Education not an issue for Dem debaters until the Harris/Biden clash over deseg
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Demand for School Integration Leads to Massive 1964 New York City School Boycott |
"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept." -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956For most of the 20 Democratic Party candidates onstage Wednesday and Thursday nights, or for the debate moderators, education wasn't an important enough campaign issue to deserve a mention. Not a word was spoken about the hottest ed issues like charter schools, vouchers, pensions or testing. Common Core Standards, ESSA, it seems, were yesterday's news. There was not even a poke at Trump's ed secretary, Betsy DeVos or at Trump himself.
That's nothing new for party presidential campaigns. I remember the 2015 debates when education issues never came up. At the time, Prof. Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote in the Progressive,
Perhaps the silence is due to the fact that the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican approach to education from the 1990s.If anything has changed in the past four years, that hasn't. This week, hardly an ed word was spoken. Not a word, that is, until Sen. Kamala Harris stole night two with her devastating "That little girl was me," confrontation with Joe Biden. After prefacing her CONTINUE READING: Mike Klonsky's Blog: Education not an issue for Dem debaters until the Harris/Biden clash over deseg
