Category Archives: Education

Asking the governor

13 Replies


This is the audio of my effort to get the governor talking about the reform ideas that he and new Superintendent of Education Jim Rex have in common. I wrote about this in today’s column.

It was interesting for me to go back and listen to it. I had forgotten how long and hard I had pressed to get a few seconds of response from the governor — and what he did say was remarkably noncommital even by his standards. (My question took a minute-and-a-half to set up and ask; the governor answered vaguely for 15 seconds.)

Poor Tom Davis jumped in and talked and talked (for more than two minutes) after the governor stopped, and I had the impression he was consciously trying to make up for the governor’s apparent lack of interest in what is really a remarkable opportunity to achieve some dramatic reforms by reaching across party lines.

I remain hopeful, though. If the governor does decide to seize this chance, he should find a willing partner in Mr. Rex, who pretty much jumps at any opportunity to build bridges on these issues. For a little corroboration of that, check out this video from after the State of the State address. You can fast-forward through it; Mr. Rex is the last person interviewed by my sometime TV sidekick Andy Gobeil.

Sanford and Rex column

26 Replies

Sanford, Rex should work together
on common reform goals

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
“I think there is a lot of common ground, and hopefully we’ll find it.”
    — Jim Rex,
    superintendent of education,
    on reform ideas that both he
    and Gov. Mark Sanford support

Gov. Mark Sanford is the most prominent advocate of converting South Carolina’s separately elected constitutional offices into Cabinet posts. He is also probably the biggest political impediment to such essential reform.
    One day after Sen. Glenn McConnell delivered
on his promise to get constitutional officers legislation out of committee, a Democratic senator said what so many have said before: He sees the merit in consolidating the executive branch, but the idea of giving the governor power to appoint the superintendent of education really gives him heartburn.
    And no wonder. This governor showed virtually no interest in our schools in his first term, beyond leading an all-out campaign to undermine taxpayer confidence in the very idea of public education, and pay parents to desert it.
    But that was then. Now, with a new term, and a new superintendent, there’s an opportunity for progress — if the governor (and the superintendent of education, but I’m less worried about him) will seize it.
    Based on what Mr. Sanford has said over the past four years, and what Jim Rex said during the 2006 campaign, there are significant reform ideas that both of them favor.
    If they are serious about these ideas, they should get behind them with all their might:

  • Merit pay for teachers. Mr. Rex has told teachers they’d better get used to the idea of being paid according to their performance, rather than just by the old standards of degrees and longevity. The governor has proposed that.
  • More educational “choice.” Mr. Rex, who has the support of the very forces who have most resisted the governor’s “choice” advocacy (which has unfortunately focused primarily on promoting private schools), wants parents to be able to choose the public schools their children attend.
  • Comprehensive tax reform. This would help beyond education, but it is essential to fixing the inequitable way schools are funded across the state.
  • School district consolidation. The governor would reduce the state’s wasteful, duplicative archipelago of 85 districts to one per county. Mr. Rex wouldn’t go that far — he suspects that some counties, such as Horry, are too big for a single administration — but he sees the need for some consolidation of districts, and certainly sharing services across district lines. There seems room for an alliance between them on at least the concept.

