How Change Works

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Walter Russell Mead

10/28/12

 

A week out from the U.S. election, the left-leaning London Guardian runs with a piece praising Jeb Bush’s education reforms in Florida—and touting Bush as the source of Obama’s own ideas on education reform.

 

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But here’s the larger point: what was once viewed by the conventional wisdom and the smug chattering classes as an ugly conservative attack on that most sacred of blue, progressive institutions (the public school system run by life-tenured, certified education professionals on civil service principles) has in the last fifteen years emerged as the center of a growing national consensus on school reform.

 

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Our political parties may be ideological in some of their inspirations and their rhetoric, but they are pragmatic. If an approach to an issue works and pleases voters, political leaders try to bring it on board.

 

(Snip)