Michigan Reporter
Dave Eggert described Mi House Democrats as reasonably content with
this year's school budget.
Indeed, it was much better than in the past
two years. While I am sure they are not celebrating loudly you can also
hear in the House Democrats muffled contentment the more depressing sounds of the Mark
Schauer/Lisa Brown gubernatorial challenge going straight down the
drain.
Having based their campaign and limited
resources almost exclusively on 1 year K12 budget issues -- and
ignoring entirely or endorsing the larger problems of Education
"Reform" like the EAA expansion, fed overreach, teacher effectiveness
via VAM, Common Core, charters, and so on -- the campaign quite simply has left
itself with no where else to go.
Snyder added enough to satisfy the
general population, certainly enough to limit any outrage big enough to
overcome the 7 to 11 % gap between himself and Schauer; and now we have a
long summer vacation with schools set to open "as normal" in the fall.
The schools and their paid lobbyists spent their political energy on
this short 1 year game, and have had little convincing to say to the
voting public about the larger threats to public education.
Many public ed advocates, then,
have spent considerable time and energy on a campaign that fizzled
before it began because the Mi Democratic party would not attend
seriously to the issues of those it was supposedly supporting.
Weird.
Instead, Lon Johnson is counting on 1 million voters to come out in 2014
-- many of them African-American women -- to support Schauer and Lisa
Brown as they did Barack Obama.
I wish him luck there.
Long term, the
fate of public education looks bleak -- and one can not blame the
Republican party or its extremists for its undoing. For Democrats, one
has the hope they decide to invest time and money now in winnable races and try not to look like complete whiners on public education.
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