Category Archives: Education

Blogger runs for school board

41 Replies

Among the e-mails awaiting me upon my return today was this one:

Happy New
Year!

You know me from my writing and
protesting about the Confederate flag: I write the blog takedowntheflag.  Some of you
also know me as an active volunteer for Barack Obama and for Anton
Gunn.

I’m writing to tell you that I’m
running for the vacant seat on the Richland Two School Board.  There are nine
candidates, and whoever gets the most votes gets elected (no runoff).  The
election is on Tuesday, Jan 20, and in-person absentee voting is
going on now.  One of the major tasks of the school board will be the oversight
of the building of new schools.  The voters passed a $306 million bond
referendum for new schools in November.

In Richland District Two, we need to

  • build new,
    well-designed schools to accommodate the amazing growth in our
    community.
  • provide more technology
    for students and more ways for students to be engaged in both curricular and
    extracurricular activities.
  • develop strategies to
    address No Child Left Behind and Act 388 so that we’re serving all students,
    teachers, parents, and everyone in our community.

I'm a public school teacher, and I
have a PhD in engineering from Northwestern University.  I teach math in Sumter
(we have a carpool); my sister Tracy teaches math in Hilton Head; my sister
Kelly teaches math in Atlanta; and my brother Kevin also teaches math in
Atlanta.  My wife Amy and I have two children. Our son Aidan is 6 years old and
is a first-grader at Polo Road Elementary School (we like the Spanish program
there). Our daughter Kate is 2½, and we plan to enroll her in one of Richland
Two’s child development programs this fall.

What I’m saying is: I'm a public
school teacher and a well-qualified candidate. I've got a huge amount of
interest in the position, and I will do an awesome job.  Please check out the
attached flyer “A Step Ahead” and my candidate website for more information
about me and about the issues.  Also, I invite you to the Candidate Forum on
Tuesday, Jan 6 at 6pm in the District Auditorium at Richland Northeast High
School.  Please spread the word about my candidacy to any voters you know in
Richland Two.  I could use all the help I can get between now and Jan 20! 

Thank
you!

Best
Regards,

Michael Rodgers,
PhD

www.michaelrodgers.org

Maybe Doug Ross could offer him some advice, having also run for that board, if I recall…

By the way, here's the attachment
to which Michael referred.

So when, precisely, do you suppose Inez got cozy with these “teachers’ unions?”

30 Replies

It’s been a busy day, so I’m just now getting back to that bizarre AP story I read this morning about Inez and the Education secretary job. It said, in part,

Teachers’ unions, an influential segment of the party base, want an
advocate for their members, someone like Obama adviser Linda
Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor, or Inez Tenenbaum,
the former state schools chief in South Carolina.

Reform advocates want someone like New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wants teachers and schools held accountable for the performance of students.

Say WHAT? Inez is the one who led the nation in implementing accountability. And where on Earth did that stuff about "teachers’ unions" come from?

Something I meant to mention in my Sunday column, but it was just too complicated to get into, was the fact that it’s hard, if not impossible, to place Inez in the simplistic terms that David Brooks used to describe the conversation within the Obama transition over the Education Secretary nomination:

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms…

He went on to suggest that potential education secretaries are being assessed according to where they fall on that spectrum.

Mind you, I’m not accusing Brooks of being simplistic. Rather, the problem is that NATIONALLY, that’s the way the whole issue of public education plays. And it just has nothing to do with Inez’ experience — or anyone else in South Carolina’s experience — of dealing with public education.

That’s because we don’t have a teachers’ union in South Carolina. In case you hadn’t noticed, teachers don’t engage in collective bargaining here, and that’s a GOOD thing. We don’t hold with
it here. Yes, we have an organization affiliated with the organization
that in other places constitutes a union, and that organization does
wield some influence at the State House. But not being a union takes
some intensity out of the conflict we see elsewhere.

This might doom her chances, for a number of reasons. First, she simply lacks experience dealing with unions, which are such a big factor elsewhere. Also, if Brooks is right, the two camps are each determined to have someone who is ONE or the OTHER (fer or agin the unions). But the fact that she doesn’t fit neatly on that scale speaks to another reason why I’d like to see Inez in that job: Maybe she could change the subject from this titanic ideological battle to one of dealing pragmatically with the challenges facing kids in our public schools.

That’s what Inez would bring: The pragmatism that Obama has sought in his nominees up to this point.

Sure, Inez has some experience dealing with entrenchment in the education establishment — she had to overcome a lot of that in implementing the EAA. But it was less fierce than you might find elsewhere. And in any case, she got the job done.

Also — and my colleague Cindi Scoppe has written about this — when folks in other parts of the country talk about "school choice," they mean charter schools as often as not. Well, we have charter schools in South Carolina. This newspaper has supported them from the start. That is NOT the case with the wacky stuff that "choice" advocates push, with out-of-state money, here. Charter schools are about innovation; vouchers and tax credits are about undermining the entire idea of public schools — accelerating the process of middle class abandonment that began with post-integration white flight. (And before you have a stroke and say you’re for vouchers, and you don’t want that, I’m not talking here about YOUR motivation — I’m talking about what the effect would be.)

