Spreading the Wealth

Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities

By Kurtz, Stanley

CHAPTER SEVEN :  FOOLED, RULED, AND SCHOOLED

If you live in a suburb because you like the school system, watch out. A reelected President Obama could start merging your local school district with that of a nearby city. It’s all a part of his quest to abolish the suburbs. Transforming America’s education system is a central focus of Obama’s allies in the regional equity movement because a gradual blending of urban and suburban school systems would undermine the social basis of the suburbs: the quest for high-quality and more locally controlled schools. Americans believe in individual freedom and self-government, and central to personal liberty and self-rule is the ability to educate your children as you see fit.

Americans also believe that the drive to better your own economic situation is the key to prosperity for all. When young couples work and save so that they can move to a home in a suburb with just the sorts of schools they want for their children, we say that they are pursuing the American dream. Shut off that dream with a misguided effort to equalize the funding of every American school district, and you will take away the engine that drives our prosperity, undermining in the process the ability of parents to control what their children learn.

Much of the motivation that drives young Americans to work and save will be taken away. Forced income redistribution will create an equality of the lowest common denominator in America’s schools, as the drive to better your child’s circumstances will be rendered pointless. And the national education system that will be necessary to manage this economic redistribution will destroy the ability of local communities to decide what their children learn.

A national curriculum created and run by Obama’s supporters will quickly become the only game in town. Get ready for leftist indoctrination in your children’s schools. Because Obama’s top priority is the redistribution and equalization of school spending nationally, he is quietly working to seize control of your children’s education. His immediate goal is to nationalize the curriculum, but that is only the run-up to a still bolder attempt to force the redistribution of suburban school funding to urban schools. Obama cannot achieve this last and most controversial redistributive goal without first gaining control of the day-to-day business of American schooling, what your children learn. So he has systematically set about

 creating a national curriculum for America’s schools very arguably in violation of both the Constitution and the law. While the public language of Obama’s education policy is “standards, standards, standards,” the actual plan is “federal control, federal control, federal control.”

Obama’s hidden goal is to lower standards by pushing a weak curriculum and soft tests on the states. High standards are an obstacle to Obama’s real aim of economic redistribution. In the eyes of education leftists like Obama, high standards make it harder for poor and minority children to get into good colleges. The truth is that high education standards, properly taught, lift everyone up, with arguably greater benefits going to poor and minority students. Unfortunately, the education left is looking for shortcuts to a forced equality. In its eyes, gutting standards is the easiest way to stop some children from doing better than others. Look carefully at Obama’s ambitious plans for a national education standards, and you will find hidden beneath it a still bolder plan to fund urban school districts with suburban money. Ultimately Obama would like to effectively merge urban and suburban school systems, a goal that can be reached through a combination of student transfers across district lines and assorted redistributive tax schemes. Technically, the national government has no power to mandate any of this. Yet a series of regulatory carrots and sticks imposed on pain of losing federal funding has the potential to move the nation’s urban and suburban school systems toward effective merger. The same technique has already gone surprisingly far toward imposing a national school curriculum, in apparent defiance of the Constitution and the law. So let us first follow the trail of Obama’s stealthy efforts to create a national education curriculum, after which we can find an even bigger prize, the route from a national curriculum to a plan to redistribute suburban school funding to the cities.

A BILL AYERS LEGACY

The confluence of Obama’s education reforms with the regional equity movement is yet another chapter in the story of the president’s deep ties to political radicals. In this case, in addition to Obama’s years of education work with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, the key figure is Linda Darling-Hammond, an influential proponent of a politicized curriculum. When it comes to education issues, Ayers and Darling-Hammond are very much on the same page.

The president does not personally coordinate his education policy with Bill Ayers in the way that he works on regionalism with his old Gamaliel colleague Mike Kruglik. How could Obama invite Ayers to the Oval Office after the explosive 2008 controversy over his political ties to the former domestic terrorist and Weather Underground leader? Yet his alliance with Ayers does predict the direction of Obama’s education policies.