    The concept is simple common sense. Some of the worst schools in the state are in some of the tiniest, least rationally conceived, districts. There is a crying need for consolidation, and a fierce resistance that has kept the Legislature deaf to it.
    Ditto with the other ideas, which have been mightily resisted by what detractors call the “education establishment” — a constituency that lawmakers have been loathe to offend.
    But if both of these statewide elected officials really poured their considerable political capital — the governor was re-elected by the greatest margin in 16 years, and Mr. Rex has the almost total support of the most critical constituencies — into these fundamental reforms, our state could be transformed.
    That would, incidentally, also advance the idea of putting the state Department of Education — which presides over nearly half of state spending — where it should be, under the authority of future governors. Ironically, Mr. Rex actually opposes that. But if education advocates could for once see this governor publicly backing serious proposals for positive change, and see Mr. Rex behind those same ideas, they could be reassured that maybe the governor’s office isn’t an inherently destructive force.
    Can it happen? I don’t know. The governor has expended little energy on pushing these ideas in the past. For that matter, we’ve yet to confirm whether Mr. Rex is more than talk — and senior Sanford adviser Tom Davis has expressed doubts that the superintendent will be able to stand firm in the face of opposition within his own party.
    But so far Mr. Rex has been the guy pushing. He initiated a meeting with the governor several weeks ago. He says both “talked candidly about the belief that we had a lot of common ground.”
    “Yeah,” said the governor when I asked him about it. “We’ve had a couple of visits, and they’ve been pleasant, and um, I think productive. I like his style; he seems to be very matter of fact. Ummm. So, yeah.”
    When the governor went no further, Mr. Davis jumped in to say there was “tremendous opportunity” to work together on these issues. But the governor’s staff still seems to wonder how far Mr. Rex would go with them.
    If I were Mr. Rex, I’d be wondering to what degree the governor’s commitment exceeds lip service. But there’s one way for everyone to be sure: Come out together on these issues in a huge, public way, each binding the other with his unmistakable commitment.
    The governor was also friendly, in a noncommittal way, with Inez Tenenbaum at the start of his first term. But all that evaporated when he and well-funded out-of-state allies started attacking public schools outright in pushing his tax credit idea. “It was just all-out war after that,” Mrs. Tenenbaum recalls.
    If both the governor and the new superintendent would seize the chance to have a much more positive relationship than that, it would be good for Mark Sanford, good for Jim Rex, and very good for South Carolina.

How about testing the teachers?

49 Replies

The author of this op-ed piece in today’s editions of The State
has a point when he says we can’t have open enrollment without providing transportation for all children whose parents want to take advantage of it.

And he’s completely right when he notes the rather obvious fact that income levels are a major predictor of student performance. In fact, it’s the one great objective measurement we have, in terms of finding correlations between measurable factors.

But he’s wrong, I believe, when he says open enrollment is a bad idea. And I suspect he takes the poverty factor, as important as it is, a little too far.

People who want to destroy public schools by paying the middle class to desert them like to lump us at the paper in with the "defenders of the status quo." But here’s where we depart from them. They say it’s purely a matter of poverty, and suggest that there’s nothing a teacher can do to change that. This is why they resisted so strongly the PACT and accountability, which we strongly supported.

As critical as poverty is, we believe good teachers and well-run schools can do a far better job of educating poor kids. The point of accountability for us is to point out, beyond a shadow of a doubt, where those good teachers and administrators are most needed. The true "defenders of the status quo" blanch at the thought of suggesting that some teachers are better than others, which in turn suggests that some teachers are, well, not up to snuff.

But it struck me in reading this piece that there’s a way to settle this dispute: Test the teachers. If their students’ scores are an imperfect indicator of the job their doing because they don’t control what the kids bring to the classroom — and that’s true enough, to a point, we just don’t know to what point — let’s come up with a PACT for teachers. Then we could see how much of the problem in rural schools comes from the students’ poverty, and how much from the fact that good teachers choose to work under better conditions, and they have the skills to get jobs in the suburbs.

This would be extremely useful. We could address the task of improving the quality of education available to all students much more effectively. We could even — gasp — use it as a factor in instituting merit pay. You want to see the system push back, try that. Or for that matter, try testing teachers to begin with.

The argument against it would be that the quality of a teacher lies in many things, many of them unmeasurable in a test. I would agree. But the test would give us some information we don’t have, and it would be helpful. As for taking it as far as using it in calculating merit pay — it wouldn’t be the ONLY factor. Along with the performance of their students (weighted by income levels plus the student’s performance under other teachers), you would have to consider subjective assessments — mainly the principal’s judgment, but you might want to toss in parent surveys.

That would really send those who resist reform through the roof. Subjective judgment, oh my! But what do you think those of us out in the private sector have to deal with, every working day of our lives?

Paul! Laurin!

2 Replies

Demarco07

Once again, we run into our intrepid correspondent, Dr. Paul DeMarco, at a political event (in this case, Wednesday’s inauguration ceremonies).

But Paul wasn’t just slumming. As usual, he had come down from Marion on a mission to help South Carolina. He had just attended the last meeting of Jim Rex’s transition team. I asked him to write us something about the experience — either for the paper or the blog — and I think he will.

