. The thrust of this cable was that what Blair had done was unacceptable and that it must be reversed. As a result of that cable from Washington to Roy, a corrective phone call was arranged between General Wiranto and Admiral Blair. That call took place on April 18.
I have the official report on that phone call, which was written by Blair's aide, Lieut. Col. Tom Sidwell. According to the account of the call and according to US military officials I spoke to, once again Blair failed to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down. In fact, Blair instead permitted Wiranto to make, in essence, a political speech saying the same thing he had said before. Here is one passage from the account: "General Wiranto denies that TNI and the police supported any one group during the incidents"--meaning during the military attacks. "General Wiranto will go to East Timor tomorrow to emphasize three things:...Timorese, especially the two disputing groups, to solve the problem peacefully with dialogue; 2) encourage the militia to disarm; 3) make the situation peaceful and solve the problem." At no point did Blair demand that the militias be shut down, and in fact this call was followed by escalating militia violence and increases in concrete, new US military assistance to Indonesia, including the sending in of a US Air Force trainer just weeks ago to train the Indonesian Air Force. "
Now, to me this is horrendous. It doesn't matter if he is appointed by Bush or by Obama. But if you think the account is false, please direct me to some reliable account that disputes this. If you think the report is accurate, but you think the massacres by the Indonesian military and/or Blair's greenlighting them despite orders to do the opposite are somehow morally defensible I will be interested in reading why you so think this. I want to turn to Duncan but this is already long so I will break it down into two separate posts.
You seem to miss the main point I was trying to make about Duncan. I did get in the crack about basketball. You are right that Duncan is not just that. But my real intention was to indicate the discontent with Duncan's policies and orientations, not that he has no educational background. He has never taught. But as you point out he has a degree in sociology, and is currently the head of the Chicago school system. Here is what he has been criticized for by what I find an extremely reputable union source. Please note Duncan's affinity for converting public schools into military-style schools and charter schools and his penchant for closing large numbers of public schools, his strong endorsement of high-stakes testing which I, as an educator, have a serious problem with since it forces one to teach to the test and not to the class and curriculum. If you can give me more information on the actual practice of this Ariel Education Initiative, I will be appreciative. Here is what I know from Black Agenda:
"This is a transcript of a December 22, 2008 Bruce Dixon interview with longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt broadcast on WRFG 89.3 FM Atlanta.
BD: Our next guest George Schmidt was a Chicago Public School teacher for 28 years. A longtime union activist, he was once a candidate for presidency of the 28,000 member Chicago Teachers Union, one of the largest union locals of any kind in the nation. He is a founding member of Substance and Substance News, an organization and a newspaper originally founded to represent the views of Chicago's substitute teachers. Substance News, which you can find online at substancenews.net is still required reading for anybody who wants an unfiltered view of the road public education has taken in Chicago and nationwide over the last two decades. How you doin' Mr. Schmidt?
GS: It's been a fun week, to be sure.
"This is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for."
BD: We've got a lot to cover. Can you tell us about your own background for the first minute or so of this?
GS: Well, I spent almost all my public school teaching career in the inner city high schools of Chicago, starting at Dusable in the upper grade center, and teaching at schools like Manley, Marshall, Collins and Tilden. My last years of teaching were at Bowen High School on the city's far south side near the Indiana border where I taught English and where I also served as union delegate and what we called the school security coordinator. During those years I was also very active in the union, as you pointed out. At one point I got over 40% of the vote in a race for president of the Chicago Teachers Union, but I didn't win.
BD: Yeah, it takes a little more than 40%. Well, we're talking to Mr. Schmidt because last week president-elect Barack Obama tapped Arne Duncan, who heads the Chicago Public Schools to be his Secretary of Education. Now Chicago has the third largest school system in the nation, so if you can make it work for the citizens of Chicago maybe you ought to get a chance to do it nationwide. So how's it workin' in Chicago, man?
GS: Basically, it's not. It's not working for the majority of children in the city and it's certainly not working for the majority of teachers. In order to understand how that particular sentence can be nuanced, you have to understand two things. The first is the dominance of the corporate narrative of “school reform”. In 1995 democratic control of the Chicago Public schools was taken out of the hands of parents, teachers, and citizens and put into the hands of Chicago Mayor, Richard M. Daley. A new law which was passed by the all-Republican state government at the time gave Mayor Daley the power to appoint a seven member school board eventually--- at first he appointed a five member thing that was called the School Reform Board of Trustees --- and the power to appoint a newly created chief executive officer based on the corporate model to run the Chicago Public Schools. Daley was also given power over the entire school system's budget, and for the first time in 17 years, the school system was freed from the oversight of an outside entity called the School Finance Authority.
What Daley did since then was basically massively increase the public relations spin that was put on every activity performed in Chicago, to the point where the gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet.
BD: We hear a lot about “reforming education.” I'm from Chicago, and back in the 80s when I was involved in school reform, school reform meant giving more power to parents and to rank and file teachers, power to determine curriculum, even to let parents evaluate the performance of teachers and programs and principals. You talked about the corporate narrative of school reform. Just what is that?
GS: The corporate narrative is the dictatorial model that you get in any corporation under a chief executive officer or CEO. And just as it's failed now miserably in corporate America, with the collapse of Wall Street and the finance industry, it's failed in the public schools as well. But just as a year ago you would find very few dissenters on the private sector analogy so today we still find not a loud enough voice for those who dissent against the claims that the corporate model (of education reform) has succeeded. Basically what you're talking about by the late 1980s we had one of the most democratic models – with a small d – of school improvement anywhere in the United States. In 1988 Illinois passed a law which gave an elected Local School council of ten or eleven members the power at every school to hire and fire the principal to set curriculum and to have an enormous say over the budget. The majority of those Local School Council members were parents. Those of us who were active at the time participated in those elections and those processes.
BD: So that was school reform in the eighties.
GS: That was school reform in the eighties, and that grew primarily out of the work of Harold Washington who we elected mayor of the city of Chicago in 1983 in a mass movement that locally rivaled the mass movement which just elected Barack Obama president of the United States.
