(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.
Posted by matthewladner 
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