A tradeoff worth making for schools
My guest is Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the non-profit Center for American Progress. This piece ran on the center’s website. By Scott Lilly I am sure that Jonathan Alter’s recent column in Newsweek, “How Congress Keeps Screwing Up Education—President Obama’s school-reform programs are falling victim to the teachers’ unions,” is as funny to the lobbyists of teachers unions as it is to me. The column is in fact not about Congress, but rather about Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin), who Alter claims “is in danger of (leaving office) as a water carrier for the teachers’ unions—the man who gutted President Barack Obama’s signature program on education, Race to the Top.” As someone who worked for Rep. Obey on education issues for many of his 41 years in Congress and was present on more than one occasion when education union lobbyists were unceremoniously thrown out of his office, I can