Blue Civil War: Knives Drawn in Education Fight

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

4/15/13

 

Delegates at the California Democratic Party convention overwhelmingly passed a resolution yesterday censuring fellow party members who support school reform and calling groups like Democrats for School Reform a front for Republican and corporate interests. “Let’s be perfectly clear”, the President of the California Teachers Association explained,

 

These organizations are backed by moneyed interests, Republican operatives and out-of-state Wall Street billionaires dedicated to school privatization and trampling on teacher and worker rights.

 

The delegates and their union backers are responding to a surge of Democratic support for reform ideas like charter schools, test-based accountability, and teacher performance evaluations. Democratic LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Coalition for School Reform backed reform-minded officials in LA’s recent Board of Education elections. The group boasts among its biggest donors blue power-brokers like Michael Bloomberg, Hollywood executives, and other individuals who are hardly “Republican operatives.”

 

(Snip)

 

We can’t say whether this means the reformers will win the day in California, but it’s safe to say that that the political coalition that once held the Democratic Party together is cracking. The Democratic Party is splintering between the providers of public services on one side and the consumers of those services on the other. In many ways, California is the biggest battlefield in this civil war.