Ruth Conniff at
The Progressive writes
The Growing Progressive Movement to Save Public Education. An excerpt:
All over the country, a growing movement of parents, teachers, and students is rising up against over-testing, school closings, and shady schemes that channel public funds into private schools.
Saving public education is shaping up to be a key issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign.
In a front-page article this week, The New York Times described Hillary Clinton’s dilemma on so-called education reform.
On one side, charter school operators and hedge fund managers are urging Hillary to adopt their teachers-union-bashing, pro-privatization agenda.
On the other side, communities all over the country are experiencing education “reform” as a major threat to their local public schools.
“Mrs. Clinton is re-entering the fray like a Rip Van Winkle for whom the terrain on education standards has shifted markedly, with deep new fissures in the Democratic Party,” Times reporter Maggie Haberman writes.
The pressure Haberman notes, however, is mostly coming from one side—Wall Street hedge fund managers and “wealthy Democrats who favor sweeping changes to education—including a more business-like approach, and tying teacher tenure to performance as measured by student test scores.”
But there is more to the story than what Wall Street wants. [...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Texas loses federal dollars for Medicaid, promises to magically fund it ... somehow:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry may not be able to count to three, but apparently, he's a mathematical genius when it comes to funding the state's Medicaid program.
After losing federal funding because it was more important to screw over 130,000 poor women in order to stick it to Planned Parenthood, the governor and the state's Health and Human Services Commission are assuring Texans that it's all good, don't worry, they've got a plan:
With federal funding choked off, state health officials and Gov. Rick Perry pledge that a Medicaid based program directed at low-income women will live on without federal dollars—but the details on how and what else might be at stake as a result aren’t yet clear. |
Okay, so maybe it's not so much a plan as a completely empty promise the state can't afford to keep because it's already knee-deep in budget problems. But it's not like the state's program was that dependent on federal funding:
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