A BILL AYERS LEGACY

The confluence of Obama’s education reforms with the regional equity movement is yet another chapter in the story of the president’s deep ties to political radicals. In this case, in addition to Obama’s years of education work with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, the key figure is Linda Darling-Hammond, an influential proponent of a politicized curriculum. When it comes to education issues, Ayers and Darling-Hammond are very much on the same page.

The president does not personally coordinate his education policy with Bill Ayers in the way that he works on regionalism with his old Gamaliel colleague Mike Kruglik. How could Obama invite Ayers to the Oval Office after the explosive 2008 controversy over his political ties to the former domestic terrorist and Weather Underground leader? Yet his alliance with Ayers does predict the direction of Obama’s education policies.

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers worked together from 1999 to 2002 as board members of the left-leaning Woods Fund of Chicago. 1 Obama played a substantial role in placing Ayers on the board, all of which was part of a broader Obama-led strategy to increase Woods Fund support for community organizing.

Along with channeling grant money to radical groups like ACORN and the Midwest Academy, Obama and Ayers directed substantial funding to Gamaliel’s regionalist crusade. 2 Obama and Ayers also jointly ran an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). 3 Obama’s role at CAC seems to have been to keep money flowing to radical allies that he and Ayers shared, like ACORN and Gamaliel.

Ayers, who hated standardized tests, was much more interested in political indoctrination than in teaching basic skills. One of his projects was a “peace school,” where kids celebrated milestones in the history of the United Nations instead of traditional American holidays. After giving out well over one hundred million dollars to their community organizer buddies, Obama and Ayers had no discernible improvement in educational performance to show for it. In fact the determination that CAC had failed to improve test scores in the low-performing schools it was trying to help was made by the foundation’s own evaluators.

Obama’s sojourn with Ayers on the hard left of the education world may seem a far cry from the president’s current education policy. At first some open continuity with the Ayers years was a real possibility because it looked for a while as though Obama were going to appoint as secretary of education Bill Ayers’s favorite education expert, the leftist Linda Darling-Hammond.

A leading Obama adviser during the presidential campaign and transition period, she is best known as a critic of traditional high-stakes tests who strongly favors “teaching for social justice”— that is, using everything from ideologically charged readings to politicized math problems to turn children into “progressive” activists. But Obama in the end passed over her in favor of Arne Duncan, who ostensibly backs demanding standards and tests.

The administration’s education policy now centers on efforts to craft a core curriculum, national standards, and systematic testing for the nation’s schools. To a casual observer, the days of Obama’s education partnership with the likes of Bill Ayers and Chicago’s education hard left are a thing of the past. But not really. Obama is deft at playing an outside game with the public but an inside game for himself. Darling-Hammond didn’t become the secretary of education, but she has emerged instead as a key leader in the administration-orchestrated effort to create national standards and tests. That is to say, Obama has arranged for an enemy of traditional academic standards to police those standards. The result will be standards that aren’t really standards at all. Darling-Hammond’s focus now, moreover, is an audacious new program for turning the administration’s Common Core Initiative into a lever for a heavily redistributionist school-funding policy. That would be a great leap forward for the regional equity movement.

Should Darling-Hammond’s plan come fully into effect, the difference between urban and suburban school districts would effectively be erased, local control would be out, the federal government would be in charge of national education policy, and the federalist system as the founders envisioned it would be a long way closer to becoming a dead letter.

PIG IN A POKE

The Obama administration is well down the road to imposing a Common Core of standards on America’s schools, with an accompanying curriculum and tests.

That might sound like a fairly conservative idea. Standards for everyone! And indeed, some conservatives have been fooled. Not everything that sounds like a standard is the genuine article, however.

Obama hasn’t told us exactly what the standards are going to be. He wants us to trust him. And anyway, with all the controversy over the economy, no one’s been paying much attention to what’s shaping up to be the biggest transformation of American schooling, maybe since the adoption of the Constitution.

