Word: teacher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Remember this scene? San Diego, 1996. Bob Dole steps up to the podium for his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. He looks lean and hungry, the faithful are cheering, so midway through the speech, Dole stares into the cameras and decides to uncork. "To the teachers' unions, I say, when I am President, I will disregard your political power," he bellows. "If education were a war, you would be losing it." Dole says he is not talking "to the teachers, but to the unions," but it doesn't matter. Democrats seize on Dole's screed and cast...
...Republicans. Since the Dole disaster, the mantra around Washington has been simple: Don't mess with the teachers. Last year G.O.P. consultant Frank Luntz declared that Dole's attack was the least popular sentence of the entire 1996 campaign and instructed Republican candidates to "find common ground with public school teachers." As fed up as many Americans are with the sorry state of the country's public schools, they have generally regarded teachers as the good guys: the ones who stay late, who buy textbooks out of their meager salaries. So while Republicans still detest the two formidable teachers' unions...
...with voters rating education as the campaign season's top priority, the Republicans have come up with a more subtle strategy: they're focusing on how to improve teaching without taking on teachers. So far it seems to be working. g.o.p. polls show that Republicans have gained 10 points over the past six months in surveys asking which party is best able to address the education issue. In New Mexico's special house election two weeks ago, Republican Heather Wilson coasted to victory, largely on the strength of a single pro-education TV spot using a teacher to promise that...
...here's the strangest part about the G.O.P.'s willingness to focus on teachers: Democrats are joining in. In California's Democratic gubernatorial primary, the candidates bickered over whose plan got toughest on middling teachers. The winner, Gray Davis, supports evaluations of public school teachers by their peers and the testing of teachers in their subject every five years. Although the California Federation of Teachers has endorsed Davis in the general election against Republican Dan Lungren, it was a reluctant endorsement; and Davis has accepted it reluctantly. "Teacher testing and evaluation are not things that warm the hearts of people...
...drive to combine forces irreversible. And so while they concentrate for now on the tactical move of simply growing bigger, both organizations are also trying to project a new, more cooperative image. Moved in part by a Democratic President's enthusiasm for reforms like charter schools and tougher teacher standards, union leaders have in the past year begun to at least pay lip service to ideas once considered heretical. The shift was detectable last February, when the new head of the N.E.A, Bob Chase, made an astounding admission before the National Press Club in Washington: "The fact is that...