Meanwhile, I had the privilege of meeting our good friend Laurin Manning for the first and second times Wednesday. She introduced herself at a post inaugural reception for 2nd-term Attorney General Henry McMaster. Then, that night, I ran into her again at the governor’s barbecue. That’s her friend Rebecca Dulin with her at the party. These two lovely young ladies will be featured in my barbecue video, which is in post-production, and which you can expect to see tonight, or tomorrow, or sometime between now and Sunday. I’m going to go get dinner now…

Laurin

Here’s your chance to help

129 Replies

Our own Paul DeMarco is a member of the Equity Funding committee of Jim Rex‘s transition team. He wants our help. He’s looking for ideas — not arguments, not recriminations, but specific, practical ideas for how we should fund education going forward.

This is our chance to make a contribution to South Carolina, and along the way transform this blog into something more than a place to blow off hot air. To quote Elliott Ness in the movie, "let’s do some good." Here’s Paul’s request:

All,

The Rex transition team Equitable Funding Committee is considering three basic questions:

1) How do you define an adequate education?
(actually the state supreme court set "minimally adequate" as the
benchmark, but let’s shoot a little higher). Only by defining what an
adequate education is can we address what an adequate funding level is.

2) What is the best way to collect money for education? HR 4449
passed in the last session shifted some of the burden from property tax
to sales tax. Is this wise? Are there other funding mechanisms the
state should consider?

3) What is the best way to distribute the dollars collected to fund
education? Is the current system in which funding varies widely from
district to district based on the tax base the best one? Some states
(i.e. Vermont) put all their education dollars in one pot and then
divides it so that every student receives the same amount of state
funding. Would a system like Vermont’s be better than what we have?

What I’m hoping for is ideas rather than commentary. Concentrate on
looking forward rather than into the past. One of our members said that
our committee would have to "give up all hope on creating a better
yesterday."

I don’t expect you to research your answers, but be as specific as
you can in the solutions you propose. If it’s a good idea, the
committee will research it for you.

So the focus is on adequacy, collection and distribution. Comment on
any or all. Also, there are four other committees 1) Choice (sorry,
Karen Floyd fans, but I suspect that’s primarily public school choice)
2) Innovation 3) Accountability (the focus is on PACT testing)
4)Teachers.  If you have any great ideas for Rex in these areas I will pass them along.

Thanks for your help.

Karen Floyd concedes

24 Replies

Karenquits2

Well, we asked her to give it up, and she did. Not that I think the two had anything to do with each other.

I spoke yesterday to Scott Malyerck over at GOP headquarters, and while he said there were folks still out there beating the bushes for excuses to protest the outcome (actually, he didn’t quite put it that way; I’m paraphrasing), it didn’t sound like they were coming up with much.

That’s not surprising. Last week when I called both Zeke Stokes with Jim Rex and Hogan Gidley with Mrs. Floyd, Zeke was all charged up and optimistic and looking forward to the results of the recount, Hogan was more like, Who’s Karen Floyd. OK, I’m paraphrasing again. What I mean is, he sounded like a guy who had put the whole campaign behind him and moved on with his life. In short, disengaged and uninterested.

But it took Karen Floyd being lady enough to stand up and say the other guy won to put an end to speculation, and I appreciate her doing that.

Speaking of the other guy, it sounds like Mr. Rex has put together a pretty good, bipartisan transition team. Here’s hoping he lives up to his promises.

Karenquits

Never give up column

67 Replies

Flagsiraq

We can’t cut and run from
our public schools (or Iraq, either)