BD: So now we've replaced democratic school reform that gave parents the power with what exactly? I understand one of Arne's pet things is giving public high schools over to the US military.
GS: Yeah, that's one example of several and it's a very good one. Beginning in the first days of the 21st century, literally Chicago instituted military high schools. And we're not talking about high schools that have ROTC programs, we're talking about high schools that are run by and for the military. The first of those was established in the heart of Bronzeville, the south side community at 35th and Giles, in the old armory there. It's now the Chicago Military Academy. Since then they've set up two more army high schools. Carver and Phoenix, a Marine high school and a naval academy which is named the Hyman Rickover Naval Academy inside Senn High School.
BD: Except for the naval academy operation inside Senn High School all of these are in African American communities, are they not?
GS: Yes they are.
HG: George
this is Heather Gray. Is this a model that's in other parts of the country as well? Are other cities doing this?
GS: No.
HG: So this is unique to Chicago.
GS: This is unique to Chicago.
GS: Most places where you have more democracy, even where you have this CEO type dictatorship now, the citizens are better positioned to resist it than we are here in Chicago.
BD: In chicago, for the benefit of our audience, we're in Atlanta GA now, the mayor is Richard Daley. 2009 marks his 20th year in office. His father was the mayor too for almost as long, from about 1956 if I remember right to 1975, I think, eighteen or ninetten years. So out of the last fifty or so years, for forty of them the city of Chicago has been run by the Daley clicque, the Daley Regime, or as we call it in Chicago, the Machine. Arne Duncan, is he a product of the Machine.
GS: Exactly, Daley as I pointed out, in 1995 was given dictatorial power over the ChicagoPublic School system. It was based upon the lie that the system as a whole had failed, and the repetition of that lie from the eighties on. Daley has appointed two CEOs and roughly two school boards since then. Both of the CEOs have been white non-educators who replaced African American educators. Both of the CEOs had no experience in education or in corporate America. This is an important point since it's supposedly a corporate model. They were funamentally political puppets who would do his bidding.
BD: The predecessor to Mr. Duncan (in Chicago) he's a guy named Paul Vallas, isn't he?
GS: That's true. Mr. Vallas came to the chief education job in Chicago through his position as budget director at City Hall under Mayor Daley.
HG: George, just going back to the military model (of education) again. What have been Barack Obama's comments about this, if any at all.
"The gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet."
GS: I haven't heard comment from Barack Obama himself, and I've known him since he was in the Illinois State Senate, and I was working for the Chicago Teachers Union. Never to my knowledge, and that may be contradicted by something on the record did he comment on this assault on the openness of Chicago high schools. But his newly incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuael has been a proud proponent of the military academies and even bragged on one occasion I was covering a press conference and he was with Mayor Daley that he got a million dollar earmakr speicifically for the military academies while he was in the US House of Representatives as my congressman.
BD: So it does say something that out of all the superintendents of school systems, CEOs or whatever nationwide, Barack Obama reached around and found one that not only liked the corporate model but liked the military model too. Since we're talking about Chicago's unique contribution to education on the national stage, let's stick with Paul Vallas. You said Paul Vallas got his start just an average guy on the budget team on the City Hall budget team, where did Mr. Vallas go after leaving the Chicago Public Schools”
GS: After Daley dumped Vallas in 2001, he was picked up by Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania who was trying to privatize the Philadelphia school system. Vallas was made head of the Philadelphia school system in mid 2002 after a failed attempt to get himself elected governor of Illinois. He ran Philadelphia for four years I believe, the chronology may be a little off. Presently he's been sent to New Orleans where the public school system has been obliterated after Hurricane Katrina and replaced by a system of primarily charter schools, many of which have been modeled on the charter school privatization plans originally hatched here in Chicago.
BD: Arne Duncan is going to be the nation's number one guy on education. Surely this guy must have years and years of classroom and administrative experience,
GS: Wrong. He has none.
BD: So he's never been in a classroom?
GS: No.
BD: Except as a student, perhaps.
GS: He talks now, as he tries to brush over his resume, about how when he was a student at the very privileged University of Chicago Lab School where his father was a professor at the University of Chicago, that after school he would go to a tutoring program his mother ran in that area north of the University of Chicago called Kenwood, where he apparently, according to Arne's narrative helped poor black children with their homework. That's the extent of Arne Duncan's actual educational experience or praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I've never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball...
praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I've never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball...
HG: What do you mean you haven't been allowed to see a resume? Why do you say that? You've asked for a resume and you've never seen one?
GS: For the past 14 years we've asked for the curriculum vitaes and resumes of top officials of the Chicago Public Schools under the Freedom of Information Act. And the answer we get every time we repeat this request is that this is classified privileged personnel information.
BD: Of course the new Obama administration is pledged to openess and transparency everywhere, so I'm sure that Arne's resumes and cv's and all that will surface really soon.
GS: If that's the case, people are going to find out that he spent most of his adult life either playing basketball or working with some very wealthy financiers from his old neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago.
BD: Since we are talking about applying this Chicago model of public education nationwide, what has the regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that don't meet testing goals which is now national policy thanks to No Child Left Behind meant to Chicago – oh, and one other thing I'd like to see if I can get your comment on is that Hillary Clinton at one point said let's repeal No Child Left Behind while Barack was saying, well, he didn't quite say mend it but don't end it, but something like that. So what has the regime of high stakes testing done for African Americans in Chicago and public education in Chicago?
GS: Basically the vast majority of the schools that have been closed for supposed academic failure, which means low test scores, have been those schools which served a populaiton of 100% poor black children via a staff that was almost always majority black teachers and usually a black principal. Since Arne Duncan took over in 2001, he has closed over 20 elementary schools. Most of them have been privatized into charter schools, and he's closed six high schools. In all the cases I know of, the majority of the staffs of those schools who were then kicked out of union jobs and forced on the rooad to try to get new jobs, were majority black teachers and principals, many of which I knew personally. The six high schools he closed, Austin HS, Calumet HS, Collins HS, Englewood HS, Orr HS, and Harper HS, were either all black, in the case of five of them, or majority black and Latino in the case of Orr. That's the active record of what Arne Duncan has done in his school closings for which Barack Obama has praised him. .
