BOSTON – A pair of hotly contested ballot proposals came in for some emotional testimony Monday during a public hearing hosted by the Joint Committee on Education, as supporters and opponents voiced their opinions on the initiatives to drop national Common Core standards from public schools and lift the state cap on charter schools.
Heavy hitters in government, including Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Mitchell Chester, the state education commissioner kicked off the hearing. Chester focused on defending Common Core while Walsh urged lawmakers to squash the charter school proposal and replace it with their own legislation.
Henry Adams famously opined that he could single-handedly disprove Darwin's theory of evolution by tracing the lineage of the American presidency from George Washington to Ulysses Grant. We could only imagine how much more steadfastly he would adhere to this observation in the era of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – our age of desecrated politics and ideological frenzy.
As a traditional conservative, I have been appalled and disappointed by the direction of the conservative movement since the late 1990s. I am particularly frustrated that the term conservative has become an all-encompassing repository for any right-leaning political theory, despite the fact that many of them have little in common with traditional conservatism. In trying to represent everything, conservatism has begun to represent nothing.
