The White House confirmed this morning that President Obama did not pick Washington’s Bridgeport High School to deliver a commencement address in June. He will instead visit Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis.
The two schools along with High Tech High International in San Diego were finalists in the Race to the Top Commencement Challenge, which is recognizing schools making strides in improving graduation rates.
BTW is the oldest high school created for black students during segregation in Memphis. According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the school surpassed state goals in Algebra and English last year. It also raised graduation rates from 60.4 percent in 2009 to 81.6 percent last year.
So much for the much vaunted “pull” of the Witches of Westwick…Cantwell, Murray and Gregoire.
Memphis is also in the news right now, being mostly underwater. Obama gets to prove he’s not Bush once more.
What a difference a little flooding makes …
Obama does not care about white people.
holy shit, 20% in TWO YEARS? that’s extraordinary.
Of cOurse Bridgeport proves everything about liberalism wrong; that cuts, racism and classism hold minorities back.
By the way, one of the things Obama did right was not trying to stop the flooding. Dikes and levies usually mean the local zoning should require houses be built on stilts or have entrance-level garages, because they’re built on flood plains.
Stopping the river from overflowing its banks only makes it worse later on.
Apparently the two schools that didn’t win get a cabinet official as a consolation prize. Here’s hoping Bridgeport gets Hillary Clinton instead of Joe Biden or (worse yet) Gary Locke.
@8, oh, but it would be so entertaining to have Biden. Like a crazy uncle. Nobody knows what kind of crazy will fall out of his mouth, not even him. It would be the least predictable commencement speech ever.
@9, Biden is not prone to gaffes. He’s prone to going on forever, but not crazy.
How many gaffes does one have to make before one is “prone to gaffes?”
“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.”
“Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see ya.” –- to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
“You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent…. I’m not joking.”
Does repeatedly plagiarizing another politician’s speeches count as a gaffe?
http://www.slate.com/id/2198543/
And I’d say every word out of his mouth defending his authoritarian escalation of the drug war was a gaffe. The co-founder of the Drug Policy Foundation says, “Pick a drug law you don’t like from the last 25 years and thank Sen. Joe Biden.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner09062…
But, you know, Obama picked him as VP, so he must be cool.
Honestly, all three schools (really, the teachers & students) have done amazing things. I hope that as new students come into these programs that they can live up to the things previous graduates have done. I hope that the teachers don’t get burnt out and I hope that the administrators don’t fuck it all up.
Does the vp count as a Cabinet member?
Maybe they’ll get Salazar or Solis.
Yes VP is conventionally included in the Cabinet, and is part of the quorum that can advise Congress the POTUS has gone off his nut and needs to be swapped out.
State visits fuck up travel plans for locals, anyway. This way, it’s people in Memphis that have to worry about their roads being closed and their flights being delayed. (More so than they are already, I guess.)