by David Safier
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce announced its 2014 legislative agenda. Along the way, Speaker of the House Andy Tobin, who's running for Congress in CD-1, said Washington is what's wrong with Arizona.
“If the federal government took its foot off the throat of Arizona, we would be doing a lot better,” he said.
The ed news is, the Chamber wants to promote a world-class education system. So far so good. It wants to do it by adding more educational choice — not so good. That's code-speak for more vouchers, more money and latitude for charters and a continuing shrinking of funds for our school district schools. If there's any question about the direction this is heading:
Toward that end, the Arizona Chamber announced nationally recognized education leader Lisa Graham Keegan, a past Arizona superintendent of public instruction, will lead an effort to bring about major reforms to Arizona’s education system.
Keegan brought us charter schools when she was in the state senate, made sure they were under-regulated when she was Arizona's Ed Supe, was McCain's education advisor when he ran for president, and currently works fist in glove with Craig Barrett, the multi-millionaire ex-CEO of Intel who is Brewer's point man for the state's conservative "education reform" agenda and has said he wants to make sure we don't "throw money" at education.
At least there's no question where the Chamber stands.
Has there ever been a question of where the Chamber stood? Firmly athwart the rush of history yelling “Stop!”. They hate public education, it gets the undesireables all riled up for silly things like “decent jobs” and “places to live”. Can’t keep pushing labor costs down to third world levels if they get those ideas in their heads.
Yes that darned Federal gummint with it’s foot on our throat, like the Border Patrol which Andy continually whines isn’t “pertecting ur borderz!” or behaving like the ‘Leave Britney Aloooone’ guy during the shutdown “Keep The Canyon Oooooopen!!!”