So the vocabulary doesn’t really translate. What I’d like to see is a South Carolinian in the main national education pulpit changing the conversation, and therefore the vocabulary, to something that matches the reality that we see in our schools here.

Has Inez been a reformer? You betcha, on the grand scale — she’s the one who implemented the Education Accountability Act, which put us out ahead of most of the country on that point (and then came NCLB, which has been really discouraging because it compares how well South Carolina meets its HIGH standards to how well other states meet their LOW standards, and acts as though they’re the same thing).

Was Inez in the vanguard demanding the EAA? No. It was passed before she entered office. But she was the one who implemented it, and got high marks for how well she did it.

Note that of the three main sorts of reform Brooks mentions above — "merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards" — South Carolina is ahead of the pack on numbers two and three, and Inez has had a lot to do with the accountability one.

Merit pay is one of those things that we haven’t done much on, and we should. In fact, that’s one of the  reforms we keep trying to push here on the editorial board of The State, along with school district consolidation and giving principals greater flexibility and authority to hire and fire.

But we don’t get much traction. Why? Because of this completely unnecessary, incessant battle over vouchers and tax credits, which consumes all the oxygen available for talking about education policy. The "choice" advocates yell so much, and defenders of public education yell back so much, that you can’t hear anything else. And it’s a shame.

Elected officials such as our governor will give lip service to favoring school district consolidation — and then put no appreciable effort into making it happen. And of course, his out-of-state allies who fund voucher campaigns have NO interest in pushing consolidation, because they have no interest in anything that would actually help public education in South Carolina. They don’t want to make our public schools better; they just want to pay people to abandon them, and the whole strategy depends on portraying the schools as being as bad as possible.

So, bottom line: Inez a reformer? Yes. Inez the candidate of "teachers’ unions?" Where did AP get that? Unfortunately, AP isn’t saying. But somebody at AP sure does seem to like Arne Duncan.

Inez Tenenbaum for Obama’s Cabinet?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
NOW THAT HE’S got his economic and national security teams lined up, President-Elect Obama can turn to the “second-tier” Cabinet positions, such as Secretary of Education.
    Normally, I wouldn’t take all that much interest in the Education job. I don’t see education as a proper function of the federal government; it’s a state responsibility. And when the feds have gotten involved in K-12, they’ve generally mucked it up. I’m not a fan of Ronald Reagan, but he did get some things right, and one of them was proposing to do away with the U.S. Department of Education. You’ll notice, however, that after all that talk, he didn’t actually get rid of it. So the department is there, and somebody is going to run it.
    That being the case, I hope the somebody Barack Obama chooses is our own Inez Tenenbaum. At this point you’re thinking two things: First, “Does she really have a shot at that?” I don’t know. There are a lot of lists, short and long, floating around, and she’s on some and not on others. The Associated Press had her on a short list of five names (which also included Colin Powell) at the end of November, but when they moved the same list on Thursday, she wasn’t on it (nor was Gen. Powell). On the same day, MSNBC posted a long list on its Web site that included her (and Gen. Powell). Other names regularly mentioned include Arne Duncan, who runs Chicago public schools, and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
    Inez (disclosure here — I call her Inez because her husband, Samuel, is a friend) doesn’t make it on David Brooks’ short list in his column on the facing page. But we’ll see.
    Now for the second thing you’re thinking, especially if you’re one of those who buy into the notion that public schools in South Carolina are irredeemable, and anyone who has ever had anything to do with them is tainted. When I mentioned Inez as a contender for the job the other day, someone who should know better said it would be ironic for two Democratic secretaries in a row to be from South Carolina, since our schools struggle so.
    No, it wouldn’t. It would be perfectly fitting, especially given Inez Tenenbaum’s record as state superintendent from 1999-2007.
    There are achievements that can be quantified, such as South Carolina’s students scoring at or above the national average on nationally recognized standardized tests for the first time. Our fourth- and eighth-graders even scored at the very top in math and science on the National Assessment of Education Progress.
    But what of the SAT, the favored test of naysayers? During her tenure, our average rose 32 points, the greatest gain of any state where most graduating seniors take the test. No, we didn’t catch up — we just improved faster than anyone.
    But what impressed me most about her performance was that she took the situation she had and did the most she could with it. The most dramatic example: her implementation of the Education Accountability Act. The EAA was enacted the year she was elected, pushed by business leaders and a conservative Republican governor, and largely opposed by Democrats and professional educators. She might have dragged her feet, but instead she fully embraced the task of implementing accountability, in spite of institutional resistance.
    How did she do on that? The year she left office, Education Week ranked South Carolina No. 1 in the nation for accountability. The research organization Education Trust ranked our state as tied (with Maine) at No. 1 in the rigor of our proficiency standards; The Princeton Review rated our testing system 11th best.
    Our state’s leadership on this front ironically became a liability when No Child Left Behind came along. That’s because each state was judged by how well it met its own standards and expectations, and ours were higher than other states’.
    So as long as there is a U.S. Department of Education, and especially while NCLB remains law, I want the person in charge of administering it to know the reality here in South Carolina.
    But what makes Inez Tenenbaum, and Dick Riley before her, better suited than folks from other parts of the country at addressing the nation’s real K-12 problems? Consider the sheer magnitude of our challenges, based in generations of slavery, Jim Crow and abject poverty. Before the Civil War, our state had more slaves than free people. We integrated our schools 16 years AFTER Brown vs. Board of Education, even though the case started here. The achievement gap for poor and minority students is a national problem, but no one has more experience combating it than Gov. Riley and Inez Tenenbaum.
Inez isn’t talking about her candidacy, or non-candidacy. But she did say some things about Barack Obama and education that I liked hearing.
    She’s had time to think about this because she’s one of the experts who helped him draft his education platform (which you can read online, linked from my blog). Rather than talk about the federal government trying to run our schools, she speaks of the historic opportunity Mr. Obama has to lead by example.
    She remembers how John Kennedy got kids engaged in physical fitness when she was in school, mainly by talking it up. A president Obama can do the same with parental involvement, parlaying the excitement his election has generated into an ongoing movement. She has been deeply impressed by his own commitment to education, from seizing every opportunity offered in his own life to his involvement in his daughters’ schooling — she heard him, on the campaign bus here in South Carolina, talking to his girls on the phone about every detail of their day at school. He was engaged in the way all parents should be.
    Barack Obama, as she describes it, has the potential to lead on education without pushing coercive new laws or creating new bureaucracies.
    Now that’s a federal role in education I can get behind.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Take another civics quiz — please

