Abstract

Jonathan Kozol

The article looks at the lack of focus on education policies during the 2004 United States presidential election. Education barely surfaced in the final weeks of the electoral campaign. This was partly because President George W. Bush effectively displaced domestic issues (other than his coded emphasis on "faith" and "values") from the nation's attention, but also because the Democrats have abdicated any serious oppositional position on the President's benighted test-and-drill agenda for our public schools. The late Paul Wellstone openly denounced the President's obsession with the measuring of children's skills while starving children in poor neighborhoods of the amplitude of learning still afforded to the children of the privileged. It is dissent and indignation on that order that was missing from too many of the statements Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made on education and related issues of equality for children. I doubt that this will greatly change until there is a grassroots movement in defense of children on a scale progressives have not dared envision.