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Since the administration is owned by unions, we suppose it makes sense they would be hostile to school voucher programs. But, it is very sad because those programs primarily benefit black children. The Washington Post Editors opine on the perversity.
NINE OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due. …
… Unfortunately, though, it is not a surprise from an administration that, despite its generally progressive views on school reform, has proven to be hostile — as witnessed by its petty machinations against D.C.’s voucher program — to the school choice afforded by private-school vouchers. Mr. White told us that from Day One, the five-year-old voucher program has been subject to unrelenting scrutiny and questions from federal officials. Louisiana parents are clamoring for the choice afforded by this program; the state is insisting on accountability; poor students are benefiting. The federal government should get out of the way.
The reasons for the administration’s about face in Syria are explained by Peter Wehner.
… This latest volte-face by the president is evidence of a man who is completely overmatched by events, weak and confused, and deeply ambivalent about using force. Yet he’s also desperate to get out of the corner he painted himself into by declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line.” As a result he’s gone all Hamlet on us. Not surprisingly, Obama’s actions are being mocked by America’s enemies and sowing doubt among our allies. (Read this New York Times story for more.)
What explains this debacle? It’s impossible for us to know all the reasons, but one explanation appears to be a CYA operation.
According to Politico, “At the very least, Obama clearly wants lawmakers to co-own a decision that he can’t back away from after having declared last year that Assad would cross a ‘red line’ if he used chemical weapons against his own people.” And the Washington Post reports:
Obama’s proposal to invite Congress dominated the Friday discussion in the Oval Office. He had consulted almost no one about his idea. In the end, the president made clear he wanted Congress to share in the responsibility for what happens in Syria. As one aide put it, “We don’t want them to have their cake and eat it, too.”
Get it? The president of the United States is preparing in advance to shift the blame if his strike on Syria proves to be unpopular and ineffective. He’s furious about the box he’s placed himself in, he hates the ridicule he’s (rightly) incurring, but he doesn’t see any way out.
What he does see is a political (and geopolitical) disaster in the making. And so what is emerging is what comes most naturally to Mr. Obama: Blame shifting and blame sharing. Remember: the president doesn’t believe he needs congressional authorization to act. He’s ignored it before. He wants it now. For reasons of political survival. To put it another way: He wants the fingerprints of others on the failure in Syria.
Rarely has an American president joined so much cynicism with so much ineptitude.
Last weekend, The NY Times had a major piece on ESPN and college football.
The nation’s annual rite of mayhem and pageantry known as the college football season begins this week, and Saturday will feature back-to-back-to-back marquee matchups.
At the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, last year’s national champions, the Alabama Crimson Tide, will battle the Virginia Tech Hokies in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic.
Earlier in the day in Houston, Oklahoma State will play MississippiState in the Texas Kickoff Classic. And that night in Arlington, Tex., LouisianaState and Texas Christian will face off in the Cowboys Classic.
The games will not just be televised by ESPN. They are creations of ESPN — demonstrations of the sports network’s power over college football.
The teams were not even on each other’s schedules until ESPN, looking to orchestrate early-season excitement and ratings, went to work. The 2013 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic came together more than two years ago when one of the network’s programming czars noticed that Alabama was not scheduled to play this Labor Day weekend, brought the Tide on board and found a worthy opponent.
Far beyond televising games, ESPN has become the chief impresario of college football. By infusing the sport with billions of dollars it pays for television rights — more than $10 billion on college football in the last five years alone — ESPN has become both puppet-master and kingmaker, arranging games, setting schedules and bestowing the gift of nationwide exposure on its chosen universities, players and coaches.
The money and programming focused on college football by ESPN, as well as its competitors, have transformed the game, creating professionalized sports empires in the midst of academic institutions. …
… The power of television contracts has driven the recent fever of conference switching, as colleges forsake geographic loyalties in pursuit of more lucrative deals. In the last year, three universities jumped to the Atlantic Coast Conference for all sports: Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Louisville, none of them located within 200 miles of the Atlantic coast. Each stands to receive more than $16 million a year from the A.C.C.’s $3.6 billion contract with ESPN.
