Where Is The Middle Ground In The Education Debate
By the time that July slips slowly off the calendar, events this month — culminating with an upcoming teacher/parent-organized march on the nation’s capital – will have clarified all too well the lay of the land in the debate on the fate of our nation’s public schools.
And no, education is not “the new abortion,” as was recently declared in this article by Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District. Although it’s easy for journalists to characterize the edu-debate as a classic struggle between “two sides” who “just glare and shout” at each other, this is a gross over-simplification.
Even a good education reporter like Dana Goldstein can make this mistake, as she did in a recent blog post when she declared that resolving the conflict over education policy was just a matter of finding the “middle ground” between “contentious binaries,” such as