by David Safier
Ever since Kathleen Parker jumped conservative ship when she was forced to confront the choice of supporting or renouncing Sarah Palin (she renounced, forcefully), she's been a changed woman. Parker has been ostracized by the conservative establishment and struck out on her own, feeling her way down a new path.
Her op ed in the Star,
Crumbling schools in land of plenty, is worth reading, not because she breaks new ground, but because she is Kathleen Parker bemoaning the sorry state of schools in this country, especially those with large populations of African American students.
The column focuses on a school Obama visited during his campaign to spotlight how decrepit the building is. Using an Obama photo op as a starting point gives you some idea of where her allegiances are moving. She says, teachers in schools like this one:
make less than similarly qualified teachers in other districts and fewer have advanced degrees. Not surprisingly, it's hard to recruit teachers to impoverished areas to teach disadvantaged students in collapsing schools without modern equipment.
She continues,
Although most rooms were relatively warm, thanks to recent repairs, some still registered as low as 50 degrees. Four years ago when Ferillo was filming here, the gym was 18 degrees.
In other schools along the I-95 corridor, classroom ceilings have collapsed and sewage backs up in hallways on rainy days. Sometimes snakes wander in from neighboring swamps.
I hope some of the more enlightened among her old readership are looking at her recent work and paying attention to things she's saying, maybe for the first time, because they're not coming out of one of those pointy headed, bleeding heart liberals.
I'm reading her columns pretty regularly now. She's one of the barometers for possible shifts in the political/philosophical landscape of the nation.
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It’s amazing, innit? Kathleen Parker was always one of the more reliably wingnutty cogs of the RW noise machine.