When domestic policy advisor for George W. Bush was named Secretary of Education, the demolition of American public schools was proceeding on a schedule set by the cynically-impossible demands built into No Child Left Behind, which Margaret LaMontagne Spellings had helped to design. After both Bush and Spellings left their miseducative mess for Team Obama to make ever worse in 2009, Spellings kicked around among the elites of the corporate education reform movement for a few years before she received her next assignment from the right-wing billionaires in charge of the GOP.
When Tom Ross was fired as President of the UNC system in 2015 for his links to progressive causes, Spellings was picked as his successor by the the state's powerful John Birchers. Everyone knew by then that the UNC system would never be the same highly-respected academic institution that it had worked so hard to become.
Even though Spellings has been put out to pasture from her position as political waitress to the UNC Board of Governors, the Board of Trustees, now controlled by the North Carolina Trump Party legislature, has been seeded with know-nothing conservative businessmen--you know, the kind that would deny tenure to an eminently qualified black scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (read Nicole Hannah-Jones's statement here).
Among the new team members named to the UNC Board of Trustees this year is Malcolm Turner, an executive for the online sports gambling site, DraftKings, Inc. He should be lots of help this fall during Board meetings that focus on finalizing members' parlay cards. Wonder if he knew what the betting line was on whether or not Hannah-Jones would accept the Board's efforts to humiliate her?
Whatever the line was, I would have bet against it.
No comments:
Post a Comment