BD: We're not seeing much of any criticism of Barack Obama's nominations, especially not this nomination...I understand there was a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education soon after the nomination was announced, and some people who were at that meeting took issue with the nomination. Can you tell us about that?
"More than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan's public record of sabotaging public education."
GS: If you don't mind I'll give you a six day backup of that. The teaser stories began on December 11. On that day, Margaret Spelling, who's George Bush's Secretary of Education came to Chicago to stand on stage with Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley and praise the (teacher) merit pay plan that they'd introduced jointly, and to say that Arne Duncan was the same type of educational leader that she and George Bush favored. By Monday the 15th, word was out around Chicago that Duncan was probably the front runner for the Secretary of Education...
BD: He plays ball with the president-elect
GS: Exactly. On the night of the 15th it was made official. Barack Obama held a press conference with Joe Biden at Dodge School on the 16th. On the 17th, the Board of Education had its regular monthly meeting scheduled for downtown Chicago. Even though they apparently, expected it to be a love fest for Arne Duncan, what happened was that more than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan's public record of sabotaging public education, of privatizing schools, of union busting, and of fraudulently cooking the educational statistics books. By the middle of the meeting Duncan had walked out for an hour and these testimonies continued to go on. By the end of the meeting members of the board were heatedly arguing with the teachers, and after the meeting two of the teachers were threatened. Members of Duncan's staff called their principals demanding to know why they had been allowed to take the day off work to talk about Arne Duncan's crimes (against public education) before a school board meeting.
BD: Now I haven't been to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education in a long time, but it's hard to believe that the day after Duncan had been tapped to be Secretary of Education, it's hard to believe that room wasn't full of corporate media. We haven't seen or heard anything about this. Have we? Or did I miss it?
GS: No, the dog and pony shows were on the 16th, at Dodge School where Barack Obama made the announcement with Duncan sitting there. At the Board of Education (meeting), one of the most interesting things that happened... was that not one of the TV stations was there to film or video any of this activity during the board meeting. The only photographer there besides me, because I cover every board meeting for Substance, was a woman from the Chicago Tribune and the only photograph the Tribune did was of Barbara Easton Watkins, who according to speculation here is in line to succeed Duncan here in Chicago. The TV stations boycotted the meeting completely, the story in the Tribune was a wacky one that ignored most of what happened in the meeting. The Sun-Times which is our other major daily newspaper covered the meeting slightly accurately, and NPR had a reporter there who missed 98% of what was actually going on, typical for the way Chicago Public Radio has been covering this type of story.
BD: The regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that came into national prominence which became national policy with No Child Left Behind, then is going to be with us for a while. What does that do to public education? Does it work?
GS: First of all, it has gradients. As soon as I say this you'll know what I am talking about. Public education in the United States is not a unified system of equal access for all children. It's a highly stratified system of at least four or five components. In the wealthy suburbs of any major city you'll find some of the best public schools anywhere on the planet. In Chicago we're talking about Wilmette, Winetka, the north shore, Glen Ellyn in the western suburbs, where the high schools are just everything you could want for your children if you could only afford a home in those areas.
BD: OK.
GS: You move from there and you have rural schools in some of the most challenging schools in some of the most desolate parts of rural North Dakota or Montana. When you get to our cities and the immediate suburbs which have declined industrially too, right now what we have is a three part system, Chicago is the exemplar of that. We have a magnet school system which selects kids on the basis of IQ scores and test scores in kindergarten or the first grade, and keeps them in that magnet school system for twelve years, and that's one of the best school systems you'll find anywhere. Michelle Obama is a graduate of Whitney Young High School which is a part of that system, the magnet and elite schools in Chicago...
BD: We're down to our last minute and a half...
GS: Well then, basically... the place where the impact of high stakes testing has been most devastating has been in those schools which serve the poorest children with the fewest resources and in the most challenging environments. In that area, the schools have not been improved, but instead the teachers and schools have been under attack for failing at things the society has never taken responsibility for.
BD: Last question, if you can do this in ten or twenty seconds or so, people in their millions or tens of millions voted for change. Insofar as education goes, are we gonna get it?
GS: If this the kind of change we needed, then I am still glad I voted for Barack Obama. I'm proud I was able to publish pictures of him and our colleagues. But this is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for here in Chicago, we the people who supported that man, and who've known him and his wife for years and years.
This is pretty much the same political territory that our current crop of Bush dogs occupy and certainly many of the certifiable worst, right-leaning, Bush-excusing in Congress and elsewhere have been recruited for his DLC-heavy right-leaning administration.
What complete and utter nonsense. Stupidity, really. So Obama has selected and appointed to his administration the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Addington, John Yoo, Gonzales, Bolton, Hadley, Hayes, and etc.? Give me a break.
Look, anyone who during the election believed that they would approve of everyone Obama appointed to his administration or every policy which he would pursue was deluded. To equate the Obama administration to Bush's is just ridiculous.
As Obama explained in an interview a few weeks back, he is the person who will dictate the policies his administration will pursue.
It is the same political space occupied by the Bush dogs. You apparently do not know this term although it is commonly used on the left. It does not refer to Bush and company. It refers to "Bush-lite" Democrats, such as those of the DLC (which heavily occupy the Obama cabinet: Salazar and Clinton being the most prominent).
You're right I was unfamiliar with the term. You apparently also "don't know this term". According to the Open Left blog, which apparently coined the term, it refers to members of Congress "who enable the right-wing through their support of Bush's policies on core progressive values at key moments." Apparently the term is Open Left's variation on Blue Dog democrats.
What is a Bush Dog, in one sentence?
