With a national Annual Meeting scheduled for this week in St. Louis and Ferguson Missourri, Green Party activists acknowledged today a growing field of hopefuls seeking the Green Presidential nomination for 2016. Besides 2012 nominee Dr. Jill Stein of Massachusettes who filed with the FEC in early July, Bill Kreml of Illinois and Kent Mesplay of California have also announced 2016 campaigns in media statements. Meanwhile Earth First! co-founder Daryl Cherney and California Party activist KCM Curry have both been testing the waters in an exploratory manner with broadcast media appearances and social media activity.
“It’s a bad summer for public education,” said Bruce Dixon, Cochair of the Georgia Green Party and managing editor of Black Agenda Report. The US Senate this past Thursday reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including provisions to lock in Common Core, to make high stakes testing and run-the-school-like-a-business polices mandatory, and to require school districts to speed up efforts to privatize public education. “Elected Republicans and elected Democrats, including its ‘Socialist’ member from Vermont, support privatization while the Green Party and its candidates all oppose it.”
Taxpayer funded, public education is a legacy of Reconstruction state legislatures, including Georgia where 19th Century McIntosh County State Senator Tunis Cambell led efforts to make primary and secondary education available to all students in Georgia.
But public education has been under attack for more than twenty years now, predating the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Georgia state education reforms pushed by the administration of Democrat Governor Roy Barnes. An orchestrated attack of Koch Brothers financed Libertarian think tanks have sought to undermine the legitimacy of public education, the competency of public school teachers, the bargaining power of their unions and professional associations and the efficacy of taxpayer financed public schools which for nearly 150 years have made a secondary education available to every child in Georgia.
“The Bush Administration’s NCLB Act served to set public schools up to fail, opening the doors for corporate competition offering educational services for private profit,” says Bruce Dixon who has written extensively on the attacks on public education. “The Obama Administration with Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee leading the way have set the stage for last week’d Senate vote, and if we leave this to the corporate parties our grand children will be denied the educational opportunities we enjoyed. But as Greens, we are offering another option. In fact while our political opponents fight to destroy public schools, Green Presidential nominees including McKinney in 2008 and Stein in 2012 have both campaigned to provide debt free post-secondary education to every student willing to do the work.”