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The latest Gallup poll contained some surprising news for the left: among Republican voters, Rick Perry does better than other candidates with the college-educated. Now, Kevin Carey writing at the New Republic has some more news that will make the liberal elite shudder: Perry's a leading reformer when it comes to higher education in America.
Carey writes:
Taken together, [Perry's] seven solutions [for university education] are remarkably student-friendly. Four of them focus on improving the quality of university teaching by developing new methods of evaluating teaching performance, tying tenure to success in the classroom, separating the teaching and research functions within university budgets, and using teaching budgets to reward professors who excel at helping students learn. The fifth solution would give prospective students choosing colleges more information about things like class size, graduation rates, and earnings in the job market after graduation. The sixth would make state higher education subsidies more student-focused, and the seventh would shift university accreditation toward measures of academic outcomes.
Carey chastises the left for defending universities, which are essentially the kind of powerful, well-heeled, top-down institutions the left loves to hate. He also writes:
The problems that Perry is trying to solve—bad teaching, unaccountable public institutions, soaring college costs—disproportionately hurt the first generation, low-income, and minority students that liberals should be most interested in helping. His call to disrupt traditional business models with low-cost, technology-driven alternatives reflects the ethos of the netroots movement that has come to dominate progressive politics. Yet one Firedoglake writer opined that Perry was “casually sacrificing the human pursuit of knowledge to the gods of a craven capitalism.”
This kind of reporting is what makes Rick Perry so fascinating. He keeps turning up as a blazing cultural contradiction. The cowboy who cares enough about higher education to call the bluff of lefty elites - he is the kind of candidate that, so far, former governors such as Romney and Huntsman and Pawlenty simply haven't been able to be.
Regarding Rick Perry, the left keeps trying to find millstone-around-the-neck activities that one would find on any given day in Illinois (that home to jailhouse governors), but he keeps out-foxing them.
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