DNC Day 2 - Clinton schools on policy

On day 2 of the DNC Convention, Sandra Fluke spoke about women's health issues, contrasting the two parties. We thought we would spotlight this speech as the majority of educators are female, and this has been one of the most contentious issues of this election.

Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown Law student whom Rush Limbaugh called a "slut" because she advocates for contraception coverage, criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney during her speech at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night, saying he failed to stand up for her.

"Your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs," Fluke said. "Who won't stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party."

Romney was widely criticized earlier this year when he responded weakly to Limbaugh. "I'll just say this," he told reporters. "It's not the language I would have used."

Fluke contrasted Romney's reaction to that of President Obama, who embraced and defended her after the incident.

"Our president, when he hears a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters -- not his delegates or donors -- and stands with all women," she said. "And strangers come together, reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here -- and give me a microphone -- to amplify our voice. That's the difference."

Bill Clinton however was the headline speaker, and didn't disappoint the crowd with a detailed and sometimes humorous set of policy lessons and choices voters face this November

Clinton saved the zinger for tax cuts for the rich, warning that Romney will "double down on trickle-down."

He paraphrased Ronald Reagan: "As another president once said, 'There they go again."

In reframing last week's GOP message, he employed equal parts mockery, wonkery and plainspeak.

In short, he said, the Republicans came to Tampa to deliver a simple message about Obama: "We left him a total mess, but he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in."

Clinton hit Paul Ryan in the same style. The GOP vice presidential candidate had attacked Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare, when his own budget proposal included those same cuts.

"You gotta give him one thing. It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did," Clinton said.

Here's the word cloud for Clinton's speech

DNC Convention Day 1 - Democrats Strike Back

Day one of the DNC convention in North Carolina included the release of the Democratic Party platform. The Washington Post has a rundown of all the education mentions, which include this section

Because there is no substitute for a great teacher at the head of a classroom, the President helped school districts save more than 400,000 educator jobs.

We Democrats honor our nation’s teachers, who do a heroic job for their students every day. If we want high-quality education for all our kids, we must listen to the people who are on the front lines. The President has laid out a plan to prevent more teacher layoffs while attracting and rewarding great teachers. This includes raising standards for the programs that prepare our teachers, recognizing and rewarding good teaching, and retaining good teachers. We also believe in carefully crafted evaluation systems that give struggling teachers a chance to succeed and protect due process if another teacher has to be put in the classroom. We also recognize there is no substitute for a parent’s involvement in their child’s education.

Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland delivered a stemwinder of a speech

“Mitt Romney proudly wrote an op-ed titled, ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.’ If he had had his way, devastation would have cascaded from Michigan to Ohio and across the nation,” Strickland told the crowd Tuesday night. “Mitt Romney never saw the point of building something when he could profit from tearing it down. If Mitt was Santa Claus, he’d fire the reindeer and outsource the elves.”

Strickland led off by lambasting Romney’s opposition to the 2008 auto rescue, which was especially critical to Ohio’s industrial economy.

“If he had had his way, devastation would have cascaded from Michigan to Ohio and across the nation,” Strickland said.

But far more than a simple policy speech, Strickland portrayed Romney as a morally suspect and deeply un-American villain willing to do anything to make a dollar no matter who was hurt. His Caribbean holdings and past use of a Swiss bank account drew the toughest condemnation.

“Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport,” Strickland said. “It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps. In Matthew, chapter 6, verse 21, the scriptures teach us that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. My friends, any man who aspires to be our president should keep both his treasure and his heart in the United States of America.”

The highlight of the evening for the gathered Democrats was a speech by First Lady Michelle Obama, that brought tears and applause from most in attendance

Here's the word cloud of her speech

Day one of the DNC convention then, saw the Democrats strike back at the Republicans, whose own convention has produced little bounce in the polls.

RNC Convention Final Day - Upstaged!

On education related issues, the final day of the RNC convention featured Jeb Bush, former Florida Governor and brother of former President George W. Bush. His speech centered on the issue of education, and if you're not a fan of corporate education reform, you probably didn't like what he had to say. The Washington Post reported it thusly

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said pretty much what you’d expect him to say about education reform at the GOP convention — schools are failing and teachers unions are bad —
[...]
Here are some other things Bush said in his speech — and things he didn’t say:

* Insisting that American schools are failing, he threw out statistics such as: “Of 34 advanced nations in the world, American students rank 17th in science, 25th in math.” But he didn’t note that Americans have always ranked ranked at best average in international rankings.

* “China and India produce eight times more engineering students each year than the United States,” Bush said, without noting, as my colleague Jay Mathews did in this blog post, that “we are light-years ahead of them in providing instruction and opportunity for every child who wants to go to college or adopt a useful trade.”

* Teachers unions are super powerful and their supporters are “masters of delay and deferral,” he said, without mentioning that the unions have lost so much political power that they have been unable to stop the implementation in a number of states of unfair teacher evaluation systems that link teachers’ pay to student standardized test scores. Bush’s implication that teachers unions are stopping academic progress ignores the fact that the problems that ail urban schools are the same in union states as they are in non-union states.

* Bush praised his own school reform program when he was governor from 1999-2007, which became known as the “Florida Miracle” and has been a model for other governors who have adopted its key tenets, which include standardized test-based accountability, charter schools, vouchers, virtual education, an end to teacher tenure, merit pay and assigning letter grades to school.