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE CRITICS SEE themselves as realists, and can’t imagine why those of us who believe we must continue to slog on refuse to see things as they are.
    The whole thing is futile, they say, and it would be madness to keep sacrificing billions of dollars, much less all those fine young people, on our stubborn hubris.
    Don’t we know that “those people” will never embrace the opportunity we’ve sacrificed so much in order to give them? Chalk it up to DNA, or simply growing up in horrific poverty and having never known any other way. Either way, we’re wasting our time.
Karenpost
    Look at the generations — the centuries — of culture and tragic history that we’re presuming to overturn.
    It would be better, they say, to begin a phased withdrawal.
    The more sensible among us over in the “never say die” camp — those of us who believe we would be sacrificing our society’s future to cut and run — agree that mistakes were made. But rather than put it in such passive, Reaganesque terms, we know whom to blame. We are appalled at the “stay the course” fanatics who dig in their heels against new tactics.
    We want new approaches — but in the pursuit of success, not surrender. The odds are long, we know. Progress is slow, and sometimes — such as in recent weeks — it doesn’t look like progress at all. We see how it could look to some as though our best efforts have led to nothing but ruined lives and wasted money.
    To keep going takes determination, resolve, and a practically Churchillian refusal to give up.
    Of course, we’re talking about public education in South Carolina. Oh, you thought this was about the war in Iraq? Fine, because it is. I see both struggles in the same terms:

It’s not optional. South Carolina has no choice but to provide the opportunity for a good education to all of its young people. We know we can do education well; just look at the public schools in our affluent suburbs. More relevantly, look at how successful Richland 2 is at educating even the disadvantaged. We must duplicate that kind of success throughout the state, particularly in the most stubborn pockets of resistance — the poor, rural areas.
    Invading Iraq was optional. We once had the choice of other ways and other places to insert the lever of change in the Mideast (our strategic objective; 9/11 taught us that our old strategy of promoting stability in the region was suicidal). But we didn’t, and now the choices are success, or handing a titanic victory to Islamist terrorists, tribalists and totalitarian thugs. Success is going to be extremely difficult to achieve at this point, but failure is unthinkable.
    The I-95 corridor is South Carolina’s Sunni Triangle. We have to figure out how to succeed there, or we fail.

If we don’t do it, no one will. No one’s going to help in Iraq; that much has been made quite clear over the last three years. Certainly not the feckless Europeans. Even the Brits are just barely hanging in there with us, thanks to the courage and vision of Tony Blair. The only other entities with a motivation to stabilize any portion of Iraq are people we would not want to see doing so — Iran’s mullahs, or the Ba’athists in both Iraq and Syria.
    Universal education can only be achieved by pooling our resources as a society and doing it, inSoldieriraq
spite of the odds and the cost. The fantasy that the private sector would create wonderful schools in communities that can’t even attract a McDonald’s is dangerously delusional. The amazing thing is that this approach is espoused by people who insist they believe in markets, when market forces are precisely why those areas have fallen so far behind. The state has to do the job — the market lacks the motive.
    The appointment of a new secretary of defense may not get the job done, but it’s a very encouraging sign. So is the election of a state superintendent of education committed to real reform.

We can win, but it’s going to take a long, long time. We’re talking about a generational (at least) struggle here, both in Iraq and S.C. public schools. Anyone who expects us to either win quickly or pull out simply doesn’t understand either the odds or the consequences of failure.

We can’t quit. South Carolina has too many problems — we are at the bottom of too many rankings — to give up on educating our people so that they can attract, get and hold good jobs.
    In this profoundly dangerous post-Cold War world, history’s most powerful and essential republic cannot be weakened by another Vietnam. After three years of horrific mistakes, President Bush has now done two things worthy of praise: He dumped Donald Rumsfeld, and he went to Vietnam (finally) and drew this distinction between the two conflicts: “We’ll succeed,” he said, “unless we quit.” Iraq isn’t Vietnam, but there’s a sure-fire way to change that fact: Give up.
    We could pull out of Vietnam in the middle of the Cold War, and the Russians still knew we had all those nukes pointed at them. So the world didn’t fall apart, even though our nation’s ability to affect world events atrophied for many years.
    Today, too many forces of chaos, from al-Qaida to totalitarians with nukes, are poised to fill any vacuum we leave behind.
    So we can’t quit — either here or over there.

