March against the NEA, not with it

So the NAACP, La Raza and the teachers unions are organizing a march on the Mall
next month.

Does anybody else see the terrible irony here?

Ben Jealous, the head of the NAACP, loves to point to the possible racists
among the Tea Party. Jealous is zealous in his pursuit of Tea Party racists.

In the meantime, he organizes a march with the organization that single-handedly
killed school reform in Washington. You couldn’t miss a commercial produced and
paid for by the NEA extolling the virtues of Vincent Gray, who has promised to
fire Michelle Rhee should he be elected mayor.

Washington under Rhee, as The New York Times editorial page noted this morning, “made quick and impressive
progress, as measured by math and reading tests and by the rigorous federally
backed test known as the National Assessment of Education Progress.”

To make that progress, Rhee had to ruffle some feathers. She had to fire
incompetent teachers and incompetent administrators. The NEA, which prides
itself on protecting incompetent teachers (that should be its catch-phrase),
mobilized quickly against her, and somehow was able to convince the black
community in D.C. that Rhee’s efforts to improve the largely black school
system were against their interests.

It really boggles the mind.

And now, the same union that successfully snuffed out school reform in D.C. is
organizing a march with the NAACP to try to stop John Boehner from being
elected Speaker of the House.

I think they see Boehner as a threat because they know he will continue the
work of school reform at the national level, trying to push President Obama and
his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, to do the right thing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama appointed Rhee to some high-level position
within his administration once she gets fired by Gray.

Earlier this week, The New York Times ran a story about an interesting survey that showed black Americans
are much happier personally than they were in the 1970s. One reason cited is
the decline (although not elimination) of overt racism. As the story pointed
out: “The most
obvious is the decrease — though certainly not the elimination — in day-to-day
racism.

“ ‘The
decline in prejudice has been astounding,’ says Kerwin Charles, a University of Chicago economist who has studied
discrimination. Well into the 1970s, blacks faced ‘a vast array of personal
indignities that led to unhappiness,’ he noted. Today, those indignities are
unacceptable in many areas of American life.”

The interesting thing about the Tea Party is that while it may harbor some
people who are either racist or completely insensitive to racial indignities,
the movement leaders (and most of the followers) understand how devastating it
is politically to be seen as racist. African-Americans are not only welcomed
within the movement. They are highlighted and celebrated. This is a far cry
from the 1960s and ’70s, when blacks who waded into these types of crowds would
have been threatened or attacked.

This really is a sea change, an important difference in how we look at
ourselves and how we look at others.

Racism is still present and still an obstacle. But the biggest obstacle to
black advancement (and to Hispanic advancement and to white advancement, for
that matter) is education. If you have a college degree, the chance that you
are unemployed is pretty minuscule, in the big scheme of things. If you don’t
have a high school degree, unless you have some sort of special talent, the
chance that you have a good-paying job is similarly minuscule.

But kids drop out of schools, like the schools in D.C., because they have lousy
teachers, lousy administrators and a lousy atmosphere to learn. Rhee was
changing that because she knew that the best way to change the atmosphere was
to change the administration and get rid of the bad teachers.

Ben Jealous should know that. If he really cared about the advancement of his
community, he should lead a march against the NEA, not a march with it.

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