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Remember the civics quiz from several months back? You know the one I aced, relatively speaking? (Disclaimer: I’m one of those people who test well. I’ve always sort of identified with Woody Allen’s quip in "Love and Death," when another character said "God is testing us!" and Woody said "If He’s gonna test us, why doesn’t He give us a written?" Some folks say testing well is not a true indication of knowledge or intelligence, but what do they know? And how are they going to prove that they know it? End of disclaimer.)

Well, the same people who drafted the last one also drafted this one, which is shorter, and easier, than the last one. Here’s my score:

You answered 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97 %

Average score for this quiz during December: 75.0%
Average score: 75.0%

You can take the quiz as often as you like, however, your score will only count once toward the monthly average.

If you have any comments or questions about the quiz, please email americancivicliteracy@isi.org.

You can consult the following table to see how citizens and elected officials scored on each question.

Which one did I miss? The very last question, as follows:

33)   If taxes equal government spending, then:
A. government debt is zero
B. printing money no longer causes inflation
C. government is not helping anybody
D. tax per person equals government spending per person
E. tax loopholes and special-interest spending are absent

Actually, all of those answers seemed a little bit OFF to me; and I just chose the one that seemed the LEAST off. I was wrong.

If you follow the link to the table above, you’ll learn that the general public scored higher than elected officials did. Big shock, huh? And which question did both groups get wrong the most? The one about the "wall of separation" between church and state, of course. That’s just a testament to the success of certain people in propagating ignorance on that topic.

Anyway, take the test — and ‘fess up as to how you did.

An exchange about macroeconomics

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Here’s an e-mail exchange from today, unadorned. Perhaps y’all will take an interest in the discussion:

From: Kathryn Fenner
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 9:26 AM
To: Warthen, Brad – External Email
Subject: a suggestion

Brad–
    Upon reading Peter Brown’s comment (the old ‘it’s my money’ whine) in Adam Beam’s excellent front page piece in today’s paper on the possibility of federal "bailout" money coming to Columbia as "investments," I wondered if it might not be helpful for some of your readers if you did a simple primer on Keynesian macroeconomic theory (since Friedman is generally considered discredited outside the Governor’s circle). Maybe if people understood that, instead of directly taxing us, the federal government can print money, which, if it pays for certain things like wages, can actually create wealth (increase the pie) rather than taking money from your pocket, everyone might calm down a bit. Or at least some people might….
    A lot of us educated in South Carolina public schools–even the fairly good ones (Aiken) missed out on economics–I only happened to take macroeconomics as an English major at Carolina b/c a friend recommended the professor teaching the honors section (Martin). I would have taken another social science for my requirement for sure otherwise. I also only happened to take an excellent course on the history of the New Deal because it was taught by an excellent professor (John Scott Wilson), whom I had studied under for another course.

