Daily Archives: 24 May 2017

Progressive Education

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The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last Sunday in which it extolled Los Angeles voters for elected a majority to the Los Angeles Unified School District school board that openly favored charter schools and the independence of those charters.  The WSJ also described the hysteria with which the teachers unions and the ousted school board vilified these folks who so favored actually educating the city’s children over being a jobs factory for disinterested teachers and piggy bank for union coffers.

Last month the [now ousted] board voted to support three bills before the state legislature in Sacramento that aim to limit autonomy for charter schools. One would prevent charters from appealing rejections by local school boards to county and state boards. The appeals process is one reason charters in Los Angeles have been able to expand despite school-board resistance.

And

Unions tried to vilify pro-charter candidates Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez by portraying them as tools of Donald Trump, though both were endorsed by President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the state’s progressive former Senator Barbara Boxer.

The approbation of the one and the opprobrium of the other are well deserved.  However, the paper’s editors exhibited one misapprehension in the last sentence of their piece.

There’s nothing progressive about failing low-income minority kids.

On the contrary, this is completely progressive: it feeds the Progressive-Democratic Party position of nearly 100 years that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

It is through their form of education that the Progressive-Democratic Party seeks to produce Americans who are so deficient.

Not Entirely

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Jay Solomon, commenting in The Wall Street Journal on the recently concluded re-election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, has missed the mark.

The landslide re-election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threatens to put the Trump administration on a collision course with Europe over future policy toward Tehran.

No, what it does do is “threaten” to put Europe on a collision course with the Trump administration over future policy regarding Iran.  This is because Europe, more importantly, has missed the mark:

European officials hailed the news of Mr Rouhani’s win as heralding a more moderate path for Iran over the next four years.

And

Many European governments hope he will use his next four years to moderate Tehran’s overseas policies….

Aside from the simple fact that hope is not a policy, not a strategy, nor even a useful tactic, there has been nothing moderate about the Rouhani administration’s push for a nuclear weapons deal that codified Iran’s “right” to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, nor has there been any semblance of moderacy in the Rouhani administration’s open support for butchery in Syria or for terrorism against Israel or for arming and controlling Shiite “militias” in Iraq, whose purpose is to serve as tools for manipulating the Iraqi government.

Hailing Hoping for a change from that to a more moderate path in this administration’s second term is…foolish.