Review your Orwell. The Left has never been about the proles. It has always been about O'Brien dunking on Winston Smith and creating a fractured and confused populace. People who still believe the Left has anything to do with helping the dispossessed are willfully ignoring history.
The problem is also downstream with the rise of credentialism versus merit (and intelligence) in a major US institutions. Take the US Supreme Court. In the 1950s the Warren Court leaders mostly went to Land Grant colleges in places like Minnesota, Indiana and California. Today, every single member of the Supreme Court (except Justice Barrett) went to Harvard or Yale. The same can be said for many of the Fortune 500 CEOs and other institutional leaders that gained their seats by credentials, not merit or skill.
Progressives are conflicted - they want the money and votes of teacher unions, however, consistency with their principles SHOULD incline them to support measures that improve educational outcomes for the non-elite, e.g., charter schools. As with most things, people choose the money!
Rather than improving upstream K - 12 education, especially for minority and low income students, we in the United States have opted for downstream affirmative action impacting a small number of students entering a small number of elite colleges and universities. Most minority and other low income students have been abandoned to their fates at the hands of a poorly-performing, albeit expensive, public education behemoth. Literacy and numeracy do matter as basic competencies especially in the 21st century global job market.
'The left' has been interested in helping the poor in the same way that the pilgrims were interested in gaining religious freedom: they were not. They just wanted to be the persecutors instead of the persecuted.
Great point.
Two observations.
Review your Orwell. The Left has never been about the proles. It has always been about O'Brien dunking on Winston Smith and creating a fractured and confused populace. People who still believe the Left has anything to do with helping the dispossessed are willfully ignoring history.
The problem is also downstream with the rise of credentialism versus merit (and intelligence) in a major US institutions. Take the US Supreme Court. In the 1950s the Warren Court leaders mostly went to Land Grant colleges in places like Minnesota, Indiana and California. Today, every single member of the Supreme Court (except Justice Barrett) went to Harvard or Yale. The same can be said for many of the Fortune 500 CEOs and other institutional leaders that gained their seats by credentials, not merit or skill.
Excellent analysis and conclusion.
Progressives are conflicted - they want the money and votes of teacher unions, however, consistency with their principles SHOULD incline them to support measures that improve educational outcomes for the non-elite, e.g., charter schools. As with most things, people choose the money!
Rather than improving upstream K - 12 education, especially for minority and low income students, we in the United States have opted for downstream affirmative action impacting a small number of students entering a small number of elite colleges and universities. Most minority and other low income students have been abandoned to their fates at the hands of a poorly-performing, albeit expensive, public education behemoth. Literacy and numeracy do matter as basic competencies especially in the 21st century global job market.
'The left' has been interested in helping the poor in the same way that the pilgrims were interested in gaining religious freedom: they were not. They just wanted to be the persecutors instead of the persecuted.