The Constitution of course is silent on education. It leaves schooling up to the states. Throughout most of American history the federal government has played a minimal role in education. Locally controlled school districts and state governments were in charge instead. Since World War II, however, between the response to Sputnik and the establishment of the Department of Education as a cabinet-level agency, the federal role has increased. Still, the Constitution has continued to block federal control of the curriculum. Obama’s ambitious plan is to use a combination of federal power and taxpayer dollars to persuade the states to do “voluntarily” what the federal government cannot directly order them to do.

Whether Obama’s approach is constitutional remains to be seen. Yet this is Obama’s strategy, and so far it’s working. To understand why the idea of a federally controlled school curriculum is worrisome, let’s take a trip down memory lane. Back in the mid-1990s Lynne Cheney waged a pitched battle against liberal educators over left-leaning national history standards, whose initial development she herself had funded while serving as the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It’s not unusual for conservatives to get burned when the money they give to improve education gets hijacked by leftist ideologues, as Cheney’s grant was by a group of UCLA historians obsessed by race, class, and gender. Something to nationalize education— before they sign on to a national standards project again.

But the real problem is that President Obama and the education left also remember the history standards battle. So now they’re too smart to actually say what America’s new education curriculum is going to be. Instead they’re trying to get all the states to sign off on the unprecedented idea of a national curriculum, sight unseen. By the time the actual standards come out, Obama hopes it will be too late for the states to back out of their commitment. And of course, by the time the actual content of our new national curriculum is revealed, Obama will quite possibly have been reelected. You might think that states accustomed to controlling their own education standards, many of them run by Republicans, would have refused to sign off on the Obama administration’s curricular pig in a poke. Yet so far well over forty states have jumped on the bandwagon. How was this possible, and where is Obama really taking us with this project?

AGAINST JOHN WAYNE

Suppose that in a major public address Barack Obama were to say the following:

“My fellow Americans, to be honest, I have some serious reservations about the way this country is structured. In America we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations. Locally those collective actions and institutions have got to be pitched at the regional level in such a way as to unite small towns and suburbs with nearby cities.  The whole federalist system, as the founders created it, is far too geared toward John Wayne– style individualism. You pick up and move to a suburb in search of your American dream. But that leaves less well-off folks behind, so classic federalism extracts a price this country can no longer afford to pay. The only way to make certain this nation’s wealth gets more equally divided among all Americans is to run our country more centrally. That way no one can pick up and take his tax money to another town, suburb, or state without sharing it with someone less fortunate. That’s why I plan to do everything in my power to advance federal and regional control of America’s tax money and especially of America’s system of education, so as to eliminate the local differences upon which our long but troubled tradition of John Wayne– style individualism rests.”

That speech would not go over well with the American public although I believe it is an accurate rendering of the thinking behind the president’s policies. In fact I’ve taken several lines at the beginning of this imaginary speech from an interview Obama gave to a Chicago paper when he first ran for public office in 1995. (The portion from “In America we have this strong bias” to “build collective institutions and organizations” is a direct quote from Obama.)

So if you’re President Obama and this is what you believe, how do you advance such an

unpopular agenda in the area of education without alienating voters prior to your reelection campaign? Above all, you proceed in such a way as to discourage public debate.

Here is a guide.

Step 1: Instead of asking Congress to appropriate money in support of your new education policy, thereby provoking public discussion of the issue, insert the funding for your key education initiative in a massive stimulus package, passed rapidly and with virtually no debate even on economic policy, much less education. That is precisely how President Obama procured the $ 4.35 billion, to be used solely at the Department of Education’s discretion, for his Race to the Top Initiative.

From the start Race to the Top was a kind of end run around the conventional legislative process. Writing in 2011 for Washington’s insider paper The Hill, the education expert Jane Robbins made the point: “The Race to the Top program has been tinged with subterfuge from the beginning.” 

