Deb Meier gets it right...

again, as she so often does:

President Obama's message throughout the campaign was a reiteration of the concept of the "common good," at a time when we were experiencing the impact of a society built around "the more I get, the better." But I agree with you, Diane. What we're hearing now is rather different than what we expected. Neither Education Secretary Arne Duncan's failure in Chicago, nor the mayor's in N.Y.C., nor Michele Rhee's in Washington, D.C., are on the table; it's as though we can sweep that inconvenient evidence under the rug by a constant repetition of good PR.

Producing schools that do right by all children AND by the nation is, in fact, more complex than rocket science. It means, for example, concerning ourselves with the children in that other ward across the levees, not just our own. Democracy works most easily when our personal short-term interests and the interests of the least advantaged match. But democracy can't depend on that.