In the world of big-time college sports, universities like these are the winners. But there are colleges on the losing end, too — those stuck in conferences whose value is diminished by realignment, those that simply lack the resources to build teams good enough to break into the exposure game.
David Schmidly has watched what he calls the “massive increase in commercialization” of college sports as the president of several universities, most recently New Mexico, a public college with a respected men’s basketball program but a mere trickle of television dollars. As he sees it, the escalating television deals, especially at a time when states are slashing subsidies to public universities, have only widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots — between a “group of super-wealthy institutions and those that are trying to gnaw at the wood of the doors to get in.” …
… on many campuses today, it is impossible to ignore the anxiety about the trade-offs inherent in big-time sports. These concerns turned up repeatedly in a Times review of minutes from faculty senate meetings in recent years.
In March, the East Carolina chancellor, Steve Ballard, spoke in support of a faculty senate resolution urging Conference USA universities to review their travel policies to minimize disruption to classes and tests. According to a paraphrase in the minutes, Mr. Ballard “stated that it is absolutely against the interests of public education to let commercial entities like ESPN dictate the football schedules and therefore dictate the travel schedules and the class time available to our student athletes.”
Several years ago, Alan DeSantis, a communications professor who was then the faculty athletic representative at Kentucky, where basketball is king, decried the profusion of Tuesday and Wednesday night games.
“When did that ever become acceptable?” Mr. DeSantis asked. “It’s because there’s television revenue, and ESPN wants a night game.”
“And so for our amusement, for America’s amusement,” he added, “my students and your students are being yanked out of class to make us happy. And then they’re getting on the plane and we’re getting back at 3 in the morning exhausted and drained, and then we’re wondering why our kids aren’t performing better.”
In a recent interview, Mr. DeSantis said he had tried to persuade SEC presidents to agree on a rule barring athletes from missing more than 20 percent of classes because of games. He failed.
“It is like this insane arms race where no one wants to take their foot off the accelerator because everyone around them is upping the ante,” he said. …
… To Mr. Schmidly, the former president at New Mexico, “what’s emerging is a select set of 50 to 60 schools” and everyone else.
The winners, Mr. Schmidly said, “will all have stadiums that seat more than 50,000. They’ll all have TV contracts that bring in $20 million to $30 million a year. And because they have all that money, they will be good in all sports.”
Meanwhile, he added, “The rest of the institutions will be struggling because they don’t have the same set of opportunities.”
Over the years, the WAC (Western Athletic Conference) has been front and center in realignment. There are more than 20 former WAC programs. After BoiseState’s departure, the conference became much less desirable to ESPN, and its annual television fee plummeted to $1 million, tax statements show. That caused more teams to leave.
The WAC had a long and strong football tradition, but it could not weather the financial hit that followed BoiseState’s exit. In August 2012, its membership down to seven universities, the WAC announced that it would abandon football at year’s end.
This season, two former WAC universities, New MexicoState and Idaho, are stranded without a football conference, forced to cobble together schedules as independents, though they will be joining the Sun Belt Conference in 2014 for football.
Eight years ago, after ESPN televised a New MexicoState game, the university’s president, Michael V. Martin, explained the event’s significance to the faculty senate. “I will tell you, last Saturday we hit a home run,” he said, “not because we had the biggest crowd in the history of N.M.S.U. football, not because we had the first sellout before game day, but because we were on ESPN nationally.”
But Mr. Martin, who last year became the chancellor at ColoradoState, recently said: “ESPN treated the WAC as marginal cannon fodder. The contract was ridiculously small, and they made you play Thursday night at 8 if you wanted any exposure at all.”
Jeff Hurd, the WAC commissioner, said, “There is certainly a reality to the collegiate athletic world; the business side is very much there.” He added, “For lack of a better way to say it, it does become survival of the fittest.”