Bush Dog Democrats are Democratic members of Congress who enable the right-wing through their support of Bush's policies on core progressive values at key moments.
What are these core progressive values and these key moments?
Currently, we're using the capitulation vote on Iraq back in May, 2007, and the disgraceful vote to give Bush warrantless wiretapping powers as proxies for Bush Doggedness. We think that if you voted for both of these, you are an enabler of Bush's policies.
We've made an exception for Brian Baird (WA-03), who voted correctly on FISA. Upon getting back from Iraq, Baird, in the face of all the evidence, touted the surge's success and explained that opposition to the continuation of the surge was borne of partisanship and a lack of concern for American moral authority. Using the right-wing media to attack core progressive values is a quick route to becoming a Bush Dog.
And
So who specifically are these people? As Chris Bowers noted, the two biggest defeats for House Democrats so far in 2007 have been the capitulation vote on Iraq, and the vote to allow Alberto Gonzales warrant-less wiretapping powers. We're calling the Democrats who capitulated on both bills 'Bush Dogs', as these are the most likely to capitulate on important fights in the future.
So obviously, the answer to your question is no.
I agree. I am using the term in a looser way to signify the accomodationist wing of the Democratic Party. In fact I explicitly noted at the beginning of the post that now that Bush is history the meaning of the term if it is to be used has to be modified and I proposed loosening it in a very inexact way. I have MANY problems with Obama so far; I will write my Senators and Congressperson to indicate that I do not support the Obama stimulus problem and how upset I am that Democratic and particularly Obama pandering to Republicans would weaken perhaps the most important measure of the next few years; we are really facing a depression and the suffering is already widespread. To water down the stimulus bill with an unnecessary tax cut after Obama shepherded and gave key support to a seriously flawed bailout bill is not only irresponsible, it is disgraceful. Do you think we can keep pissing away $700 billion in ways that make Republicans happy and then have more to correct the damage? Shouldn't he stop his posturing and keep to the main lines he campaigned for namely fixing Amerrica's monumental problems and easing the widespread suffering brought on by Republican misrule. Sure change the tone of the debate but we don't need Alan Colmes; we need someone who is strong addressing very severe problems.
BTW I do not think Obama was honorable in his FISA vote. I do not think that is a good example for you to use. It supports my case.
I agree. I am using the term in a looser way to signify the accomodationist wing of the Democratic Party. In fact I explicitly noted at the beginning of the post that now that Bush is history the meaning of the term if it is to be used has to be modified and I proposed loosening it in a very inexact way. I have MANY problems with Obama so far; I will write my Senators and Congressperson to indicate that I do not support the Obama stimulus problem and how upset I am that Democratic and particularly Obama pandering to Republicans would weaken perhaps the most important measure of the next few years; we are really facing a depression and the suffering is already widespread. To water down the stimulus bill with an unnecessary tax cut after Obama shepherded and gave key support to a seriously flawed bailout bill is not only irresponsible, it is disgraceful. Do you think we can keep pissing away $700 billion in ways that make Republicans happy and then have more to correct the damage? Shouldn't he stop his posturing and keep to the main lines he campaigned for namely fixing Amerrica's monumental problems and easing the widespread suffering brought on by Republican misrule. Sure change the tone of the debate but we don't need Alan Colmes; we need someone who is strong addressing very severe problems.
BTW I do not think Obama was honorable in his FISA vote. I do not think that is a good example for you to use. It supports my case.
Lots of information in the dialogue between the two of you. Thanks.
In response to the tile of your post:
NO
I am using the term in a looser way to signify the accomodationist wing of the Democratic Party.
In which case, see my comment above.
I read it and responded. I reread it and do not get what you mean. Would you mind expanding?
In regards to US education, as a British mother of 3 sons who are at present in the US education system, I see there are many insidious factors that contribute to the dire failure of the education system, for many. Some of the people reading this list of comments might be interested in a unique education reform book that a colleague and I have compiled - Education:The Emperor's New Clothes, by Carlson & Felix, 2008. This book does not pander to political correctness or jargon, and is an easy read with many original cartoons and famous quotes. It is a verbal documentary from teachers, parents and concerned individuals world-wide. Here is the publisher’s link, for more information - http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/Education.html
Arne Duncan graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in sociology in 1987. Puts him above most teachers in academic qualifications.
Duncan has extensive experience in educational policy and management, but has not been a teacher. And he is not going to be a teacher now he is dealing with policy and management.
In 1992 Duncan became director of the Ariel Education Initiative, a program to enhance educational opportunities for children on Chicago's South Side that was started by John W. Rogers, Jr., and in 1998 he joined the Chicago Public Schools. He became Deputy Chief of Staff for former Schools CEO Paul Vallas in 1999.[14] In 1996, along with Rogers, he was part of a network that funded and supported Ariel Community Academy.
As far as Blair goes if he did all this stuff wrong re East Timor would somebosy please tell me why the Clinton administration either didn't have him fired and demoted. And why after he supposedly disobeyed orers he was sent back again to East Timor. Somebodies story on this guy is ass backwards.
January 10, 2009 10:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
You seem quite knowledgable. I will tell you what I know from fairly public sources concerning Blair and Duncan and if you have more information I hope you will share it. Let me start with Admiral Blair. The following is from an article by Allan Nairn in the Nation dated September 9, 1999. (Here is the blurb from the article describing Nairn's credentials: "While the Indonesian military's thugs continue their rampage in East Timor, most foreign reporters have fled the country. As of September 7, frequent Nation contributor and award-winning journalist Allan Nairn was believed to be the only US reporter still there. Nairn left the besieged UN compound and walked the streets of Dili, where he hid in abandoned houses as he observed troops and militia burning and looting. Nairn has been writing about the troubles there for years. In 1991, after being badly beaten by Indonesian troops while witnessing the massacre of several hundred East Timorese, he was declared a "threat to national security" and banned from the country. He has entered several times illegally since then. In his Nation dispatch from East Timor on March 30, 1998, Nairn disclosed the continuing US military training of Indonesian troops implicated in the torture and killing of civilians. He filed this report by satellite telephone to The Nation through Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!")
