Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Obama, the Third Way, TPP, education privatization..accepting "status quo" used against us.
Right now in this country so many are going along with the idea that all students are alike, learn alike, can perform the same educational tasks, and that there really are no special needs students that can't be fixed by more rigid standards.
In fact President Obama says if we don't accept these new reforms we are comfortable with the "status quo".
"But education is an economic issue – if not the economic issue of our time," Obama said. "It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have.
Black leaders have charged that by firing teachers or closing schools that are considered to be failing, the president is only making a bad situation worse.
Obama, in addressing critics of his program, said that part of the controversy surrounding Race to the Top "reflects a general resistance to change; a comfort with the status quo."
Obama went further in his defense of the new normal in education. He said the "status quo" is morally inexcusable.
President Obama on Education: “The Status Quo is Morally Inexcusable”
Today, President Obama delivered an address on education at the Urban League’s 100th Anniversary Convention highlighting the steps his Administration has taken over the past eighteen months to improve the education system in America. The President stated that education reform is a top priority for his Administration because the “status quo is morally inexcusable, it’s economically indefensible, and all of us are going to have to roll up our sleeves to change it.”
Recently when he spoke of those of us who opposed the Trans Pacific Partnership, he said we were "accepting the status quo".
Video in which Obama says if we oppose the TPP we are "accepting the status quo".
Those words are about 5 minutes into the video.
I believe in both instances there are positions that allow us to have a different opinion but also understand that things are not perfect just as they are.
I believe we can see the serious harm to be done if the "status quo" is changed so very drastically in both areas.
I remembered where I had seen the term "status quo" used to marginalize those of us on the left of the party who question such policies. Guess who said it.
Why Third Way
This dysfunction in Washington serves to maintain the status quo – leaving us unprepared to meet the defining challenge of our time: making the global information era work for the United States, not against us. The innovation, dynamism, and modernization we need from our political system to meet that challenge have simply not kept pace:
Once, we could take prosperity—for America and most Americans—for granted. Now, we need new ideas for job-creation, expanding exports, shifting spending from entitlements to public investment, re-thinking higher education, and making the tax code competitive.
Once, our K-12 education system was the envy of the world. Now, we are struggling to compete in a knowledge economy, with a teaching profession—the linchpin to providing equal opportunity and mobility—that hasn’t been reformed in generations.
Once, our energy was largely shipped in and burned freely. Now, the U.S. is a fossil fuel powerhouse while simultaneously facing a global climate crisis, and we need new policies that can reconcile those two opposing forces.
Once, we stood atop the globe as a super-power. Now, we face ever-more complex security threats, but our defense systems are still fitted to a Cold War age.
And though some of our hot-button social issues have been addressed, new and pressing questions remain, on immigration, gun safety, and LGBT equality.
Third Way’s role in these debates is to serve as a centrist counterweight to the forces of polarization and ideological rigidity – forces that serve only to preserve the status quo. Our job is straightforward but not easy: we ponder, develop and then offer paradigm-busting policies and narratives; we find creative and strategic ways to make them politically salient; and then we work relentlessly to promote them to policymakers.
It's a term used too freely, so freely that it has literally lost its meaning.
11 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
these new uncompromising reforms in education are mostly ignored. Once both major parties approve such policies, the rest of us are wasting our breath. 