Kathryn
—
Kathryn Braun Fenner
Attorney at Law

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Warthen, Brad wrote:
    We touched on economics in my senior year, at Radford HS in Honolulu. You know how we did that? We played a game over the course of several days, in which we were supposed to be marooned on a desert island, and we had to make decisions about how to spend our time. Most time was spent obtaining food, but we could also budget time away from food-gathering to make tools to save time, etc. Scads of fun, much like such computer games of latter days such as Sim City — only we did it on paper.
     That was about it.
    We also read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Barack Obama ALSO read in high school in Hawaii, and found inspirational. Our teacher for that class was Mrs. Nakamura, so we were way multicultural.
     That’s about it. I know what Keynesian economics is in this context, very roughly — it’s like, spending to stimulate the economy, right? — but I would not presume to set myself up as an expert. Oh, I know one other thing — his middle name was Maynard, like Maynard G. Krebs, whom you are probably too young to remember.

From: Kathryn Fenner
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 12:43 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: Re: a suggestion
    Dobie Gillis was in syndication and played in the afternoons when I got home from school, man. Maynard went on to be Gilligan, a vastly inferior show. I’m only six years younger than you, not that your face gives that away (what is it,  a portrait in the attic? Some secret Hawaiian face cream? I mean from reading your columns, you got plenty of sun playing outdoors in the tropics and subtropics)
    The game you played was more about microeconomics, which most people probably grasp more intuitively–it’s our household economy, our business. The mess we are in now calls for macroeconomic solutions, which no one in the MSM seems to spell out in a nice graphic for the newbies–how when the government prints money, you get inflation, but you also can get jobs and spending money and ripples through the economy (bottom up works a lot faster–not stimulus in your pocket that you save or pay off credit cards, but jobs for the unemployed who buy groceries and other necessities and thus get the ball rolling again in terms of generating transactions that not only support a civilized lifestyle (as opposed to homelessness or Harvest Hope) but taxable income to repay the "printed money."
    Whatever happened to the notion of "from those to whom much is given…."?  Rotary is such a great example of the fulfillment of the expectations by the fortunate, but some of the bloggers and Peter Brown and Sanford and his cronies (Joel Sawyer’s letter was way off base) need to step to the plate. Dennis Hiltner said something to me the other day that drew Socialist me up short, "The employers who depend on workers who depend on bus transit should pay them enough to afford the true cost." I sputtered, but then I thought, "Surely Palmetto Health could take $10 per shift from the MDs and give it to the custodial staff?" I guess that’s redistributionist, huh?

Dick Riley makes TIME’s Cabinet Top 10

1 Reply

Rileydick

Well, this is pretty awesome — Dick Riley, who as we know was no slouch of a governor, has made TIME magazine's list of Top Ten Best Cabinet Members of modern times. It's quite a list:

  1. Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, 1933-1946
  2. Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, 1933-1940
  3. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, 1934-1945
  4. George Marshall, Secretary of State, 1947-1949
  5. Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General, 1961-1964
  6. William Ruckelshaus, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency, 1970-1973, 1983-1985
  7. Elizabeth Dole, Secretary of Transportation, 1983-1987
  8. Richard Riley, Secretary of Education, 1993-2001
  9. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, 1993-1997
  10. Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, 2006-present

You may quibble about some of them after Marshall — as we get closer to our own time, people seem less "great;" we see their flaws all too clearly. For instance, we who admire Gov. Riley may object to his having to follow someone rejected by the voters just last week. But being rejected by the voters should not diminish our respect for past achievement. Just ask Winston Churchill (you know, the guy who wasn't the Labour guy). Besides, one can excel as a Cabinet member but be less respected in other fields of endeavor. For instance, Henry Wallace made TIME's list of worst vice presidents.

And to earlier generations, someone we think of as a giant of history might have been looked upon as, "just this guy, you know." For instance, when he was growing up in Kensington, Md., my Dad used to hitchhike to junior high school on Connecticut Ave. One day, Harold Ickes stopped to pick him up. Dad rode up front with the chauffeur (OK, so he wasn't totally an ordinary guy). Another time, FDR rode by, and waved. (Though I obviously was not there, I have a vivid "memory" of that in my head — FDR in a convertible, the big, encouraging grin, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle…)

Video: Richland 2 superintendent explains why he’s against 4-day school week

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Richland 2 Supt. Steve Hefner visited us today to talk about the $300 million dollar bond referendum that will be in front of voters on Nov. 4. More about that later. While he was here, I asked him about Jim Rex’s idea of letting districts go to four-day school weeks to save money.

He had some strong objections, which you can hear by viewing the video clip above, taken in our boardroom.

Hefnersteve

Rex’s ‘4-day-school-week’ idea

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I meant to raise this idea for discussion last week — Jim Rex’s idea that school districts be allowed (not required) to have four-day school weeks if that’s how they want to save some money in light of state budget cuts.

Here’s a memo that I got last week from Jim Foster (who works for Rex) on the subject:

TO:   News media

Dr. Rex made a variety of recommendations yesterday as possible cost-saving measures for South Carolina’s public schools.  The idea generating the biggest reaction is going to a four-day school week, so here’s some additional information on that.

Dr. Rex is not, as some headlines said this morning, "urging the state to adopt a four-day school week."  What he is doing is asking the General Assembly to modify the current 180-day minimum requirement for school calendars so that local communities would have the option of going to a four-day school week if that’s what they want to do.  That would mean lengthening four school days so that you would end up with what used to be a week’s worth of instruction, but delivered in just four days.