Step 2: Now that you’ve got a huge pile of money free from congressional constraints and even public debate, use it as a lure to move the country’s education system toward a federally controlled curriculum. Make the willingness to adopt a national Common Core a virtual condition of receiving Race to the Top grants, even before the standards and curriculum are finalized.

Now things get tricky. Technically a federally designed curriculum for the nation’s schools would be both illegal and unconstitutional. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserves control over education to the states and the people. Not only that, but the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the U.S. Department of Education’s 1979 enabling legislation and even the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 all forbid the creation of either national education standards or a national curriculum. So how do you get around all this?

Step 3: Orchestrate the creation of a national curriculum and standards from the White House while denying central control. Recruit publicly unaccountable groups like the National Governors Association to sponsor the project.

Bring in the massively wealthy Gates Foundation for funding and supervision.  See to it that your former education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond (too controversial to be appointed secretary of education) is the leading presence at one of the private groups actually designing the curriculum and standards. And voilà! You, the president, have just used a combination of stealth, fancy legislative footwork, and the lure of big money in tough economic times to effectively circumvent both the Constitution and the law. Congratulations! By acting without proper public debate, withholding details of the standards, testing regime, and curriculum he is pushing, and threatening to withhold federal funding from states that refuse to jump on the national standards bandwagon, Obama is making cash-strapped states an offer they can’t refuse. Technically the states are “voluntarily” buying into this national Common Core idea. In fact they are selling their constitutional birthright for a mess of pottage, as Obama lays the foundations of an unprecedented federalization of America’s schools. And all that is only part one of the plan.

A number of observers have remarked on the stealthy nature of President Obama’s Common Core Initiative. Here, for example, is the University of Arkansas professor and education blogger Jay Greene, commenting on the advocates of a national curriculum:   . .  their entire project depends on stealth.

If we have an open and vigorous debate about whether it is desirable for our large, diverse country to have a uniform national set of standards, curriculum, and assessments, I am confident that they would lose.  .  .  . I continue to believe that the chief architects of the nationalization campaign at the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education are intentionally concealing the full extent of their nationalization effort to improve its political prospects. For example, repeatedly describing the effort as “voluntary” and led by the states is obviously false and misleading, especially as the primary impetus was financial rewards during Race to the Top.  .  .  .

Greene is right to say that were they presented openly and honestly, Americans would reject Obama’s plans to nationalize the country’s education system. The framers of the Constitution understood perfectly well that the education of children ought to be governed by their parents, families, and neighbors.

Americans enthusiastically embrace this responsibility by holding local school officials responsible for their decisions. But how will parents be able to give a piece of their mind to some anonymous Washington education bureaucrat, much less an employee of a the Gates Foundation or an adviser to a private education consortium with a federal contract (like Linda Darling-Hammond) once these bodies have seized effective control of the nation’s schools?

15 NO GOLD STANDARD

Why exactly does President Obama want to take all this trouble to impose a national curriculum, education standards, and a system of testing on America’s schools? Believe it or not, he is doing it because he’s hostile to the whole idea of standards and testing. Tests and standards separate students out on the basis of achievement. The education left opposes that sort of ranking because it reveals “disparities.” Racial and ethnic minorities as well as low-income students often do less well on standardized tests than do the children of the middle class. The right way to correct for that of course is to improve the ability of all students to meet high standards.

The education left, however, prefers a shortcut to a false equality. It hopes to trash real education standards, so as to pretend that differences in achievement don’t exist. That way low-performing poor and minority students will find it easier to get into college whether they’re

truly prepared or not. Differences in college admissions between urban and suburban students will begin to equalize, not because of genuine parity but through the suppression of real measures of educational achievement. Sure enough, the limited information we have about the still undefined and incomplete Common Core being orchestrated by the Obama administration tells us that it will lower standards rather than raise them. Says Andrew Porter, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Education: “Our research shows that the common-core standards do not represent a meaningful improvement over existing state standards.  .  .  .

