An Obama "Transition" to Public Education?

My post is Recommended by the NYTimes editors, well sometimes they do that!

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/11/14/us/politics/14obama.html?s=1&pg=2
Post #42.
November 14, 2008 9:50 am

The pic accompanying a story in the NY Times today on the Obama family's "transition" since he became the President-elect, shows Obama's daughters arriving at school.
Private school.

During his almost-two-year campaign, Obama repeatedly promised to "fix" education. By that he and everybody else means PUBLIC education. Even though we have an unequal two-tier system of private/elite vs. public/mass education, it is always public education that apparently needs fixing. The elite private education system goes unexamined, unregulated.

Obama is no Jimmy Carter. When Carter was President, he sent his daughter Amy to a public elementary school in Washington DC. It was a predominantly Black school. When Obama becomes President, he will send his two daughters to an elite private predominantly white school. Like the Clintons, Obama will choose an elite (which also means predominantly upper middle class, white) private school for his daughters.

The real "transition" would be if the Obama parents sent their daughters to public school. But then, that would make Obama what we need in a leader -- a social, economic and political PROGRESSIVE, rather than a NEOLIBERAL who maintains and enforces the political, economic and social status quo while gaining immediate benefits for themselves, to the detriment of the Greater Collective Good in civil society.

Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York (a public education institution)
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

— EthicalDemocracy, http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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