For a long time, I’ve been harping on a particular thing in the education “reform” movement: that it isn’t natural. People in it always claim that while they may not be doing the obvious things to improve primary education in this country, they are at least doing something. What’s more, they claim that the things that I think are important are “politically impossible.” But it just so happens that the things that they have “chosen” to do — the things that are “politically possible” — are the things that rich people are willing to pay them to work on.

As a result of this, there is really only one thing that the education “reform” movement is all about: breaking teacher unions. Everything else: high stakes testing, charter schools, and all the rest are just the means to that end of depriving teachers of basic worker protections. And whether the useful fools who work in the “reform” movement know this or not, the ultimate result of this will be to make teaching a worse paying, less stable form for work. And that will mean that it will be that much harder to find qualified teachers, not to mention the great teachers the “reformers” are always yammering on about incentivizing.

All of this is obvious if you follow the issue at all. But in general, it isn’t discussed. Maybe it is because opponents of this “reform” don’t want to be seen as questing the motives of “reform” supporters — who after all seem to be genuine in their desires. But the issue isn’t primarily about the people on the front lines. The primary issue is who is supporting them and why. And they are the plutocrats who have a very different end in mind for education “reform.” But I do blame those on the front lines who are clearly more interested in listening to people who know nothing about education but who offer up piles of cash than they are to actual teachers.

It’s because I feel so alone on this issue that I was glad to see that Matt Bruenig had written, The Left Wing of the Fundable. It it, he talked about one very telling example. Conor Williams recently made the case that those in the education “reform” movement are the true warriors against inequality because they are against segregated neighborhood schools. Hooray for charter schools because they wash away decades of segregated schools!

Except they don’t. Neighborhoods are segregated because white Americans are racists. And they are helped along by a racist system where educational funding in most areas dependent upon local property taxes. So the (mostly white) people who can afford it are incentivized to move to (mostly white) areas that have better schools. Are charter schools designed to solve the problem of segregation? No. Is it likely that racist white Americans would figure out ways to game the system anyway? I think so.

Bruenig noted that busing is the obvious answer to school segregation. We know it works. But Conor Williams isn’t running around telling everyone that we should be using busing to integrate the schools. Williams and other reformers would claim that busing is not a political possibility whereas charters are. And this is where Bruenig gets his title: “practicality is defined here in terms of what you might call the Left Wing of the Fundable.” He’s singing my tune:

This is one of the biggest ways the the power elite have to keeping the conversation always on their own turf. This is why we are always talking about cutting Social Security and not raising the payroll tax cap — because Pete Peterson pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the liberal class to talk about what he wants. And it is the same way that Bill and Mindy keep us us from talking about using the taxes they pay on their $123 million house and spending them on poor children in Lakewood. So don’t listen to the jerks like Conor Williams. They are just useful fools. Look at what the interests are of those who fund people like him. It ain’t school integration, that’s for sure.

David Brockington wrote a great article over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Why I Voted Jeremy Corbyn for Leader of the Labour Party, With Reservations. This is not another article about Corbyn, so don’t worry. It’s about choice. Brockington is a social scientist on the faculty of Plymouth School of Government. And he has been doing work that indicates that voter turnout goes down the more the two parties move to the center. He’s very careful to say that he hasn’t proven this. He’s a scientists, after all. But the evidence seems to indicate it. And the narrative is very strong.

Consider that you have two candidates. One of them is promising cut taxes on the wealthy and the other is promising to keep those taxes the same. If you aren’t wealthy, why would you care? Would this make you think that you ought to inconvenience yourself by finding time to vote? Or would you feel very much like the people of a nation where they can only vote for people from a single party? When elections come down to who is the most competent to do what both candidates agree on, very few people show up at the polls.

Given that the people least likely to vote are liberal leaning voters, it thus makes more sense to get turnout as high as possible. Of course, it doesn’t always work. In 2004, turnout was very high because people were angry about the war. But this was cutting against an improving economy. I now feel certain that had the Democrats nominated Howard Dean and made the election about the war, Bush would have lost. (And do you know what that would have meant? No John Roberts. No Samuel Alito. And we still would have likely gotten Sotomayor and Kagan, because Souter and Stevens both wanted to retire. That would have brought us a court with one liberal, five moderates, one conservative, and two wackos.)

So what does this mean for the 2016 presidential election here in the US? Even though I’m a supporter of Bernie Sanders, I don’t think that it means we have to nominate him. I think that Hillary Clinton is plenty exciting herself. She would be, after all, the first woman president. And we do have a history of this: first black men got the vote (in theory, anyway) and then women got the vote. It does make me more skeptical of a Joe Biden presidential run. I think that people often make a very big mistake by going with the “safe” choice. It’s just too easy to be wrong. Again, it’s like John Kerry in 2004. He was the “safe” choice, but knowing what I now know about politics, he was a horrible choice.

Someone I was reading recently noted that if the American people could vote Obama a third term, they would. That’s probably true. I think the country is happy enough with the direction of the economy. And I expect that to be true for the next year. The Republicans seem incapable of offering anything other than going backwards to worse times. And I don’t think the people are in any mood to go far to the left. Of course, the thing about Clinton is that she’s pretty much matched Sanders in terms of possible economic policy. So in addition to being a woman, she is offering policies that do make a clear distinction with whatever candidate the Republicans run.

This makes me feel even a little better about 2016.