For parents who have young kids in day care, the idea of a four-day week is a legitimate cause for concern.  What you will probably hear is, "What am I supposed to do with my kid on a weekday when there’s no school?"

Several things to consider:

1.)  The current school day means that many parents must pay for after-school care every day.  Lengthening four days a week would mean lower day care bills (and more convenient pick-ups) on those four days.

2.)  School districts that choose a four-day week could keep one or more schools open on the fifth day to help working parents.  Staffing could be greatly reduced.  Homework assistance could be provided, recreation and athletics, etc. 

3.)  Having an "extra day" during the week could spur innovation and create new types of student-centered services.  For example, that day could be devoted to tutoring children who have particular academic needs.

Viewed from a broader perspective, four-day weeks are not a new thing.  Sixteen states currently have at least some schools on that kind of calendar.  And in some states, it appears to be taking hold in a more permanent way.  In Colorado, for example, 67 of the state’s 178 districts operate on a four-day week.  In New Mexico, 18 districts operate on a four-day week.

There are a variety of possible pros and cons, and each school district would have to examine those to determine if a four-day schedule is for them.

One question asked yesterday is what the financial savings might be in terms of school bus transportation.  Statewide, South Carolina’s school bus system costs $300,000 each day for fuel alone.  There are additional daily costs for state  maintenance facilities, driver salaries, etc.

Again, Dr. Rex is not urging the state’s 85 districts to adopt a four-day schedule.  He is, however, asking the General Assembly to make the statutory changes necessary for local districts to consider it as an option.

What do I think of it? Well, I’m weird, and on things like this I tend to go more than I should by my own experience as a schoolboy, which is one of the reasons WHY I’m weird. Here’s my own extreme case: In the 4th grade, I got caught between the northern hemisphere school year and the southern hemisphere year when we moved to Ecuador in November. I had spent a few weeks in school in Bennettsville, and then a few in Kensington, Md., but I arrived in Ecuador just before the school year ended, which meant that when it started back in April, I would probably have to start the 4th grade over and therefore be a year behind when we came back to the States.

So my parents got me a tutor, who did the 4th grade with me in one-hour sessions three times a week over eight weeks (and lots of homework). So I essentially did the 4th grade with 24 hours of instruction — and I didn’t miss anything.

And no, a teacher with 25 kids in the room can’t devote that kind of attention, but the experience made me think the 180-day year is less than sacrosanct.

You will be relieved to know that when I raise such points as this, my colleagues ignore me and go with expert opinion, and expert opinion maintains that kids need the time on task with a teacher. Fine. But in Sunday’s editorial, we said that while we see potential problems with Rex’s idea, at least he’s thinking in the right direction — we’re going to have to be flexible about how we do a lot of things in this fiscal crisis.

What do you think?

Palling around with terrorists in S.C.

27 Replies

Ap801203024

A lot of y’all think I’m way harsh on our gov. Well, the guy deserves to have someone stick up for him on this one. Barack Obama’s campaign has done him a rather grave, although ridiculous, injustice.

As Sanford says, the attempt to tie him to Obama’s old friend Bill Ayers (that’s him above with Bernardine Dohrn in 1980, and below in 1981) is "bizarre." From the story in the Greenville News:

Obama’s campaign responded in recent days, noting in a fact-check release to reporters this week that Ayers "is currently a distinguished scholar at the University of South Carolina where Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who supported Sen. McCain’s campaign as far back as the 2000 primaries, serves as an ex-officio member of the board of trustees. By Gov. Palin’s standards, that means Gov. Sanford shares Ayers’ views."

In an interview with Fox News, Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary, said Sanford "employs" Ayers.

"He’s the governor of the state and he’s in charge of the board, so that means he employs Bill Ayers," Burton said, adding that, "We don’t think that Mark Sanford or John McCain share the views or condone what Bill Ayers did in the 1960s, which Barack Obama said were despicable and horrible."

Gosh, where do we start?

  • First, if supporting John McCain is a crime, then Mark Sanford is as innocent as a lamb. Did he, years ago (as, once upon a time, Obama associated with Ayers)? Yes. But he basically gave the McCain campaign the big, fat finger this year. Sanford was the only leading Republican in the state (and in his case, one uses the term "Republican" loosely, which is one thing I’ve always liked about the guy, but even that can wear thin) NOT to take a stand as to who should win the primary in S.C. As one McCain supporter complained to me, Sanford never so much as invited McCain to drop by for a cup off coffee during the primary campaign; his disdain was breathtaking. His post-primary "endorsement" came through a spokesman, in answer to a question.
  • Next, and this is the most telling point, one must have a staggering ignorance of South Carolina to hold the governor of the state responsible for ANYTHING that happens at a public college or university. Should he have such say? Absolutely. Sanford thinks so, and we’ve thought so for a lot longer. But the higher ed institutions continue to be autonomous fiefdoms answering to boards of trustees appointed by the Legislature — one of the powers that lawmakers guard most jealously. USC and its fellows are famously, notoriously independent of executive control, which is one reason why we lag so far behind such states as NORTH Carolina, which has a board of regents. You say the gov is an ex-officio member of the trustee board? Yeah, with the emphasis on the EX, in the original Latin meaning. He’s also an honorary member of my Rotary Club, but I can’t remember seeing him at any meetings.

