October 1, 2009

Dear Mayor Fenty,

We missed you at yesterday’s rally to celebrate the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. A cast of thousands was on hand to raise their many voices with one message to Congress and the Administration: that they reauthorize the program so that the children of our city may receive the very best education possible.

We’ve heard lately that you are leaning supportive.

If you had been there, you’d be a believer.

This is not a partisan or ideological issue. It is only political because we have allowed it to become a football between the nation’s leaders and special interests.

You can help fix this.

(Save Opportunity)

Two interesting education conversations on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning:

1) Walter Isaacson speaks some truth about NCLB, charter schools, mayoral control and teachers unions, but his argument that deep down Duncan supports the D.C. voucher program coupled with a sunny outlook on the affect $timulus money will have in the classroom raised this viewer’s eyebrows.

2) D.C.’s Mayor Adrian Fenty lays it out for Joe and states unequivocally that real change will come to public schools when principals are given control of a hiring/firing process based on merit. Be sure to watch the Mayor dance around Pat Buchanan’s assertion that what he is endorsing is union busting.

The best note of the morning, however, was hit by Joe when he shook his head in an attempt to understand the BLOB and their efforts to thwart true reform, saying: “It’s like these people are like holdouts, like those Japanese soldiers that kept fighting for 20 years on remote islands. They didn’t realize the world had changed.”