But he didn’t mention that the standardized testing regime that he pioneered, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, is in shambles after a succession of scandals, and that his claims of great progress in student achievement are questionable.

Of course the highlight of the evening was to be the acceptance speech by Mitt Romney, but somewhere along the line the proceedings got sidetracked and overwhelmed by a bizarre 11 minute piece of theater performed by movie legend Clint Eastwood having a conversation with an invisible President Obama, or an empty chair depending upon your perspective.

A new internet meme has been born - Eastwooding (google it, but be prepared to waste some of your day).

Romney's speech lacked any policy specifics, "Where was the policy?" wrote one Washington Post reporter. Here's the word cloud of his speech - he mentioned America, a lot

RNC Convention Day 2 - chock full of misstatements

Day 2 of the RNC convention saw the introduction of Mitt Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, a life long public employee.

One reader described his speech as "chock full of misstatements" - something many major media outlets also noticed.

• Top 5 Fibs In Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech
• Ryan misleads on GM plant closing in hometown
• 6 Worst Lies In Paul Ryan’s Speech
• Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly dishonest speech

Indeed, there were so many whoppers, it is now being parodied - Ryan Launches Campaign Theme of Lying About Everything

As for Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he said he was working “around the clock” to add additional lies to his speech tonight: “I’m no Paul Ryan, but, darn it, I’m going to do my best.”

Here's the word cloud from Paul Ryan's speech

Mitt Romney - Mr. Corporate Ed

Yesterday, Republican Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney gave one of his first speeches of the campaign on education, while releasing a policy booklet on the subject titled, "A Chance for Every Child.

The Washington Post has this analysis of his proposed policies

“A Chance For Every Child” is the name of the education program that the presumptive Republican presidential candidate spelled out in a speech and then a white paper released on Wednesday.

Romney is advancing a pro-choice, pro-voucher, pro-states-rights education program that seems certain to hasten the privatization of the public education system.

In a Romney-run education world, the parents of poor and special education students would choose a school — public or private, based on standardized test scores and other data — and then a specific amount of public money would follow the child to the school.

It’s a voucher system that would, among other things, require families of the neediest children to constantly shop around for schools in an unstable market and would likely exacerbate the very thing — a chronic achievement gap — all of this is supposedly intended to fix. Obama opposes vouchers.

Romney’s education vision is based on an ideology that demonizes unions and views the market as the driver of education reform. His program is not based on quality research or best practices; indeed, it doesn't mention the one reform that has been shown over years to be effective, early childhood education.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel went even further, in pointing out that...

“If you liked President George W. Bush’s education legacy, you’re going to love Mitt Romney’s education vision for America if he’s elected president,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “Not only did he recycle many of the key education players from the Bush administration but he’s also pursuing some of the failed policies that hurt students and schools.”

Romney’s education plan outlined today during his speech demonstrates a complete disdain for public schools and educators. His speech lacks a meaningful plan for parental engagement or providing what is best for students in need. There’s no mention of priorities or realities about what is actually happening in classrooms across America.

Educators also are scratching their heads about the choices that Romney made in selecting his team of education advisors, which includes former Education Secretary Rod Paige. Paige once referred to teachers, bus drivers, custodians, and other educator members of the NEA as “a terrorist organization.” His list of advisors also included a state superintendent who pushed a host of bills protested by community leaders, parents and educators because he promised to increase class sizes, reduce the teaching force, replace teachers with mandatory online classes and erode educator rights. Other advisors come straight out of think tanks which have worked to undermine public education and what works for students.

Picking someone who called teachers terrorists, does seem like a poor choice of Romney's.

Ed Week has a series of articles based upon Romney's speech and policy book

• Details of Romney's School Choice Plan Emerge

But it appears Romney didn't consult with special education advocacy groups before making his pitch. While special education vouchers have grown in popularity in recent years, the number of programs is small, and the number of participants is also tiny.

Many advocacy groups warn parents against using vouchers for students with disabilities because, in doing so, they give up their rights outlined in federal education and disability laws. And they may not know that.

• Romney Calls for Using Title I, IDEA Funds for School Choice

The accountability proposals also prompted a host of question from Sandy Kress, a lawyer in Austin, Texas, and a former White House aide who played a key role in working with Congress to craft the NCLB law during President George W. Bush's tenure.

"What would the expectations be for states and districts?" Kress wanted to know. "What would the expectations be for the money in terms of the report cards and for the responsibility for learning? What will the expectations be for the rigor of the standards and the consequences? That's unclear."

• Dividing Lines: Romney and Obama on Private School Choice

The title of Petrilli's essay sums up his view: "The Romney education plan: Replacing federal overreach on accountability with federal overreach on school choice."

Education Sector's Anne Hyslop offers a different perspective. She praises pieces of Romney's proposal but says it wrongly assumes that choice—rather than polices for turning around low-performing schools and helping struggling students—will act as a cure-all.

The takeaway seems simple, if you like the failed policies pursued by corporate education reformers, and you want more of it, Mitt Romney is your guy.

Don't mess with Matt Damon

This speech at the Washington DC SOS rally by actor, and academy award winning writer, Matt Damon received a lot of positive reviews from a broad spectrum of observers.

After the speech, Damon was confronted by some right wing media. "Don't mess with Matt Damon" was the message that CNN reported.

He does a great job eviscerating the arguments of some of the least informed corporate education reformers.