So I’ve defended Sanford, who in this case was most unjustly accused. But what the silly Obama allegation DOES do, however, is raise this very good question: What on Earth is USC doing paying stipends to an unrepentant terrorist?

Dohrnayers

Obama, Ayres, and another kind of ‘school choice’

66 Replies

Now that everyone has been totally desensitized by the ranting of Lee et al. about Obama, probably not much attention will be paid to an accusation of substance that appeared in The Wall Street Journal today. But if you do pay attention, it’s intriguing — and disturbing. It’s an op-ed piece headlined "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools."

Basically, it provides fairly strong evidence to believe that Bill Ayres — unrepentant Mad Bomber and live-in of Bernardine Dohrn — has been considerably more than "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" to Barack Obama. Sen. Obama was the chairman, from 1995-99, of a foundation that the author, Stanley Kurtz, describes as Ayres "brainchild":

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. …. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

… The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

… Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

Until now, the Obama/Ayres connection had been a minor worry at the back of my mind. This rachets that up a notch.

On a less serious note, I was amused to see that Ayres shared with Gov. Mark Sanford the goal of divorcing school funding from the institutional model: "Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate
with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from
groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead
CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such
as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn)."

No, it’s not the same as what Sanford would do. Of course, if we did have vouchers and tax credits, parents would be free to spend it on Mr. Ayres’ idea of a good education, or some other loony alternative, with no accountability to the public from whose school coffers that funding would be diverted. Maybe that’s why I was reminded.

MSNBC on South Carolina’s NCLB problem: our high standards

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Jim Foster over at the state Dept. of Ed. drew my attention to this recent report on MSNBC that touches upon the great problem that South Carolina has with No Child Left Behind: That the federal law judges states on how well they meet their own standards, and South Carolina has some of the nation’s highest.

Of course, all of us who had been paying attention knew that already. If the feds want to assess the schools, they need to come up with a uniform standard for the assessments to mean anything. But here’s a better idea: Shut down the U.S. Dept. of Ed., and get the federal gummint out of our schools.

Spartanburg on ‘belittling progress’ in SC schools

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A colleague brought to my attention an editorial in the Spartanburg paper which she called "nicely done." It was headlined "Belittling Progress." Here’s an excerpt:

It’s become a regular pattern over the past few years: The state Department of Education releases a set of test scores – ACT, SAT, PACT – that shows improvement by South Carolina students, and South Carolinians for Responsible Government follows with a news release that attempts to turn the good news bad.

It happened again this week. State education officials reported that the state showed marked improvement in proficient and advanced scoring across the board in 2008, the final year of PACT administration in the state’s public schools.

South Carolina students scored higher on the tests. More of them met the proficient standard and more met the advanced standard. The numbers of students meeting those standards aren’t as high as we’d like, but the movement is in the right direction.

Name that test (nice words only, now…)

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Ohboyohboyohboy, but that Jim Rex is a glutton for punishment. The day after he and Jim Foster came to see us, I got this release from Jim (Foster, that is):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

South Carolinians to select name of state’s new  testing system; deadline to vote is Labor Day

EDITOR’S NOTE – The direct link to the online ballot is
http://ed.sc.gov/tools/NameThatTest/

COLUMBIA – State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex announced today that South Carolinians will name the state’s new standardized testing system, which will replace PACT  tests that have been administered statewide since 1999.

Voters can visit the South Carolina Department of Education’s web site and cast their ballots on line.  The deadline to vote is Labor Day, Sept. 1, at 5 p.m., and Rex will announce the winning name on Wednesday, Sept. 3.

I replied to Jim (Foster, that is) with three words: Don’t tempt me!

Given the wild unpopularity of this test, offering the public the chance to name it seemed to me like what Huck Finn said about telling the truth:

… it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.

But then I followed the link, and saw that Jim (Rex) wasn’t taking near the chance that I thought. It’s multiple choice, not essay. The public won’t get to express itself fully with this "choice," to say the least.

Jim Rex on public school choice

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Obviously, this was not a good day to leave my camera at home. First the interesting James Smith speech, then Jim Rex visited us to report on his first year in office.

He talked for some length about his initiatives pushing public school choice. He had a lot to say about it, some of which I captured on my phone above (sorry again about the quality).

I haven’t really had time to go through all my notes yet from this meeting. When I do, maybe I’ll find the beginnings of a column; I don’t know. But in the meantime, I’ll share his response to my expressing one of my big reservations about school "choice," whether it’s public or private.

