The Progressive Mask Slips

[Geee]

American Thinker:

July 9, at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival, a mask slipped, and the event was recorded on video. We get a fascinating glimpse at hardball politics inside the progressive left, as a quiet network of leftists seeks to supplant part of the Democrat Old Guard, step by step.

Jonah Edelman, director of Stand for Children, and son of Peter and Marian Wright Edelman Edelman, spoke at a seminar on education reform. He was caught bragging (see video -- embedded below) about his involvement in undermining teachers' unions in Illinois.

It may look like business as usual for so-called education reformers to use lobbyists, PAC money, and influential politicians like Rahm Emanuel to get their agendas enacted, but Edelman gives us invaluable insight into the inner workings of a leftist's hardball approach to the opposition, in this case the unions. The end result was a power shift in the education platform.

Edelman operates out of Oregon, where he helped create SFC in 1996 with his mother, who is well-known as the founder of Children's Defense Fund. Politicians and non-profits have lauded Marian Wright Edelman since she began her program in 1973. The fund proved to be a very lucrative venture for Marian, who studied under Marxist Howard Zinn in the '60s. Zinn even sponsored her on a summer trip to the Soviet Union as an undergraduate at Spellman College.

In the July 2011 video, Jonah Edelman speaks about a breach between the usual Democrat ranks and the teachers' unions in Illinois. Education reform has taken on a new way of doing business in the past few years. Ever since Obama came onto the scene, teachers and their unions have been in the crosshairs.

In a press conference pushing his stimulus bill in February 2009, Obama brought up education. "But we're also going to need more reform, which means that we've got to train teachers more effectively; bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively," he said, adding that "we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, [and] we should have high standards."