As to Nairn's description AT THE TIME (not now I emphasize) concerning the good Admiral:
"US officials say that this past April, as militia terror escalated, a top US officer was dispatched to give a message to Jakarta. Adm. Dennis Blair, the US Commander in Chief of the Pacific, leader of all US military forces in the Pacific region, was sent to meet with General Wiranto, the Indonesian armed forces commander, on April 8. Blair's mission, as one senior US official told me, was to tell Wiranto that the time had come to shut the militia operation down. The gravity of the meeting was heightened by the fact that two days before, the militias had committed a horrific machete massacre at the Catholic church in Liquiça, Timor. YAYASAN HAK, a Timorese human rights group, estimated that many dozens of civilians were murdered. Some of the victims' flesh was reportedly stuck to the walls of the church and a pastor's house. But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on Liquiça, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance.
According to the cable, which was drafted by Col. Joseph Daves, US military attaché in Jakarta, Admiral Blair "told the armed forces chief that he looks forward to the time when [the army will] resume its proper role as a leader in the region. He invited General Wiranto to come to Hawaii as his guest in conjunction with the next round of bilateral defense discussions in the July-August '99 time frame. He said Pacific command is prepared to support a subject matter expert exchange for doctrinal development. He expects that approval will be granted to send a small team to provide technical assistance to police and...selected TNI personnel on crowd control measures."
Admiral Blair at no point told Wiranto to stop the militia operation, going the other way by inviting him to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Blair told Wiranto that the United States would initiate this new riot-control training for the Indonesian armed forces. This was quite significant, because it would be the first new US training program for the Indonesian military since 1992. Although State Department officials had been assured in writing that only police and no soldiers would be part of this training, Blair told Wiranto that, yes, soldiers could be included. So although Blair was sent in with the mission of telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, he did the opposite.
Indonesian officers I spoke to said Wiranto was delighted by the meeting. They took this as a green light to proceed with the militia operation. The only reference in the classified cable to the militias was the following: "Wiranto was emphatic: as long as East Timor is an integral part of the territory of Indonesia, Armed Forces have responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the region. Wiranto said the military will take steps to disarm FALINTIL pro-independence group concurrently with the WANRA militia force. Admiral Blair reminded Wiranto that fairly or unfairly the international community looks at East Timor as a barometer of progress for Indonesian reform. Most importantly, the process of change in East Timor could proceed peacefully, he said."
So that was it. No admonition. When Wiranto referred to disarming the WANRA force, he was talking about another militia force, different from the one that was staging attacks on Timorese civilians. When word got back to the State Department that Blair had said these things in a meeting, an "eyes only" cable was dispatched from the State Department to Ambassador Stapleton Roy at the embassy in Jakarta. The thrust of this cable was that what Blair had done was unacceptable and that it must be reversed. As a result of that cable from Washington to Roy, a corrective phone call was arranged between General Wiranto and Admiral Blair. That call took place on April 18.
I have the official report on that phone call, which was written by Blair's aide, Lieut. Col. Tom Sidwell. According to the account of the call and according to US military officials I spoke to, once again Blair failed to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down. In fact, Blair instead permitted Wiranto to make, in essence, a political speech saying the same thing he had said before. Here is one passage from the account: "General Wiranto denies that TNI and the police supported any one group during the incidents"--meaning during the military attacks. "General Wiranto will go to East Timor tomorrow to emphasize three things:...Timorese, especially the two disputing groups, to solve the problem peacefully with dialogue; 2) encourage the militia to disarm; 3) make the situation peaceful and solve the problem." At no point did Blair demand that the militias be shut down, and in fact this call was followed by escalating militia violence and increases in concrete, new US military assistance to Indonesia, including the sending in of a US Air Force trainer just weeks ago to train the Indonesian Air Force. "
Now, to me this is horrendous. It doesn't matter if he is appointed by Bush or by Obama. But if you think the account is false, please direct me to some reliable account that disputes this. If you think the report is accurate, but you think the massacres by the Indonesian military and/or Blair's greenlighting them despite orders to do the opposite are somehow morally defensible I will be interested in reading why you so think this. I want to turn to Duncan but this is already long so I will break it down into two separate posts.
January 11, 2009 12:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
You seem to miss the main point I was trying to make about Duncan. I did get in the crack about basketball. You are right that Duncan is not just that. But my real intention was to indicate the discontent with Duncan's policies and orientations, not that he has no educational background. He has never taught. But as you point out he has a degree in sociology, and is currently the head of the Chicago school system. Here is what he has been criticized for by what I find an extremely reputable union source. Please note Duncan's affinity for converting public schools into military-style schools and charter schools and his penchant for closing large numbers of public schools, his strong endorsement of high-stakes testing which I, as an educator, have a serious problem with since it forces one to teach to the test and not to the class and curriculum. If you can give me more information on the actual practice of this Ariel Education Initiative, I will be appreciative. Here is what I know from Black Agenda:
"This is a transcript of a December 22, 2008 Bruce Dixon interview with longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt broadcast on WRFG 89.3 FM Atlanta.
BD: Our next guest George Schmidt was a Chicago Public School teacher for 28 years. A longtime union activist, he was once a candidate for presidency of the 28,000 member Chicago Teachers Union, one of the largest union locals of any kind in the nation. He is a founding member of Substance and Substance News, an organization and a newspaper originally founded to represent the views of Chicago's substitute teachers. Substance News, which you can find online at substancenews.net is still required reading for anybody who wants an unfiltered view of the road public education has taken in Chicago and nationwide over the last two decades. How you doin' Mr. Schmidt?
GS: It's been a fun week, to be sure.
"This is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for."
BD: We've got a lot to cover. Can you tell us about your own background for the first minute or so of this?