Rexpost

Sanford vs. Floyd column

42 Replies

Sanfordleft

The difference between Sanford and Floyd

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
ONE DAY last week, I was trying to explain the politics of our state to a visitor from the West Coast. That’s not quite the proverbial visitor from Mars, but it was the best I could do in real life.
    Anyway, I couched Gov. Mark Sanford’s appeal to voters in terms of white South Carolinians’ fierce aversion to anyone telling them what to do — especially the “government,” which many continue to see as an entity outside themselves, rather than something that serves their collective will. That’s the psychological (as opposed to the economic) reason why ours was the first state to secede from the Union. Our mamas and daddies can tell us what to do, but no outsider better try.
    Hence the allure of a doctrinaire libertarian such as the governor, who continues to lead Sen. Tommy Moore in the polls. All the governor has to do is say he’d keep the government from taking your money away from you, and he’s got us — or enough of us to win. Few stop to think: “Wait — the government is us. We elect it, and it only spends money on what we demand.”
    But here’s what’s wrong with my neat explanation: The governor is pushing a radical idea that most South Carolinians don’t want: public money going to private schools. And why is that on the agenda at all? Because rich folks from New York City and other foreign parts, folks who don’t give a rip about what happens to South Carolina one way or the other, think it would be neat to force that experiment on our state and see what happens.
    It’s not just about the governor, of course. These same rich Yankee ideologues are trying to buy up part of the Legislature, and intimidate the rest of it, in order to advance their plan to use our state as their lab rabbit.
    The ancestors of many Sanford supporters donned gray and butternut and started shooting to keep Northerners from telling them how to do things. But this doesn’t seem to bother many of their descendants.
    So maybe it’s not about populist, anti-government rhetoric after all. If it were, the governor would post his biggest victory margin in Lexington County, but after his loss there to Oscar Lovelace in the GOP primary, he’ll be doing well to squeak by in my home county. I’m seeing a lot of “Republicans for Tommy Moore” signs on my way to and from work each day.
    If it were purely about the ideology, Karen Floyd would also be leading by a big margin. She, after all, would be the governor’s go-to person on privatizing education if she becomes state superintendent of education. But while I’m sure she gets a boost from having an “R” after her name, I hear that she doesn’t enjoy the lead that Mr. Sanford apparently does.
    Mrs. Floyd doesn’t have a clue about how to run schools — public or private. I really don’t think she’s even thought about it much — at least not very deeply. Her comments regarding what she would do in office are short on specifics and long on PR-speak. On the main issue that caused the governor to endorse her before the primary race even started, she is evasive to a stunning degree. If I were a voter who actually favored the governor’s voucher/tax credit plan, I wouldn’t vote for her purely because she does everything she can get away with to avoid saying she’s for it.
    And if you’re not a supporter of that idea, then this is a no-brainer: Jim Rex proposes actual reforms, and demonstrates with every word that he knows enough about the system to succeed in making changes that need to be made. Mrs. Floyd, based upon her performance on the campaign trail (since her resume features no educational experience, that’s all we have to go by) would sow confusion and accomplish nothing.
    Mr. Sanford, with all his faults, is better qualified to be governor than Mrs. Floyd is to be a teaching assistant, much less superintendent of education. I think voters can see that. Can’t they?

Floydgeneral

Defining concepts downward

30 Replies

See the headline on today’s front page?

Which is better —
insider or outsider?

It refers, of course, to the superintendent of education race. It’s an idiotic question, but I certainly don’t blame my colleagues down in the newsroom for that. They are reflecting the times in which they are editing. Today, such a question regarding the head of something as complex as our schools system is … perfectly "reasonable."

You see, we have defined "reasonable" down to an absurdly low level in our politics today. Even the use of "insider" and "outsider" to describe this race is misleading, because we’ve distorted those concepts as well.

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ran as "outsiders," and both had been governors — Reagan was the governor of our largest state, which is larger and richer than most nations. They had been chief executives before; they had some clue what the job entailed. They were real outsiders because they weren’t part of the establishment. That establishment chewed up Carter and spit him out; Reagan triumphed over it.

Karen Floyd most certainly isn’t an "outsider" by those standards. She’s had limited administrative experience in the private sector during her job-hopping career, and none in the public. She doesn’t know anything more than a randomly chosen person off the street knows about education, and less than many you might find that way. She hasn’t been working on improving schools from the outside — running advocacy groups or participating in think tanks or establishing and successfully running private alternatives. Maybe she plays a leading role in the PTA, but if she’s touted that, I’ve missed it.

The bizarre thing is, by the usual standards of "outsider," Jim Rex is it. Most of his career has been spent in higher ed — both public and private colleges — working on improving schools from the outside. He’s found innovative ways to improve the teaching pool and training, and he’s got plenty of ideas — based on actual experience — for making greater improvements.