The common core is not a new gold standard— it’s firmly in the middle of the pack of current curricula.”  Ze’ev Wurman, a mathematics, engineering, and science expert and a member of California’s commission reviewing the Common Core, says: “This framework simply teaches our students science appreciation, rather than science.”  And this is before we’ve seen the Common Core’s testing system, which is even now being designed by the nation’s leading opponents of standardized tests.

An already mediocre core curriculum will surely be dumbed down still further by a weak testing program.  It’s particularly disheartening to see the hugely successful education reforms undertaken by Massachusetts cast aside by that state’s adoption of Obama’s Common Core. Under Republican governor William Weld, Massachusetts adopted rigorous standards, with a heavy emphasis on classic literature and academic content. Over the past fifteen or so years, Massachusetts has risen from being a middling performer on national tests to a consistently top-ranked state. In 2005 it became the first state ever to finish first in every one of the four categories measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often called Americans’ report card). Massachusetts students swept every category again in 2007 and 2009. Poor and minority students have not been passed over by this progress. Performance gaps keyed to race and income have actually narrowed in Massachusetts. In fact scores for African Americans and Hispanics have been rising more quickly than those of white students. In 2008 E. D. Hirsch, an expert on educational standards, said, “If you are a disadvantaged parent with a school-age child, Massachusetts is  .  .  . the state to move to.”  You’d think the Massachusetts experience would serve as a model for the rest of the country, maybe especially for those on the political left. Yet the temptation to gut educational standards instead of doing the hard work it takes to meet them is too great. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has thrown over his own state’s successful education experiment in favor of the untried, untested, undefined, but sure-to-be-dumbed-down, national core curriculum being pushed by his close political ally Barack Obama.

AYERS AND DARLING-HAMMOND
The key to Obama’s second-term education plans lies in the role being played in the administration-orchestrated Common Core program by Linda Darling-Hammond. Darling-Hammond was Obama’s education adviser during campaign 2008 and led his postelection transition team. She was on the fast lane to appointment as secretary of education until her leftism alienated even many Democrats. 21 Shortly after Darling-Hammond was passed over for education secretary in favor of Arne Duncan, Bill Ayers himself came out with a column on the issue at the Huffington Post. If it were up to him, said Ayers, he would have picked Darling-Hammond for the job: “.  .  .   then again I would have picked Noam Chomsky for [S] tate  .  .  . Bernardine Dohrn for Attorney General  .  .  . Paul Krugman for [T] reasury, and Amy Goodman for Press Secretary.” 22 Yet Ayers admitted that the attacks on Darling-Hammond had destroyed her potential effectiveness as a cabinet member. He ended the piece by railing against standardized tests and advocating a redistribution of resources to the poor and minorities as a payment on America’s “educational debt” (a popular variation on the reparations idea supported by Darling-Hammond as well as him). 23 Along with a politicized curriculum (another Ayers specialty), those are the key goals of the education left. As it turns out, Darling-Hammond may now be in a better position to gut standards, redistribute money, and politicize the curriculum than if she’d become a heavily scrutinized and controversial secretary of education. The Ayers– Darling-Hammond link is no fluke. Both were leaders of the small schools movement, which was supposedly about reducing school size but was in fact about creating places to push leftist politics, like the peace school.  Ayers and Darling-Hammond have also worked together. She contributed to a collection of essays edited and published by Ayers in 1998 (when Ayers and Obama were working together at their own education foundation in Chicago). Darling-Hammond’s contribution to that volume emphasized funding disparities between urban and suburban schools and praised the nonstandardized alternative assessments (like having students keep personal journals instead of taking tests) popular in the experimental schools that sprouted up in the 1960s.  Like Ayers, Darling-Hammond has even edited her own volume of essays on teaching for “social justice.”

