One of the stock phrases that Arne Duncan uses in his speeches is the that “there is not a day that he doesn’t think about Martin Luther King.”
Duncan will say that his agenda of competitive school funding, school closings, charter schools, the undermining of teacher union contracts and the punitive use of standardized test results (it is becoming harder and harder to come up with a single term to describe his expansive plans for destroying public education) is the “civil rights movement of today”
According to the Civil Rights Movement and organizations of today, apparently not.
In fact, you could say that stopping the Duncan/Obama education agenda is the civil rights movement of today.
Ironic that the MLK, who was in Memphis to support the right of workers to strike, has been co-opted by corporate whores like Duncan, Klein, et al. to corporatize public education, bust teachers unions and socialize children to expect to work longer and harder to make subsistence wages.
Ironic too that the education reformers who claim to be so concerned about civil rights have created a two-tiered, segregated system just like the one MLK and other civil rights leaders of the 50's/60's fought to integrate.
Lastly, ironic that the first black man elected president of the United States is so frightened by criticism of white bigots that he would rather fire a government worker wrongly accused of racism against whites than actually investigate the charges and back her up when it becomes clear they are false.
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