No, today, "insider" means "someone who has relevant experience of some kind" and "outsider" means, "doesn’t know jack about the job." And the latter, in our anti-intellectual, anti-expert, Reality TV-soaked society, has enormous appeal.

I don’t understand why. But then, I expect words to mean what they mean, and voters to behave rationally. So don’t mind me; I’m deluded.

A nicer-looking version of Floyd ‘plan’

45 Replies

My Sunday column promised that my blog would feature a copy of the outline that Karen Floyd’s campaign had sent me as a guide to what she would propose to do as superintendent of education.Floydplan

I couldn’t lay hands on it over the weekend (we recently changed e-mail servers, and I
had lost the message from her campaign with that attachment), so I linked you to a lame photograph of a black-and-white printout of the "plan." (I had printed it out to have in front of me during last week’s debate.) Well, that hardly met this blog’s standards.

So here’s a link
to the original PDF, as it was sent to me. I’ll go back and replace it in the other post as well.

Once again, if you can put together her description of her plans during the debate and this outline and come up with something coherent, then my hat is off to you, Gunga Din.

Single-issue obsession

92 Replies

Debate1

Superintendent debate revolves
around dangerous obsession

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
AFTER THE debate Monday night between candidates for state superintendent of education, Republican Karen Floyd accused me of being obsessed with a “single issue.”
    Say what? Moi? Hey, I was the very last person there to mention that issue. Her opponent, Democrat Jim Rex, brought it up. She vaguely touched upon it herself. S.C. ETV moderator Andy Gobeil pressed her repeatedly, but to no avail, to answer a simple “yes” or “no” question about it.
    That issue, of course, is the one that has paralyzed debate over schools in South Carolina ever since Gov. Mark Sanford introduced it, and thereby attracted vast sums of money from out-of-state extremists determined to undermine the very idea of public education. It’s the issue of whether to abandon the concept of accountability for tax dollars spent on education, and instead throw money to individuals to spend on any alternative that strikes them as attractive.
    Before the governor weighed in, parents, educators and policymakers were debating all sorts of ways to improve the quality of those schools that did not meet South Carolina’s standards — which, ever since the 1998 Education Accountability Act, have been among the most demanding in the nation.
    The governor used his bully pulpit to change the debate from how to meet those standards to whether we should even try. He wants to take money that would be spent on that strict regimen of improvement, and toss it at parents in the vague hope that better options will naturally spring up to take their money.
    And Karen Floyd is his candidate. In the year since he anointed her, she has presented no other convincing reason why she is on the ballot. She has absolutely no relevant experience. She has never improved a school system, or even one school, or one classroom. To my knowledge she had never publicly exhibited any interest in school reform of any kind before she decided to run for this statewide office.
    Her opponent offers 30 years of experience in education, from K-12 through higher education, both public and private. Her response is to dismiss completely the value of his experience, airily proclaiming that what our schools need is an outsider’s perspective. She can boast an infinite supply of that.
    Dr. Rex, product of “the system,” is the one telling the system that it needs to do some radicalDebate4
things that lawmakers have never dared require — such as paying teachers by their performance rather than how many degrees they have, and empowering principals to fire the teachers who don’t measure up.
    She says she’s for those things, too. But she doesn’t articulate them as well, possibly because she knows far less regarding what she’s talking about.
    Visit her Web site. Under “Issues,” she offers four brief position papers. One is about tweaking the PACT — which is her most substantive foray into actual academic improvement. Another is about preventing violence in schools. The other two are about channeling resources to the private sector of education — one about contracting with “diverse providers” and the other “choice,” which is her and the governor’s preferred term for taking tax money away from public schools and urging parents to spend it on something else.
    I don’t find all of Jim Rex’s proposals on his site, either. But I do find the kind of comprehensive approach you get from a thorough professional who is fed up with the status quo.
    To back up her assertion that her version of “choice” is but one subtopic in a multifaceted plan, she had a campaign assistant draft a chart and send it to us recently. It’s on my blog if you’re curious. But I warn you: Your only chance of making any sense out of it is to look at it while you listen to the streaming video of her buzzword-laden elaboration during Monday night’s debate. Good luck with that, because it didn’t help me much.
    So please excuse me if I identify her with the single issue that caused the governor to endorse her before it was known who else would even seek the Republican nomination.
    But I’m the single-issue guy, right? I think I know where that came from. Even though I was the last one at the table to address vouchers and such, I was the one who did so in embarrassingly specific terms. She managed to slough off Mr. Gobeil’s several attempts to get a straight answer, but I was more successful back during the primary debate in the spring. It took three attempts, and even then she answered with great reluctance. Yes, she had said, she would have voted for the last version of the governor’s proposal considered by the Legislature.
    OK, I said last week, so that means that rather than just advocating options for the disadvantaged trapped in “failing schools,” you favor giving these tax credits to anyone who is already sending their kids to private school or home-schooling them — because that bill did that.
    She turned to the camera and gave another long nonanswer. (Along the way she cited Shakespeare as having compared legislation to making sausages. But it was Otto Von Bismarck, not the Bard, who said that.)
    Let’s face it: When it comes to factors bearing upon her candidacy to preside over our state’s public schools, Mrs. Floyd is the single-issue candidate. She could dismiss it with a word if she chose, but she won’t. Consequently, that one thing looms over everything else she says or does.
    And on that one issue, she’s wrong.

