Comments on: Suddenly, everyone is a liberal democrat

By: Eli Ackerman

Eli Ackerman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:52:32 +0000

I don’t think, especially given what the Obama administration is doing, there are so many folks left opposing charter schools purely on principle. There are a lot of issues and nuance here involving governance, oversight, soft privatization to “non” profit boards and the roughshod manner in which reforms were implemented but as someone that dogged that stuff pretty heavily for a long time, I don’t hear from a lot of people who would wholly undo what was done. If there were a more substantive debate about education policy, there might be some real discussion about how to improve what we’ve got going forward but the Mayor has little authority there – and this crop of candidates has not expressed any urgency with regard to establishing a framework for the restoration of local OPSB control of the school system.

By: dsb nola

dsb nola — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:10:40 +0000

“In education, every candidate for mayor has embraced the charter-schools movement and the reforms implemented under the Recovery School District. While there may be some disagreements on the margins over how and when to re-establish local governance of the schools, there is little substantive difference between the candidates in an area that was once quite controversial.”

Are these education reforms liberal/progressive? I don’t think so. Oh, and it’s still a controversial issue …

By: jeffrey

jeffrey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:59:35 +0000

Well that is certainly optimistic. More pessimistically, what you’re seeing is everyone jump on the most convenient means of attacking the failure we’ve been living under recently. Abstractly, it’s a parallel to the last Presidential election. We’re all HopeyChangey right now because to be otherwise is to endorse utter failure. The trouble comes later when we learn that the HopeyChangey ticket was really just a different bunch of guys from Goldman Sachs the whole time.

By: Eli Ackerman

Eli Ackerman — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:00:57 +0000

Well that’s what is so insidious about some of the campaigns being run right now. You’re seeing a lot of really conservative people claiming to support progressive reform efforts not because they believe those reforms reflect the most practical means of dealing with problems, but because they recognize that proposing we double-down on authoritarianism would be electorally divisive.

One of my strongest optimistic beliefs about this city is that there really is a big progressive governing coalition to be made here, in a city that voted 80% for Barack Obama, and applied to implementing some pretty important changes, especially in areas like criminal justice reform. So it is remarkable to see the discourse absolutely dominated by a bunch of fairly progressive policy proposals and interesting to see long-standing opponents of these kinds of reforms hopping on the bandwagon for the purposes of a 45-day election cycle.

By: jeffrey

jeffrey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:24:14 +0000

In this election in New Orleans, proposals to deal with the crime rate are far more patrician, perhaps surprisingly so, given the political grandstanding that has gone on around criminal justice traditionally. Candidates have talked not about unleashing the police force, but about more stringent police accountability procedures. Candidates have not clamored for more police, but for higher hiring standards. Instead of calls for more arrests, candidates have embraced a path to reduce penalties for simple marijuana possession with near unanimity.

Why? Because the current police chief is unpopular with the “patrician” reform crowd. Watch what happens when you get a white chief. You’ll see the “Get-tough-on-thugs” meme come back strong… at least among the “patricians”