GS: Well, I spent almost all my public school teaching career in the inner city high schools of Chicago, starting at Dusable in the upper grade center, and teaching at schools like Manley, Marshall, Collins and Tilden. My last years of teaching were at Bowen High School on the city's far south side near the Indiana border where I taught English and where I also served as union delegate and what we called the school security coordinator. During those years I was also very active in the union, as you pointed out. At one point I got over 40% of the vote in a race for president of the Chicago Teachers Union, but I didn't win.
BD: Yeah, it takes a little more than 40%. Well, we're talking to Mr. Schmidt because last week president-elect Barack Obama tapped Arne Duncan, who heads the Chicago Public Schools to be his Secretary of Education. Now Chicago has the third largest school system in the nation, so if you can make it work for the citizens of Chicago maybe you ought to get a chance to do it nationwide. So how's it workin' in Chicago, man?
GS: Basically, it's not. It's not working for the majority of children in the city and it's certainly not working for the majority of teachers. In order to understand how that particular sentence can be nuanced, you have to understand two things. The first is the dominance of the corporate narrative of “school reform”. In 1995 democratic control of the Chicago Public schools was taken out of the hands of parents, teachers, and citizens and put into the hands of Chicago Mayor, Richard M. Daley. A new law which was passed by the all-Republican state government at the time gave Mayor Daley the power to appoint a seven member school board eventually--- at first he appointed a five member thing that was called the School Reform Board of Trustees --- and the power to appoint a newly created chief executive officer based on the corporate model to run the Chicago Public Schools. Daley was also given power over the entire school system's budget, and for the first time in 17 years, the school system was freed from the oversight of an outside entity called the School Finance Authority.
What Daley did since then was basically massively increase the public relations spin that was put on every activity performed in Chicago, to the point where the gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet.
BD: We hear a lot about “reforming education.” I'm from Chicago, and back in the 80s when I was involved in school reform, school reform meant giving more power to parents and to rank and file teachers, power to determine curriculum, even to let parents evaluate the performance of teachers and programs and principals. You talked about the corporate narrative of school reform. Just what is that?
GS: The corporate narrative is the dictatorial model that you get in any corporation under a chief executive officer or CEO. And just as it's failed now miserably in corporate America, with the collapse of Wall Street and the finance industry, it's failed in the public schools as well. But just as a year ago you would find very few dissenters on the private sector analogy so today we still find not a loud enough voice for those who dissent against the claims that the corporate model (of education reform) has succeeded. Basically what you're talking about by the late 1980s we had one of the most democratic models – with a small d – of school improvement anywhere in the United States. In 1988 Illinois passed a law which gave an elected Local School council of ten or eleven members the power at every school to hire and fire the principal to set curriculum and to have an enormous say over the budget. The majority of those Local School Council members were parents. Those of us who were active at the time participated in those elections and those processes.
BD: So that was school reform in the eighties.
GS: That was school reform in the eighties, and that grew primarily out of the work of Harold Washington who we elected mayor of the city of Chicago in 1983 in a mass movement that locally rivaled the mass movement which just elected Barack Obama president of the United States.
BD: So now we've replaced democratic school reform that gave parents the power with what exactly? I understand one of Arne's pet things is giving public high schools over to the US military.
GS: Yeah, that's one example of several and it's a very good one. Beginning in the first days of the 21st century, literally Chicago instituted military high schools. And we're not talking about high schools that have ROTC programs, we're talking about high schools that are run by and for the military. The first of those was established in the heart of Bronzeville, the south side community at 35th and Giles, in the old armory there. It's now the Chicago Military Academy. Since then they've set up two more army high schools. Carver and Phoenix, a Marine high school and a naval academy which is named the Hyman Rickover Naval Academy inside Senn High School.
BD: Except for the naval academy operation inside Senn High School all of these are in African American communities, are they not?
GS: Yes they are.
HG: George
this is Heather Gray. Is this a model that's in other parts of the country as well? Are other cities doing this?
GS: No.
HG: So this is unique to Chicago.
GS: This is unique to Chicago.
GS: Most places where you have more democracy, even where you have this CEO type dictatorship now, the citizens are better positioned to resist it than we are here in Chicago.
BD: In chicago, for the benefit of our audience, we're in Atlanta GA now, the mayor is Richard Daley. 2009 marks his 20th year in office. His father was the mayor too for almost as long, from about 1956 if I remember right to 1975, I think, eighteen or ninetten years. So out of the last fifty or so years, for forty of them the city of Chicago has been run by the Daley clicque, the Daley Regime, or as we call it in Chicago, the Machine. Arne Duncan, is he a product of the Machine.
GS: Exactly, Daley as I pointed out, in 1995 was given dictatorial power over the ChicagoPublic School system. It was based upon the lie that the system as a whole had failed, and the repetition of that lie from the eighties on. Daley has appointed two CEOs and roughly two school boards since then. Both of the CEOs have been white non-educators who replaced African American educators. Both of the CEOs had no experience in education or in corporate America. This is an important point since it's supposedly a corporate model. They were funamentally political puppets who would do his bidding.
BD: The predecessor to Mr. Duncan (in Chicago) he's a guy named Paul Vallas, isn't he?
GS: That's true. Mr. Vallas came to the chief education job in Chicago through his position as budget director at City Hall under Mayor Daley.
HG: George, just going back to the military model (of education) again. What have been Barack Obama's comments about this, if any at all.
"The gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet."
GS: I haven't heard comment from Barack Obama himself, and I've known him since he was in the Illinois State Senate, and I was working for the Chicago Teachers Union. Never to my knowledge, and that may be contradicted by something on the record did he comment on this assault on the openness of Chicago high schools. But his newly incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuael has been a proud proponent of the military academies and even bragged on one occasion I was covering a press conference and he was with Mayor Daley that he got a million dollar earmakr speicifically for the military academies while he was in the US House of Representatives as my congressman.
