If It Seems Too Good To Be True It Usually Is

Just last night I was having dinner with a past executive director of the NYT. We were discussing Obama and his potential and I indicated that, to date, all of Obama's appointments and policy statements coincided precisely with my points of view. That, I said, made me weary and today, finally, I disagreed with his last decision. Arne Duncan may be acceptable to both opposite camps in education and he may have obtained excellent results within the Chicago school system but I believe that what was needed was a clearer message to the Teacher's Union that business as usual was over, that bad teachers would not be allowed to go on teaching and would not be rammed down the throats of Principals for reason of seniority and that huge sums - badly needed for educational purposes - would no longer be wasted to pay full salaries to teachers pulled out of their classes for child molestation and who, instead of being in prison, where they belong, sit on full pay in Department of Education buildings set aside to house them while they do nothing. Maybe an Arne Duncan, less treatening to the TU that a Joel Klein, will be able to obtain more concessions and make more headway in reforming our public education system and the TU; however, if he will not deal enrgetically with the problems at hand, we will be, by the end of Obama's term(s), a third world country as far as education is concerned.