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Thursday, May 24, 2012

What We Still Don't Know About Mitt Romney and Education | The Nation

What We Still Don't Know About Mitt Romney and Education | The Nation:

What We Still Don't Know About Mitt Romney and Education

As Ben Adler reports, there are few surprises in Mitt Romney's education platform, which the candidate finally unveiled yesterday in a 40-page white paper and a speech to Latino business owners. Guided by Bush administration veterans, Romney is pushing teacher accountability policies tied to student achievement data, an expansion of the charter school sector, and more freedom for parents to spend their children's federal education dollars on private tutors and online learning -- but without guaranteeing the federal funding or regulatory support necessary to ensure quality in any of these areas. All in all, Romney has skirted some of the most important and controversial issues in school reform, both within his own party and nationally. Here are my remaining questions for his campaign:
Does Romney support the Common Core curriculum standards? Partly in response to federal funding incentives instituted by the Obama administration, 46 states have agreed to adopt these shared English and 

Mitt Romney Wants To Bring Socialism Back For The Banks And The Student Lenders

Mitt Romney gave a speech on education yesterday. Most of it was about K-12, but in a related policy paper, he made it clear that he wants to bring a form of socialism back for the lenders. If he is elected, Romney would ensure that the middlemen - who the Obama administration ousted - would again be heavily subsidized by the government. That means Sallie Mae, Nelnet, and the other loan sharks would be propped again by taxpayers.

This is terrible policy. These lenders still have tremendous power over debtors who had been part of the FFEL program. This can't happen again. This is one of many reasons why Mitt Romney cannot win the election.

A man who urges people to "shop around" for colleges doesn't have a clue about the student loan debt crisis. 



The GOP's Played-Out Race Card

Melissa Harris-Perry will be a featured speaker at the Take Back the American Dream conference, convening June 18 to 20 in Washington, DC, as part of the plenary session, "2012 and Beyond: Victory Necessary, Not Sufficient." The following is an excerpt of an article originally published by The NationClick here for the full article.
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Conservative strategists have been toying with how to use race against President Obama in this year’s election. Since Obama’s May 9 announcement supporting same-sex marriage, some Republicans have been salivating about the delicious possibility of dampening black voters’ enthusiasm for the president by casting him as out of touch with their religious sentiments. Then the leaked Joe Ricketts plan, “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama,” revealed GOP strategists’ idea of employing “an extremely literate conservative African-American” to discredit Obama among white voters by reminding them of his link with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Thus, the black church