What happens when a shaky bridge to the future seems determined to fuse with a nostalgic look to the past? That is a jarring question to ask in the wake of the 1996 election and the Democratic Presidential victory, but since President William Jefferson Clinton is determined to push aspects of a Republican platform, it is the appropriate question.
In early November, talk of a bipartisan Cabinet, of outreach to the Republican Congress, and of a White House-sponsored balanced budget amendment must send shudders down the spines of those who hoped that a Democratic victory would boost the prospects for both K-12 and higher education in the United States.
Indeed, some have opined that the president will seek a Republican to be Secretary of Education — even as Senate Majority leader Trent Lott has indicated that he would like to abolish the Department of Education. Thus, the 1996 election reveals several trouble spots that education activists will have to deal with and strategize around. Clearly, the question of ways the federal government deals with educational issues is high on a priority list. Do educators have a consensus that there should be a Department of Education? Should the functions be scattered through other departments, returned to the states, or eliminated? What are the educational implications of these options? The political implications?
For me, the structural issue is overshadowed by a more fundamental one raised by the passage of California Proposition 209, which may well spark a national evaluation of the efficacy of affirmative action. This evaluation will not take place in an impartial space, as the racial fault lines were drawn when then Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole went on television to talk about affirmative action in the context of slavery–as if past discrimination is the only thing that people of color have to worry about. Indeed, contemporary discrimination, as evidenced by the Texaco tapes, is alive and well, but ignored in the color-blind world of Ward Connerly and California Governor Pete Wilson.
