[VeniVidiVici]

The Democrat Unions screwed D.C. kids and their parents once again.

Can’t have them straying off the Democrat plantation. They may open their eyes.

[rhema]

We’re All Right-Wing Bastards Now —that is, if the NEA’s logic is to be believed.

On the final day of the National Education Association’s convention last summer, its outgoing general counsel, Bob Chanin, gave a speech for the ages. After sharing fond recollections of his 41 years as the NEA’s top lawyer, he switched gears and started lobbing grenades at “conservative and right-wing bastards,” including Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. The NEA and its affiliates, by contrast, were “the nation’s leading advocates for public education and the type of liberal social and economic agenda that these groups find objectionable.”

Chanin’s glowing portrait of the NEA was wildly wrong, of course, but so was his characterization of the union’s opponents. People of all political stripes—not just right-wing “bastards”—are starting to realize that the single biggest impediment to education reform is the NEA itself.

Take the nation’s 4,000 charter schools—public schools that operate with less red tape, fewer suffocating union rules, and a higher percentage of minorities and poor students than regular public schools do. In California, 12 of the top 15 public schools are charters, including three in Oakland that cater to exceptionally poor children. Los Angeles charters’ median score on California’s Academic Performance Index was 728 in 2008, compared with 663 for regular public schools. . . .

[rhema]

2009 State Teacher Policy Yearbook Orange-shaded states were graded C; light green states got a D.

[jmcenanly]

Can’t have them straying off the Democrat plantation.
In the ante bellum South, it was a crime to teach a slave to read.I also remember reading Frederick Douglass reporting how the slaves regarded their annual provisioning as a holiday, with shouts of joy. With the exception that slaves were expected to work, there is little difference between the plantations in the Old south and the current welfare state.