(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Clive Crook doesn’t think that the alliance between education reactionaries and Democrats is going to last. I don’t either. Crook writes in the Financial Times of London:
The keys – and here comes the political challenge – are accountability and competition. However you do it, through school vouchers if you want to be radical, or the faster expansion of self-governing charter schools if you do not, the crucial thing is to give parents alternatives to failing schools. This means firing the worst teachers and shutting the worst schools. Teachers’ unions have a death grip on the system and are having none of it. In many parts of the country, sacking a teacher, however incompetent, is next to impossible. Will Mr Obama dare to face down this powerful Democratic party constituency?
There are two reasons to hope he might. One is that he understands the issue and cares about it. Plainly he feels passionately about inequality. Improving the working poor’s economic opportunities is essential, and if schools cannot be fixed, that is not going to happen.
Another reason for guarded optimism is that the politics of education is more complicated and less predictable than you might think. The Democratic party, despite the clout of the teachers’ unions, is split. Many urban activists and community organisers – the milieu from which Mr Obama sprang – are strongly in favour of greater school choice, which one might have supposed to be a Republican rallying-cry. The pressure for reform is coming from the left as well as the right.
At a meeting in Washington to launch the McKinsey report, Al Sharpton, a black community leader and all-round stirrer of controversy, was on the platform alongside more orthodox education reformers and administration officials. He called school reform the civil-rights challenge of our time. The enemy of opportunity for blacks in the US was once Jim Crow, he said; today, in a slap at the educational establishment, it was “Professor James Crow”. He is right, and the country must hope the president agrees.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
It’s nice to see that people who’ve just discovered the schism in the Democratic party over education are opining about it. It suggests the schism’s liable to break out of it’s wonkish ghetto into the broader, public arena.
That would be definitely to the good since much of the current public education system’s grip on the power is based on inertia, apathy and fear. A noisy squabble in the Democratic party would be just the thing to break the issue out into the light of day.
I won’t channel Obama but I will note that he’s at the wrong end of the government to effect the conversion of the public education system to one based on the choices of parents.
While NCLB was useful in driving the education debate into the light of day as well it also served to make the federal government a more important player in public education. It’s unlikely that an individual parent will enjoy more authority over the education of their child if the federal government has more authority over public education as a whole.
I doubt that “(Mr Obama)…understands the (school choice) issue and cares about it …(and) feels passionately about inequality.” While “(i)mproving the working poor’s economic opportunities is essential, and if schools cannot be fixed, that is not going to happen”, Barak Obama has demonstrated throughout his career a greater concern for gaining personal power that for helping the downtrodden.
Socialists “feel passionately about inequality” only to the extent that they can use the issue to expand their power. If they are so devout as to believe that the State can equalize society, they demonstrate that they slept through the 20th century.
All indicators suggest that this President and this Congress will strengthen the grip of the public sector unions on the US education industry.
As I have observed before, the President exercises legitimate authority over four K-12 school systems: the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, the US Defense Department’s schools for dependents of Defense Department employees stationed overseas, the State Department’s US Embassy schools for dependents of State Department employees overseas, and the Washington, DC schools. All the President has to do to inject competition into the US education industry is to:…
1) require that these schools create exams for a sequence of courses which satisfies graduation requirements,
2) allow independent organizations to administer these exams for a fee to be negotiated between the proctoring agency and the examinee,
3) require that these schools grant diplomas to anyone who accumulates sufficient credit
4) require that all Federal agencies recognize these diplomas in hiring and promotion decisions.
Let competition between the Kumon Institute and Sylvan Learning Centers drive the cost of a high school diploma down to the cost of books and of proctoring exams.
Since the US school system is, in fact, an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, this will not happen so long as the Democratic Party controls the Legislative branch and the Executive branch. Probably not if Republicans rule, either.
Homeschool.