From “It Takes a Village” to It Takes a “Race”
Return with me if you will to the heady days of the early Clinton Presidency when then-First Lady Hillary declared that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Her bold exhortation at that time committed the leadership of the Democratic party to the belief that there are societal responsibilities owed to every child born into this country – that “it takes teachers, it takes clergy, it takes business people, it takes community leaders, it takes those who protect our health and safety, it takes all of us” to ensure the well being of children.
This declaration resonated especially strong with public school teachers and anyone connected to the education community who knew all too well from day-to-day observations that everyone is “part of a larger community that can help or hurt our best efforts” to raise healthy, motivated, and morally-centered children. Every day of their professional lives, teachers see students whose best efforts are frequently undone by societal ills that surround them – households broken by debt and health calamities, unsafe streets and playgrounds, governing systems that care more about perpetuating the power of certain individuals than advancing the public well being.
Now fast forward to 2011 and the Democratic party leadership currently occupying the White House, and what we see is an exhortation of a completely different kind. Instead of calls for collective action and shared responsibility for children, what we see instead is a party committed to competition.
President Obama has staked out an obligation to “win the future” and has made his Education Secretary’s “Race to the Top” the hood ornament of his ed policy vehicle. Despite the fact that the grants rewarded from Race to the Top have only just begun and we don’t have any results yet, Obama called this winners-take-all approach to governing “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.”
The purported magic of this Race is to force states to adopt specific education “reforms”– primarily, charter schools and merit pay for teachers based on student test scores – in order to fund initiatives aimed at improving schools, especially those serving mostly poor kids. And it must be noted that hardly anyone – even ardent backers of the so-called reforms – likes the results of the Race, and most view the whole affair as a way to “push through an agenda that otherwise would likely not get voter or public approval.”
What happened in the past 15 years? What moved the leadership of the Democratic party from collectivist calls to our moral responsibilities toward children to cold, technocratic contests for cash?
Certainly when you look at the other side of the political coin, you don’t see a similar transformation. After Ms. Clinton’s declaration for “a village” approach to education policy, the Republican opposition at that time, represented by Senator Bob Dole, dismissed her kind of thinking as a “collective excuse.” His insistence, back in 1996, for “individual accountability” as the only means to achieving progress is in seamless agreement with today’s leadership in the Republican party.
Regardless of how you may feel about the Obama administration’s proposals for children and education, this profound change in philosophy and rhetoric emanating from his party’s leadership is an undeniable fact. And as Democrats abdicated a collectivists stand for children and shifted to the paradigm of competition for cash, Republicans kept singing the same chorus. So how’d that happen?
What happened was, in the education debate in particular and arguably in the broad policy arena at large, the leaders of the Democratic party not only bungled their political strategy, they also lost the courage of their convictions. In fact, if you want to get an enlightened view of the Democratic party’s strategic and moral failure over the past 30 years, the arc of the education debate in America provides you with a spectacular ringside seat.
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