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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

How President Obama Could Win the Election « Diane Ravitch's blog

How President Obama Could Win the Election « Diane Ravitch's blog:


How President Obama Could Win the Election

By all accounts, the election of 2012 will be close.
For educators, the stakes are high.
Mitt Romney supports every kind of privatization, from charters to vouchers to full-time online schools, and he has no problem with for-profit schooling.
His agenda threatens the survival of that most basic of democratic institutions, the public school.
Educators supported President Obama when he ran in 2008. They enthusiastically embraced him as a true change agent, expecting that he would make major alterations to the noxious federal law No Child Left Behind.
But after his election, instead of calling for a major change in NCLB, he launched his Race to the Top, which builds on the flawed strategies of NCLB. Although President Obama has won the endorsement of the NEA and the AFT, many of the nation’s nearly four million teachers are discouraged by his policies. If they sit home or if they are lukewarm, he could lose the election.
We can’t let that happen.
So I am doing my part by writing a short speech that would win educators back. If he uses this speech, he would