The Feeble Strength of One!
Dear Diane,
Yes, Diane, we do have a few reasons for being hopeful of late. I was delighted to hear that California's Governor Jerry Brown has spoken out about testing. I had a good conversation with him recently about early childhood. It, too, left me optimistic.
It's interesting to speculate on why liberals are so divided on schooling issues. One consistently useful predictor of who's on which side is their attitude toward organized labor. The shift from seeing "labor" as underdogs to "big labor" or labor "bosses" goes back a while. From World War II to the early 1980s, trade unions were all-American favorites. The Left was more mad at them, it seemed, than the Right. (I'm exaggerating.) The shift coincided perhaps with the end of the war on Communism?
The other night I found myself muttering under my breath, "and the feeble strength of one." It took me a minute to