BD: So it does say something that out of all the superintendents of school systems, CEOs or whatever nationwide, Barack Obama reached around and found one that not only liked the corporate model but liked the military model too. Since we're talking about Chicago's unique contribution to education on the national stage, let's stick with Paul Vallas. You said Paul Vallas got his start just an average guy on the budget team on the City Hall budget team, where did Mr. Vallas go after leaving the Chicago Public Schools”
GS: After Daley dumped Vallas in 2001, he was picked up by Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania who was trying to privatize the Philadelphia school system. Vallas was made head of the Philadelphia school system in mid 2002 after a failed attempt to get himself elected governor of Illinois. He ran Philadelphia for four years I believe, the chronology may be a little off. Presently he's been sent to New Orleans where the public school system has been obliterated after Hurricane Katrina and replaced by a system of primarily charter schools, many of which have been modeled on the charter school privatization plans originally hatched here in Chicago.
BD: Arne Duncan is going to be the nation's number one guy on education. Surely this guy must have years and years of classroom and administrative experience,
GS: Wrong. He has none.
BD: So he's never been in a classroom?
GS: No.
BD: Except as a student, perhaps.
GS: He talks now, as he tries to brush over his resume, about how when he was a student at the very privileged University of Chicago Lab School where his father was a professor at the University of Chicago, that after school he would go to a tutoring program his mother ran in that area north of the University of Chicago called Kenwood, where he apparently, according to Arne's narrative helped poor black children with their homework. That's the extent of Arne Duncan's actual educational experience or praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I've never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball...
praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I've never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball...
HG: What do you mean you haven't been allowed to see a resume? Why do you say that? You've asked for a resume and you've never seen one?
GS: For the past 14 years we've asked for the curriculum vitaes and resumes of top officials of the Chicago Public Schools under the Freedom of Information Act. And the answer we get every time we repeat this request is that this is classified privileged personnel information.
BD: Of course the new Obama administration is pledged to openess and transparency everywhere, so I'm sure that Arne's resumes and cv's and all that will surface really soon.
GS: If that's the case, people are going to find out that he spent most of his adult life either playing basketball or working with some very wealthy financiers from his old neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago.
BD: Since we are talking about applying this Chicago model of public education nationwide, what has the regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that don't meet testing goals which is now national policy thanks to No Child Left Behind meant to Chicago – oh, and one other thing I'd like to see if I can get your comment on is that Hillary Clinton at one point said let's repeal No Child Left Behind while Barack was saying, well, he didn't quite say mend it but don't end it, but something like that. So what has the regime of high stakes testing done for African Americans in Chicago and public education in Chicago?
GS: Basically the vast majority of the schools that have been closed for supposed academic failure, which means low test scores, have been those schools which served a populaiton of 100% poor black children via a staff that was almost always majority black teachers and usually a black principal. Since Arne Duncan took over in 2001, he has closed over 20 elementary schools. Most of them have been privatized into charter schools, and he's closed six high schools. In all the cases I know of, the majority of the staffs of those schools who were then kicked out of union jobs and forced on the rooad to try to get new jobs, were majority black teachers and principals, many of which I knew personally. The six high schools he closed, Austin HS, Calumet HS, Collins HS, Englewood HS, Orr HS, and Harper HS, were either all black, in the case of five of them, or majority black and Latino in the case of Orr. That's the active record of what Arne Duncan has done in his school closings for which Barack Obama has praised him. .
BD: We're not seeing much of any criticism of Barack Obama's nominations, especially not this nomination...I understand there was a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education soon after the nomination was announced, and some people who were at that meeting took issue with the nomination. Can you tell us about that?
"More than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan's public record of sabotaging public education."
GS: If you don't mind I'll give you a six day backup of that. The teaser stories began on December 11. On that day, Margaret Spelling, who's George Bush's Secretary of Education came to Chicago to stand on stage with Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley and praise the (teacher) merit pay plan that they'd introduced jointly, and to say that Arne Duncan was the same type of educational leader that she and George Bush favored. By Monday the 15th, word was out around Chicago that Duncan was probably the front runner for the Secretary of Education...
BD: He plays ball with the president-elect
GS: Exactly. On the night of the 15th it was made official. Barack Obama held a press conference with Joe Biden at Dodge School on the 16th. On the 17th, the Board of Education had its regular monthly meeting scheduled for downtown Chicago. Even though they apparently, expected it to be a love fest for Arne Duncan, what happened was that more than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan's public record of sabotaging public education, of privatizing schools, of union busting, and of fraudulently cooking the educational statistics books. By the middle of the meeting Duncan had walked out for an hour and these testimonies continued to go on. By the end of the meeting members of the board were heatedly arguing with the teachers, and after the meeting two of the teachers were threatened. Members of Duncan's staff called their principals demanding to know why they had been allowed to take the day off work to talk about Arne Duncan's crimes (against public education) before a school board meeting.
BD: Now I haven't been to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education in a long time, but it's hard to believe that the day after Duncan had been tapped to be Secretary of Education, it's hard to believe that room wasn't full of corporate media. We haven't seen or heard anything about this. Have we? Or did I miss it?
GS: No, the dog and pony shows were on the 16th, at Dodge School where Barack Obama made the announcement with Duncan sitting there. At the Board of Education (meeting), one of the most interesting things that happened... was that not one of the TV stations was there to film or video any of this activity during the board meeting. The only photographer there besides me, because I cover every board meeting for Substance, was a woman from the Chicago Tribune and the only photograph the Tribune did was of Barbara Easton Watkins, who according to speculation here is in line to succeed Duncan here in Chicago. The TV stations boycotted the meeting completely, the story in the Tribune was a wacky one that ignored most of what happened in the meeting. The Sun-Times which is our other major daily newspaper covered the meeting slightly accurately, and NPR had a reporter there who missed 98% of what was actually going on, typical for the way Chicago Public Radio has been covering this type of story.
BD: The regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that came into national prominence which became national policy with No Child Left Behind, then is going to be with us for a while. What does that do to public education? Does it work?
