I was driving home recently listening to NPR when a story
came on detailing the latest attempt to attack Obama by Mitt Romney out on the
stump and I almost spit Diet Pepsi all over my dashboard. Here was Mitt Romney, candidate of a
republican party which has de-funding of government on all levels as its main
operational principle and which has gone to court to fight bilingual education
all over the country, speaking to a group of Hispanic small business owners and
claiming that education reform as designed and prescribed by him is suddenly
the most important issue of our time. It’s laughable to watch Mitt stumble around
trying to find an opening so he can land that one knock-out punch. And since nothing else he or the Koch Brothers
or Karl Rove or any of their congressional minions have tried has gotten any
traction, Mitt trots out faux concern for education and hope that somehow we
can ignore his imperious and patrician background long enough for it to stick.
Moreover, he had the gall to flat out accuse Obama of
putting campaign donations from the teachers’ unions ahead of improving
education and to blame him for the state of education today when John Boner and
the rest of the unruly and bug-eyed rabble in the House of Representatives are
starving local and state governments of funding, causing a catastrophic
reduction in the number of teachers available to educate the children he
pretends to care about so deeply. He
makes me want to puke.
This is the guy who has a schizoid immigration policy in a
party that is certainly not known for being sympathetic to the Hispanic
community, shedding big fat, toxic crocodile tears about the sad state of
minority education. His party is almost
universally contemptuous of the public school system and yet he promises these
Hispanic business people that he would lead the charge to make certain that
their children get the education they deserve.
Meanwhile he is proposing and supporting an economic agenda – designed by
weasely wunderkind Paul Ryan - that would cut public funding for schools – and
virtually everything else - and turn it over to “for-profit” educational
companies, meaning that the very minority children with whom he is pretending
to empathize won’t be able to afford his grand private education and will be
stuck with underfunded, crippled public schools of last resort. Who can believe this guy about anything?
The republicans to try to pretend that they are concerned
about education but that concern only runs deep enough to include cutting teacher salaries – directly or indirectly – and starving public schools by
slashing the Federal budget’s aid to state governments. Much of that aid is directed to education at
the state level and the deficit boogie-man haunting republican dreams is
resulting in unprecedented chaos most clearly manifested in the state of
American education. They have made public
employee unions – and the teacher’s union specifically – the enemy and the
targeted example of corruption, complacency, mismanagement, laziness, incompetence,
sexual depravity and bad personal hygiene.
They would prefer to either send
their kids to private schools like Mitt himself if they’re wealthy enough or
home school them if they’re delusional, fanatic and socially terrified enough.
Schools – like much of government – have significant waste
and disorganization that should be addressed.
There needs to be a way to get the almost comically incompetent teachers
drunk on tenure out of the classroom and into retirement or another line of
work. There needs to be a way to get
parents engaged in the process of educating their own children and make them
understand that sending their children to school isn’t the same as taking your
car in for service. Overlapping
responsibilities, unnecessary layers of management and tenure combined with
non-English-speaking students conspire to make modern education less than
ideal. But the only solution you achieve
by yanking the ventilator off the struggling patient is to kill them – not a
great outcome unless you just don’t give a shit and are sick of paying the electric
bill to run the thing.
Romney hasn’t bothered to lay out his brilliant plan to
resolve these issues and empty promises are the order of the day in political
campaigns but the idea that he is going to portray himself as the last great
hope for education is hilariously incompatible with reality.
Blame Obama for having a jack-booted justice department that
is focused on all the wrong things, blame him for being a little bit timid and
underfunding the stimulus program, blame him for spending the first two years
of his term trying to be the level-headed community organizer pleasing everyone
instead of using the bully pulpit to kick ass and take names and get things
done. I think he made a mistake spending
so much political capital on health care even if it will turn out to be a
signature achievement. But to blame him for the state of education in
an age of a dumbed down, discouraged and angry population and schools starved
for funds, all the while pretending to have the answer is Romney being a cyborg
gas-bag who truly believes nothing but who will say anything to try to be
president. That really is who he is…
No comments:
Post a Comment