Debate2

“A-minus?!?” What does it take to get an “A?”

9 Replies

Harry Harris of Sumter sent in a piece too long to be a letter, but it did not get selected as an op-ed. So here’s the next best thing — I’m putting his piece on my blog.

Obviously, I was interested because he was grading a debate in which I took part. Here’s his assessment:

GRADING THE EDUCATION CANDIDATES

After watching the ETV debate between the candidates
for State Superintendent of Education, my mind switched to my days of
being in school and teaching students.  I just had to give them a
grade. I want to make it clear what those grades mean by explaining the
criteria used. 

I rate Karen Floyd’s effort a D plus after adding and
subtracting the key points covered. Her presentation rated an A-.  She
is well rehearsed and makes a good first impression. The main detractor
was her uncomfortable demeanor when pressed to give straight answers to
some clear questions. 

On substance, I grant a C, based on a broad look at
issues and preparation for debating them.  She had a noticeable
fall-off in content after a good start.  The content of her proposals
and answers were, however, mostly based on business-model ideology and
risky, costly proposals.  She offered nothing but "competition" and
outsourcing as solutions for students left-behind in struggling
schools.  Her comments about public schools were framed with
negativity, and selectively repeated ad nauseam the two areas where
South Carolina lags furthest behind – SAT scores and dropout rate.

Her failing areas were clarity and trustworthiness.
In addition to evasive answers that sounded much like a lawyer who is
familiar with the weaknesses of her case, she sometimes forced the
questioners to ask what she really meant by some of her statements.
She left an impression that she is not willing to say in public what
she really thinks or intends to do.  Her evasiveness on voucher
questions leaves a deep uneasiness that she may still believe what she
touted to Republican Party and business groups in her pre-primary
rounds but is unwilling to honestly admit it.  Are we to believe she
made no promises to outside-the-state voucher proponents who have given
over half of the non-borrowed money for her campaign? How honest can
one be and ignore top ratings given the state on curriculum standards,
teacher standards, national testing results (NAEP), SAT and ACT score
improvements.  F on trustworthiness! 

Dr. Rex earned a B+ from me.  His presentation was a
B level effort.  His remarks seemed less refined – and somewhat less
rehearsed.  He handled the tougher issues and questions without
grasping for wiggle-words and seemed quite straightforward.  It did not
seem to bother him to explain that current political conditions – a
certain Governor – caused rethinking and modification of his views on
electing the State Superintendent.  He didn’t even wince at being
called a bureaucrat.

On substance, the ideas he included in his answers
and remarks gained a B plus after subtracting for what he did not
include. (I’m a hard grader.)  While citing his innovative efforts in
building-up the teaching profession in South Carolina through the
Teacher Cadets and alternative certification, he failed to adequately
point out the damage done to the profession and the demoralization of
working educators brought about by the Sanford/Floyd philosophy.
Though he outlined the need for change and innovation informed by
experience, he did not include a reminder of the damage, morale drain,
and test score decline under Ms. Floyd’s supporter, Barbara Nielson.
Nor did he adequately highlight the reversal of that decline under Inez
Tennenbaum who led reform without attacking her own troops.  His reform
plans seem grounded in experience and sound fiscal judgment.

