The Big Education Fight In The Democratic Party

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/13/big-education-fight-democratic-party

The Huffington Post’s politics editor Sam Stein notices the leftward swing in the party as well and how it has resulted in a “panic” among centrist Democrats. “Leading architects of the ‘New Democrat’ movement are sounding the alarm over a lurch to the left in the party,” writes a reporter for The Guardian.

The centrist New Democrats faction of the party Eskow refers to is the corporation- and billionaire-friendly bipartisan agenda that embraced “the magic of the market”, outsourced jobs through corporate giveaways like “free trade”, promoted fiscal austerity, pledged to be tough-on-crime, and vowed to make any recipients of government funds more accountable (“welfare reform”). Followers of this philosophy scorned labor unions and heralded the end of the “era of big government.”

But New Democrat bipartisanship has not been confined to economics. The same big money, Wall Street-connected actors behind this bipartisan agenda for the economy have dominated education policy since the 1990s too.

With a bipartisan agenda in charge of education, devotion to “the market” unleashed more charter schools, and corporate- friendly outsourcing increasingly sent education jobs and services to private contractors such as Teach for America. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s term for financial austerity in our schools was “the new normal”. Tough-on-crime policies in the streets were translated to “no excuse” and “zero tolerance” policies in classrooms. And “welfare reform” for the poor became “education reform” for public schools that demanded those institutions prove their “accountability” with a never-ending avalanche of standardized tests.

But just as corporate-friendly policies for the economy “fared poorly, both as policy and as politics,” to use Eskow’s words, they were a bust on all fronts for education too.