GS: First of all, it has gradients. As soon as I say this you'll know what I am talking about. Public education in the United States is not a unified system of equal access for all children. It's a highly stratified system of at least four or five components. In the wealthy suburbs of any major city you'll find some of the best public schools anywhere on the planet. In Chicago we're talking about Wilmette, Winetka, the north shore, Glen Ellyn in the western suburbs, where the high schools are just everything you could want for your children if you could only afford a home in those areas.
BD: OK.
GS: You move from there and you have rural schools in some of the most challenging schools in some of the most desolate parts of rural North Dakota or Montana. When you get to our cities and the immediate suburbs which have declined industrially too, right now what we have is a three part system, Chicago is the exemplar of that. We have a magnet school system which selects kids on the basis of IQ scores and test scores in kindergarten or the first grade, and keeps them in that magnet school system for twelve years, and that's one of the best school systems you'll find anywhere. Michelle Obama is a graduate of Whitney Young High School which is a part of that system, the magnet and elite schools in Chicago...
BD: We're down to our last minute and a half...
GS: Well then, basically... the place where the impact of high stakes testing has been most devastating has been in those schools which serve the poorest children with the fewest resources and in the most challenging environments. In that area, the schools have not been improved, but instead the teachers and schools have been under attack for failing at things the society has never taken responsibility for.
BD: Last question, if you can do this in ten or twenty seconds or so, people in their millions or tens of millions voted for change. Insofar as education goes, are we gonna get it?
GS: If this the kind of change we needed, then I am still glad I voted for Barack Obama. I'm proud I was able to publish pictures of him and our colleagues. But this is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for here in Chicago, we the people who supported that man, and who've known him and his wife for years and years.
January 11, 2009 1:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
What complete and utter nonsense. Stupidity, really. So Obama has selected and appointed to his administration the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Addington, John Yoo, Gonzales, Bolton, Hadley, Hayes, and etc.? Give me a break.
Look, anyone who during the election believed that they would approve of everyone Obama appointed to his administration or every policy which he would pursue was deluded. To equate the Obama administration to Bush's is just ridiculous.
As Obama explained in an interview a few weeks back, he is the person who will dictate the policies his administration will pursue.
January 10, 2009 11:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is the same political space occupied by the Bush dogs. You apparently do not know this term although it is commonly used on the left. It does not refer to Bush and company. It refers to "Bush-lite" Democrats, such as those of the DLC (which heavily occupy the Obama cabinet: Salazar and Clinton being the most prominent).
January 11, 2009 12:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're right I was unfamiliar with the term. You apparently also "don't know this term". According to the Open Left blog, which apparently coined the term, it refers to members of Congress "who enable the right-wing through their support of Bush's policies on core progressive values at key moments." Apparently the term is Open Left's variation on Blue Dog democrats.
January 11, 2009 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. I am using the term in a looser way to signify the accomodationist wing of the Democratic Party. In fact I explicitly noted at the beginning of the post that now that Bush is history the meaning of the term if it is to be used has to be modified and I proposed loosening it in a very inexact way. I have MANY problems with Obama so far; I will write my Senators and Congressperson to indicate that I do not support the Obama stimulus problem and how upset I am that Democratic and particularly Obama pandering to Republicans would weaken perhaps the most important measure of the next few years; we are really facing a depression and the suffering is already widespread. To water down the stimulus bill with an unnecessary tax cut after Obama shepherded and gave key support to a seriously flawed bailout bill is not only irresponsible, it is disgraceful. Do you think we can keep pissing away $700 billion in ways that make Republicans happy and then have more to correct the damage? Shouldn't he stop his posturing and keep to the main lines he campaigned for namely fixing Amerrica's monumental problems and easing the widespread suffering brought on by Republican misrule. Sure change the tone of the debate but we don't need Alan Colmes; we need someone who is strong addressing very severe problems.
BTW I do not think Obama was honorable in his FISA vote. I do not think that is a good example for you to use. It supports my case.
January 11, 2009 10:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. I am using the term in a looser way to signify the accomodationist wing of the Democratic Party. In fact I explicitly noted at the beginning of the post that now that Bush is history the meaning of the term if it is to be used has to be modified and I proposed loosening it in a very inexact way. I have MANY problems with Obama so far; I will write my Senators and Congressperson to indicate that I do not support the Obama stimulus problem and how upset I am that Democratic and particularly Obama pandering to Republicans would weaken perhaps the most important measure of the next few years; we are really facing a depression and the suffering is already widespread. To water down the stimulus bill with an unnecessary tax cut after Obama shepherded and gave key support to a seriously flawed bailout bill is not only irresponsible, it is disgraceful. Do you think we can keep pissing away $700 billion in ways that make Republicans happy and then have more to correct the damage? Shouldn't he stop his posturing and keep to the main lines he campaigned for namely fixing Amerrica's monumental problems and easing the widespread suffering brought on by Republican misrule. Sure change the tone of the debate but we don't need Alan Colmes; we need someone who is strong addressing very severe problems.
BTW I do not think Obama was honorable in his FISA vote. I do not think that is a good example for you to use. It supports my case.
January 11, 2009 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Lots of information in the dialogue between the two of you. Thanks.
January 11, 2009 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
In response to the tile of your post:
NO
January 11, 2009 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am using the term in a looser way to signify the accomodationist wing of the Democratic Party.
In which case, see my comment above.
January 11, 2009 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I read it and responded. I reread it and do not get what you mean. Would you mind expanding?
January 11, 2009 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
In regards to US education, as a British mother of 3 sons who are at present in the US education system, I see there are many insidious factors that contribute to the dire failure of the education system, for many. Some of the people reading this list of comments might be interested in a unique education reform book that a colleague and I have compiled - Education:The Emperor's New Clothes, by Carlson & Felix, 2008. This book does not pander to political correctness or jargon, and is an easy read with many original cartoons and famous quotes. It is a verbal documentary from teachers, parents and concerned individuals world-wide. Here is the publisher’s link, for more information - http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/Education.html
For a YouTube clip, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9MISufDnE8
February 2, 2009 2:28 PM | Reply | Permalink