History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
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Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
The GOP'S new war on schools
- 08-18-2011
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By Dana Goldstein/Slate
Michele Bachmann's victory in the Iowa straw poll Saturday represents many obvious things: the mainstreaming of the Tea Party, the overnight ordinariness of female presidential candidates, the increasing irrelevance of also-ran moderates like Jon Huntsman. But her growing popularity among the Republican base also signals something that's been less widely acknowledged: a sea change in the party's education agenda. It's safe to say that the political era of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind is now officially over, even as the law's testing mandates continue to reverberate in classrooms across the country. s recently as a decade ago, Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Boehner embraced bipartisan, standards-and-accountability education reform as a pro-business venture, a way to make American workers and firms more competitive in the global marketplace. Now we are seeing the GOP acquiesce to the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann, in which public schools are regarded not as engines for economic growth or academic achievement, but as potential moral corrupters of the nation's youth. (more...)
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