Is being an admiral a good qualification for running a big city school system? I have no idea. Does having a doctorate in education prepare one for being a superintendent of any school system? I don’t know that either. I have long been a critic of schools of education. I think they have little knowledge of actual teaching and learning. Rather they have an ideology – call it progressivism for want of a more definitive term – and I think that ideology has done little good and much harm. But it has also been pointed out, and makes a lot of sense to me, that running a school system is not an educational job. It is a political job. An administrator, perhaps with a few exceptions, is not an educational leader, should not be expected to be, should not pretend to be, and is not prepared to be. Running a school system, big or little, is political job in that it requires dealing with power, with working out trade offs among competing interests. It also, I presume, is a management job because there are lots of logistics to manage. So why not an admiral?

Perhaps in the ed school curriculum for school administrators, among the educational fluff, there is also some real training in the nitty gritty of school management. I don’t know. Is real training in the nitty gritty of related management in the admiral’s background? I would think probably so. But apparently it wasn’t sufficient. He failed.

A school administrator certainly is a “community organizer” to at least some extent. But where does that lead?

Is social promotion a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure. I would certainly think it would be bad, very bad, if adopted as mandatory policy on a school level. But I suspect it can be a good thing in some individual situations. Are politicians routinely given social promotion, meaning given advancement for which they are not qualified? Of course. Well, in the opposition party, that gang of rascals that ought to be thrown out, they are. In your own party, the party of enlightenment and all good things, advancement always comes by merit. Everyone knows that.

Is it true that the Democrats are getting tough on education? I don’t know. If so, is it a good thing? I don’t know. Do Democrats have a coherent and sensible plan for education? I don’t know but I’m skeptical. Do Republicans? Probably not, but that just might beat whatever the Democrats have in mind.

Is American education broken, and in need of fixing? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I don’t think the “broken” perspective serves us well. When a machine is broken we expect to find a definitive cause of the malfunction and a definitive cure. I can’t see that as applying to education at all. Education can certainly be made better, as anything can be made better. But where will this improvement come from? I do not think the answer to that is obvious.

Turns out that many of the edu-fads that afflict public education have been around for a long time. Whole language reading instruction’s been around since at least the 1930′s and I’m sure that with some vigorous spelunking various other edu-fads that have long since crashed and burned could be uncovered.

The reason is that since there’s nothing about public education that mandates the meeting of an independent, external standard of performance all standards of performance are locally defined and changeable. That means that one school district’s kids learn to read because that’s the standard that applies and in the district right next door the kids graduate illiterate but full of certainty of their knowledge.

That lack of an independent, external standard means that education is whatever the local school board says it is. Illiterate graduates aren’t a failing and the construction of a shiny, new, over-priced school building from which they graduate is a success. Mandating of edu-fads that allow school board members and administrators to present themselves as forward-thinking and cutting-edge is success and the resulting mis-education isn’t a failure.

The Democrats’ problem is that they’re faced with the decision of maintaining a long, successful political alliance with those who benefit from the extant public education system or facing squarely the shortcomings of that system and embracing a newly-emerging constituency – the black voter.

I know, I know, the black voter isn’t exactly a new constituency. The Democrats have enjoyed their favor for several decades by buying their vote. Trouble is, now two worrisomely powerful constituencies are coming into conflict and it’s not all that clear the rift can be healed. If the newly-emerging black/education voter is to win then the current system has to change fundamentally and there are folks who think things are fine just the way they are. There may be no way to bring them together and the Democratic party can’t exist in it’s current form with the allegiance of on or the other.