Specifically, I worry that there’s no way to administer choice so that everybody has access to it (which is why I’m always preaching that we need to improve ALL the schools). In a state where the Legislature won’t even come up with enough money to pay for the gasoline for buses to go where they go NOW, how are kids who don’t have middle-class Moms with a minivan to run them to a program 20 miles away supposed to avail themselves of these opportunities.

Rex had a fairly decent reply to that. He said that if you start a good program — say, single-gender programs — in a few schools, parents across the state will demand the same opportunities, and soon you’ll see it in every corner of the state. In the case of single-gender, the program started in a handful of schools, and this year is in 250. Of course, single-gender is a low-cost kind of "choice" to offer. It’s a little harder to ramp up such programs as Montessori.

But he’s committed to this course.

Again, sorry about the video quality. You know where my usual camera (which by the way is my own personal camera, not the newspaper’s) was? I’d left it at home where I’d taken some pictures of my twin grandbabies, who are — no offense intended here — WAY more photogenic than Jim Rex and James Smith. For proof, see below. (And that’s just ONE of them. I could have shown both, but I didn’t think y’all could stand that much cute.)

Tiptoes

Tom Davis on the Jasper Port deal

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Tom Davis dropped by to see Cindi and me Tuesday morning — his first visit since the one I wrote about back here and here — and we talked about a number of things.

Tom, you will recall, is the governor’s former chief of staff who is now the GOP nominee for what is for the moment Catherine Ceips’ Senate seat.

Anyway, one thing Tom talked about was progress that’s been made on the Jasper Port deal. Tom continues to believe that his ex-boss, Mark Sanford, doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the deal with Georgia along to this point (even though my former colleague Mike Fitts did a column awhile back pretty much covering Tom’s talking points on the subject).

But Tom expects that years from now, when some of the more southern Corridor of Shame counties have benefited greatly from the economic development the projected port will bring, Mr. Sanford will get the credit, and deservedly so. This, he says, will be Mark Sanford’s legacy.

It will also be, if it turns out as hoped, Tom Davis’ legacy. He was, near as I could tell, the most ardent advocate for the Jasper Port in the Sanford administration, and the one who worked hardest to make it happen. I think you can probably see some of Tom’s passion about the subject in the above video.

Supt. Scott Andersen and Dist. 5 school board in better days

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Our Sunday lead editorial will be about the Lexington/Richland District 5 school board’s conspiracy of silence over the resignation of Superintendent Scott Andersen. As I was editing it earlier today, it occurred to me that I had video of the superintendent together with his board at a time of perfect unity — just under a year ago, when they came to visit us to promote the bond referendum that failed last fall.

I had posted video from this meeting before, but the clips concentrated entirely on the board members. They, after all the ones who are elected and therefore directly accountable to the people (or should be, their recent secrecy to the contrary). And the thing that impressed us was their unanimity on the bond referendum. None of us could remember when the District 5 board had been so unified about anything, so that was where the news lay.

But I remember having the impression that the unanimity might have resulted in part from a good selling job by the superintendent. Superintendents work for boards, but all of them strive to lead their boards when they can. And when they lose that ability, they are often on the way out.

In the above clip, watch for two things:

  • Mr. Andersen’s breezy confidence as he makes his pitch, even to the point of joking about his having "skipped over the price tag." This was obviously a guy who was comfortable in front of his board members.
  • His board was comfortable with him, chuckling and joshing about the fact that "Scott’s not from around here," after the superintendent had explained his ignorance about a piece of property the district had been interested in (ignorance that critics of the board had misinterpreted as a deliberate attempt to deceive, according to Mr. Andersen).

To help you remember, I’m imbedding below the old clip from that meeting as well, with the board members speaking.

That Howie — he just can’t meet a deadline, can he?

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Ross Shealy over at Barbecue and Politics has been busy compiling some interesting facts on some of the individual races in our recent state primaries.

Actually, it’s just the same fact over and over, but it’s an interesting one. Howard Rich — that star of video, thanks to Katon Dawson — funneled thousands of bucks to candidate after candidate, right AFTER the final deadline for pre-primary campaign finance reports. So did some other out-of-state voucher supporters.

By Ross’ reckoning, Katrina (no relation) Shealy (to name one) got $97,000 in out-of-state funding, of which voters only had the chance to know about $5,000 before they voted.

Here’s the result of Ross’ labors with regard to Ms. Shealy. Here also is what he’s put together on the following candidates:

Our boy Ross has been busy. So has Howard Rich.