Her writings on the topic would not sit well with most Americans. She appears to like making what she calls “[ w] hite, middle class, heterosexual” students and teachers squirm. 27 She seems happiest when she gets her guilty targets apologizing for their “unspoken privileges.” 28 But Darling-Hammond doesn’t just attack “sexuality, race, and gender privilege.” 29 Her other favorite target is the insularity of “[ w] hite, middle-class, suburban America.” 30 Darling-Hammond is always looking for a way to guarantee “equity” between suburban and urban schools. 31 Nothing bothers her more than America’s practice of funding schools from local taxes. 32 In effect her ideal curriculum could serve as a kind of propaganda arm for the regional equity movement.
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It’s clear from Darling-Hammond’s writings that her long-term goal is to circumvent America’s localized governance structures by centrally funding and administering the nation’s schools, on the European model. 33 Just as the regional equity movement’s strategy is to increase the reach of regional governing bodies before actually proposing tax sharing, so Darling-Hammond hopes that laying down a national curriculum will set a precedent for greater federal control of America’s education system, even in matters of funding.

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

What exactly is Darling-Hammond’s role in shaping the new Common Core? Two major consortia are now devising a set of tests to measure mastery of the Core’s education standards. Between them they are splitting $ 360 million in federal Race to the Top money, $ 176 million of which goes to Darling-Hammond’s group.  One knowledgeable teacher quoted in Education Week describes what’s coming as “a huge departure from the kinds of tests most kids currently take.”  That’s not surprising, since Darling-Hammond is a prominent critic of standardized tests and a fan of far fuzzier “alternative” measurement instead. Darling-Hammond is the leading presence at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, whose actual testing plans remain disturbingly undefined.

The tests themselves will be ready only sometime in 2014 and 2015, conveniently several years into a possible second Obama term.  The Smarter Consortium was formed through the consolidation of several smaller groups. That consolidation apparently came in response to the Obama administration’s decision to award money to only a very few applicants. This move had the effect of putting Darling-Hammond in charge of the huge chunk of the assessment pie. Although Darling-Hammond doesn’t formally lead the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, education experts generally treat her as the group’s leading figure.   

Perhaps mindful of the controversy surrounding her far-left views, she seems intent on downplaying her role. When Education Week reported that the Smarter group was “under the leadership” of Darling-Hammond, she contacted the paper to deny it, claiming to be just one of many people advising the consortium, which was itself supposedly being led by state chiefs and assessment leaders from the states. 39 That denial is unconvincing. We’ve seen that state “leadership” of the Common Core is actually more like state followership of the federal money being dangled, with heavy conditions, by the Obama administration. And here’s how the newsletter of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium described Darling-Hammond’s role in November 2011: “Throughout the summer, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Consortium’s Senior Research Advisor  .  .  . led the development of the content specifications [of the tests] in collaboration with experts in the field.”

Clearly, Darling-Hammond is leading the actual development of testing by the Smarter
Balanced Assessment Consortium, which in turn now controls about half the national testing franchise. So by limiting the number of competitive grants, the Obama administration has created a situation in which the president’s former education adviser, who is the top national opponent of standardized tests, is now effectively in charge of designing tests for half the country. Yet the broader public has virtually no idea that any of this is happening.

A TROUBLING VISION

Gutting America’s educational testing standards is only the beginning of what Darling-Hammond has in mind. In January 2012 Darling-Hammond published a piece in the leftist Nation magazine, pointing toward her broader goals for the Common Core.   

Like Obama’s regionalist mentors, Darling-Hammond compares America’s education system with South African apartheid. She also suggests that a real solution to the problem of poverty would require government to guarantee “housing, healthcare, and basic income security” to all. She then attacks standardized tests and praises nations that centrally control their schools. Yet the real novelty in this piece is Darling-Hammond’s call to create common resource standards that would work on the model of the new Common Core standards. She wants to use these common resource standards to make the receipt of federal education money conditional on the equalization of school funding across municipal lines.

