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Thursday 25 October 2012
Why I will vote for President Obama

But as bad as the Obama education policies are, they are tolerable in comparison to what Mitt Romney plans. Romney claims credit for the academic successes of Massachusetts, but he had nothing to do with the gains in that state, which were enacted 10 years before he became governor. The Massachusetts education reforms doubled the budget for public schools, increased spending on early childhood education, and raised standards for new teachers, but Romney intends to do none of that if elected President.

If elected president, Romney will curtail spending on everything except privatization of public education. He will lower standards for entering the teaching profession. His policies will devastate our public schools and dismantle the education profession. He supports charters and vouchers and welcomes the takeover of public schools by for-profit entrepreneurs. Unlike the Massachusetts reforms that he wrongly takes credit for, he offers not a single idea to improve public education. Romney nowhere acknowledges that free public education is a public responsibility and an essential institution in a democratic society.

Under a Romney administration, I fear not only for the future of public education but for the future of our society. Presently, nearly 25% of American children are growing up in poverty. We lead the advanced nations of the world in child poverty. Romney offers no proposals to reduce that scandalous number. Only government action can make a dent in a problem of that magnitude, but Romney believes in private charity, not government action.

What frightens me most about the Romney-Ryan ticket is the Republican Party’s rigid ideology. There have been times in recent history when moderate Republicans were in the ascendancy in the party. Today, the moderates are gone; the GOP is dominated by radical anti-government ideologues. The party seems determined to roll back the social policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and to bring our society back to the 1920s. We know what followed the free-market exhilaration of the 1920s.

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