Mayor Bob on Town, Gown, Sorensen, Pastides

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Making my way back through my public e-mail account, I just got to this one that Mayor Bob sent me Sunday:

    Brad, your editorial today about Dr. Harris Pastides was excellent.  The City of Columbia and the University of South Carolina have one of the best, if not the best, town-gown relationships in the nation.  Dr. Pastides has been an integral part of that success and will continue to strengthen our partnership.  Under Dr. Sorensen’s leadership the University and the local community have achieved more than we could have dreamed.  The research campus in Downtown Columbia was announced in 2003. In April of 2006, USC, the Guignard family and the City unveiled a master plan for the 500 acres in Downtown from Innovista to the waterfront.  The first phase of Innovista with two buildings at the Horizon Center and the Discovery Center are nearly complete, as are the two parking garages financed by the City of Columbia and Richland County, representing an investment of over $140 million.  Innovista will be the driving force in building a strong new economy with more jobs and an increase in our per capita income.
            Another important strategy for transforming our economy is our Fuel Cell Collaborative.  In 2008, we will build on our Fuel Cell District with the construction of one of the first hydrogen fueling stations in the Southeast. Next year, Columbia will host the National Hydrogen Association’s annual convention.  Neither would be possible without the fuel cell expertise at USC.  The University has been critical in developing a decade long regional strategy of increasing the number of our conventions and visitors. The Convention Center and the Colonial Center have both exceeded expectations, and could only have been done with all governments working together.  Mike McGee deserves great credit for the Colonial Center of course.  USC Sports play a tremendous role in our economy.  Carolina football games under Coach Spurrier are regularly broadcast nationally and our new USC Baseball Stadium is coming out of the ground on the Congaree River.
            The University and the community have collaborated on a host of other issues including hosting our friends from New Orleans after the flooding of Hurricane Katrina; together with Benedict College doing our gang assessment; working together on our homelessness effort, Housing First; and collaborating on improving Richland District One schools with Together We Can.  We look forward to continuing that great work with Dr. Pastides.

I told him thanks. As it happened, that was one of the few editorials I actually wrote myself.

Preview of Sunday page

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Kidding aside, I’ll put on my oh-so-serious editorial page editor’s hat for a moment (I don’t really have such a thing as an "editorial page editor’s" hat; that’s just a figure of speech — although I do have a very impressive Medallion of Office I wear on special occasions), and do something I haven’t done lately: Give you a preview of Sunday’s editorial page.

This is from the lead editorial, about the USC president decision:

    … Harris Pastides was the one candidate named in recent months who not only understood and believed in these initiatives, but already had his sleeves up working to make them happen. As The State’s Wayne Washington reported Friday, in recent years, “Sorensen thought the big thoughts, and Pastides got the ball rolling.”
    He may have been the comparative “insider” candidate, but he is not a “South Carolina as usual” choice. The Greek Orthodox New Yorker made his mark at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Athens in Greece and with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, before coming here in 1998. He is comfortable in Washington’s corridors of power and among the bustling new technology spheres of India.
    The challenge that now faces him as president is to bring the university’s promise from potential to tangible reality. To say that’s a daunting task is gross understatement, but obviously USC’s trustees believe he’s the one to get it done….

See? I told you it was serious. Then there’s my column, which analyzes the government’s decision to send us "stimulus" checks, and other questionable recent calls with regard to the economy:

    … But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
    Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns….

Be sure to read the paper Sunday.

Well, I got two out of three

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As some of y’all already noted, I got two of my three wild guesses right on the finalist list for USC president: Harris Pastides, and a woman. (Do I get extra points because there are two women?)

Andy Card* was apparently no one the trustees ever wanted. Apparently, the talk about him was generated by the wishful thinking of politicos — or somebody.

Of course, the fact that wild guesses were in order reflects the failure of USC trustees to conduct an open process that would allow stakeholders (i.e., the people of South Carolina) to vet the candidates before the decision is made.

But that’s par for the course, isn’t it?

Of course, if Pastides is the winner of the contest, we’ll have had plenty of opportunity to assess the new guy. And the impression I’ve formed over the years has been quite good. He’s been at the forefront of the most critical initiatives the university — indeed, all three of the state’s research universities — has been engaged in, and is well-positioned to continue the push.

At this point — thanks to the trustees’ secrecy — going forward with either of the other two candidates will seem like stepping off blindfolded into a void. Maybe they’re great, but we haven’t had the opportunity to decide that.

One worry I have if it is Pastides (and if it isn’t, he sure made the wrong call putting all his eggs in this basket), what will he be able to accomplish that Andrew Sorensen could not? I’ve never been satisfied with the official explanation, that Dr. Sorensen and the board suddenly realized he was about to turn 70, and there’s this multi-year fund-raising push coming up, yadda-yadda… Didn’t he ALWAYS have a future full of fund-raising? What was new?

My worry takes this form? If for some other reason the board had become disenchanted with the charismatic Sorensen, how will a quieter member of the same administration succeed? Or is "low-key" what trustees are looking for?

Who knows? I don’t. I just want the next president to be successful, because so much is riding on this for South Carolina. I think Harris Pastides can do the job, if the string-pullers will let him. As for the two ladies? I have no idea…

* Did I ever mention my almost-connection to Andy Card? I’ve never met him or anything, but he was supposed to be my uncle’s roommate at USC. They had been randomly matched up, but at the last minute my Uncle Woody roomed with someone else. Yes, Andy Card is of my uncle’s generation. I’m that young — haven’t you seen my picture at left? … Actually, Woody is my Mama’s way-younger brother — he’s only six years older than I am.