The plan is sketched out in the 2020 Vision Roadmap, a document that Darling-Hammond helped put together and that she touts at the end of her Nation article.  The 2020 Vision Roadmap is filled with prescriptions for using federal carrots and sticks to force the sort of antisuburban reforms advocated by the regional equity movement. Consider the following passage: “The federal government should compel states to review inter- and intra-[ school] district resource distribution using established indicators. States that fail to comply would be subject to withdrawal of federal funds, and the federal government would have the right to apply the direct remedy to correct the problem.”  

This would empower the federal government to negate America’s local school funding system and force the redistribution of local tax money across municipal lines.

The 2020 Vision Roadmap also proposes allowing students to transfer across school district lines, with transportation provided at government expense.  

Just as the combination of regional tax base sharing, growth boundaries, and low-income housing quotas supported by the regional equity movement would effectively abolish the suburbs, so Darling-Hammond’s proposals would have the effect of eliminating distinctions between urban and suburban school districts in a given region. The combination of government-imposed revenue redistribution and government-funded cross– school district transfers would, in practical terms, mean the swallowing up of suburban school districts by
nearby cities. It could be argued that the Obama administration will stop at the Common Core.  

Just because Darling-Hammond wants common resource standards added to the Common Core doesn’t mean that Obama will do as she asks. Voters would be fools to believe that, however. Given the fact that Darling-Hammond is now effectively steering the administration’s most important education policy initiative, her outsize influence will surely continue. We’ve already learned that the president’s Sustainable Communities Initiative is being shaped behind the scenes by his former organizing mentor Mike Kruglik.

Obama’s urban and regional policy has already been infused with equity standards craftd by his old leftist colleagues. We should therefore expect him to grant Darling-Hammond and her leftist colleagues the ability to craft a parallel educational equity agenda in a second term. In fact Darling-Hammond has already been appointed to the Obama administration’s Department of Education Equity and Excellence Commission, which is charged with recommending “ways to restructure school finance systems to achieve equity in the distribution of educational resources and further student achievement and attainment.

ENDGAME

The outlines of a revolutionary and profoundly redistributionist transformation of the way Americans live and govern themselves are now visible— to those who have eyes to see. The foundation has already been laid. If Obama can graft Darling-Hammond’s common resource standards onto his common curricular standards and enforce them by regulation, on pain of loss of federal funding, he could force a gradual merger of urban and suburban school districts. The country is in for some major surprises during a possible Obama second term. If it seems unlikely that a combination of federal carrots and sticks could usurp America’s system of state and local school control, consider that we are already vastly closer to having an arguably illegal and unconstitutional national school curriculum than many would have thought possible. That was achieved through the powers of the presidency, a willingness to make an end run around the usual legislative process, and the lure of federal money in tough economic times. Having gotten this far toward fulfilling the redistributive goals that he and his hard-left colleagues have cherished for years, for the most part without the public even noticing, a reelected Obama will surely press the plan forward. Once Obama begins to force a redistribution of suburban school funding to the cities, a central plank in his program to abolish the suburbs will be in place. A core reason for moving to the suburbs will slowly be rendered pointless, undercutting the engine of our prosperity and ending the American tradition of local control over schools. In the meantime those who saved and sacrificed for years to move to the suburbs will see their plans undermined, as the schools that drew them to new homes slowly lose their distinctive quality. Forced equality through redistribution will trump liberty, prosperity, and self-rule. Welcome to Obama’s new America. It doesn’t stop there. Once we pull Obama’s regionalist crusade out from its dusty hiding place, examine it, and grasp its tremendous personal importance for the president, a whole panoply of administration policies begins to make sense as part of a much larger effort to force redistribution from the suburbs to the cities. We’ve just seen this for education policy, and the implications go further still. Even Obama’s signature issues, like health care reform and the stimulus package, take on new meaning once you recognize that the antisuburban redistributionist crusade has been the president’s guiding light all along. So let’s go big, with a panoramic view of Obama’s first term in light of all that we’ve learned to date.

Source: Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities Kurtz, Stanley (2012-08-02). CHAPTER SEVEN :  FOOLED, RULED, AND SCHOOLED