Reply #1: Orlando Sentinel: Dems' school reform takes page out of GOP book

[madfloridian]

I really hate it when an argument for who we are as a party is taken out of our hands because our party is doing the very same thing as the other one. In the area of school reform, that is happening.

I read this at the Orlando Sentinel. It angers me so, but I have to agree.

Dems' school reform takes page out of GOP book

From Mike Thomas's blog. I want to disagree and tell him he is wrong. But he is mostly right.

I've had little success selling Jeb Bush's education reforms to my liberal friends and colleagues. So I am trying something new.

I'm calling them Barack Obama's education reforms.

It took Nixon to go to China, and it could take Obama to bring school reform to Democrats.

"This began as a Republican fringe movement in the 1990s but now is embraced by a growing number of Democrats. Listen long enough to Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and you'll hear Jeb Bush.

In a recent speech, Duncan noted, "In many situations, our schools are perpetuating poverty and are perpetuating social failure."

Duncan, who ran the Chicago school system, is pushing reforms that include tougher standardized tests, merit pay for good teachers, pink slips for bad teachers and more charter schools to provide competition and innovation. Far from abolishing No Child Left Behind, started under George Bush, Duncan wants to strengthen it."

Everything could be fixed that needs fixing in the public schools. Our new education secretary says our public schools are "perpetuating poverty" and "social failure."

When your own Democratic party leaders say that.....how can you fight back?

I am retired. I don't have to fight the system anymore. But I can still talk about what they have done to public schools in the name of profiting from them.

It's called greed, and greed has no conscience.