In clarity and substance, Dr. Rex stood out.  Is
there any doubt where he stands on vouchers?  He was clear about the
kinds of choice he thinks show promise.  He did not filibuster or evade
tough questions.   He was honest and forthright about where he wants to
lead – and about needing to comprehensively address the difficult
issues – whether taxes, funding, or the failure of some schools.  He
seems trustworthy and clear.

Solid A. 

I was forced to subtract some extra points from Jim
Rex’s overall score for being too uncritical of Ms. Floyd’s
assertions.  Her remark about a position paper she "wrote" would have
drawn a quick F in my classroom.  After reading the paper referenced on
her website months ago, I found a strangely similar paper at the
Manhattan Institute website.  Footnotes have since been added to "her"
paper on her website.  They cite the Manhatten Institute, The Heritage
Foundation, The Center for Education Reform, The Home School Legal
Defense Association, and Jay P. Greene – a chief writer for the
Manhatten Institute.  Each is an opponent of public schools and a
voucher proponent.  Good scholarship, Ms. Floyd. 

He also did not mention the large loans taken out by
the Floyd campaign – over $181,000 just this quarter.  This gives her
lots of money to have a large campaign voice, but who will pay back
this money after the campaign? I suspect it will be largely those
out-of-state sham companies that are her largest contributors to date –
the ones to whom she owes nothing – right?  Dr. Rex was a true
gentleman as he stated.  It cost him 5 points on my scale.

The debate panelists ran a good debate.  They asked
good questions, and gave good opportunity to respond, but did not allow
empty or evasive responses.  A -.

Harry Harris

Sumter

 

Perhaps after I call his attention to this star billing, Mr. Harris will just come straight here with his offerings the next time my buddy Mike Fitts turns him down for print.

This guy’s Crozier than I am

58 Replies

When you get tired of Jim Rex and Karen Floyd airing their staid, trite arguments about how to make schools safer in light of recent horrific shootings, take a look at their counterpart out in Oklahoma.

This guy wants to do something. And he doesn’t just talk about doing something. He and his "staff" went out and blasted some textbooks with a 9mm pistol and an AK-47, and put it on video. You have got to see this — it’s like outdoor-sportsman show meets Monty Python: "Boring Book Stalking on the Moors," or some such.

Why can’t we have candidates like this?

This was brought to my attention by some alert folks down in our newsroom. One education reporter speculated that, since the only kind of textbook mentioned in the story was a calculus book, that maybe this reflected some sort of deep hostility to higher math on the part of Bill Crozier, the candidate. Was he asked to recite the chain rule one too many times? Who knows? In any case, he has taken his revenge.

I’ll be helping moderate the Monday night debate between Mrs. Floyd and Mr. Rex. Now I have two new questions to ask:

  1. Would you provide our pupils with body armor made from old textbooks?
  2. If so, what kinds of textbooks — as in what subjects — would they be?

Their answers would speak volumes about their suitability.

Once again, we are reminded what a wonderful idea it is to elect our state superintendent. The kind of person who would be appointed would be the dull sort who would actually read textbooks, rather than shredding them with a Kalashnikov.

Mark Sanford vs. Tommy Moore

48 Replies

Why must we choose
between vision and effectiveness?
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THIS IS THE election year for complementary pairs. For treasurer we have the Brash Rich Kid vs. Everybody’s Granddaddy. For lieutenant governor, Mr. Mature is challenging Wild Thing.
    But the most marked dichotomy is at the top of the ticket.  On one side, we have incumbent Gov. Mark Sanford, a policy wonk who has all sorts of ideas, but who can’t get anything done. The fact that he can’t get anything done is both a bad thing and a good thing, because some of his ideas (restructuring state government) are excellent, while others (paying people to abandon public schools) are very, very bad.
    Opposing him is veteran state Sen. Tommy Moore, a “git ’er done” kind of guy. He prides himself on bringing together lawmakers from across the spectrum who may be miles apart on a given issue, and getting them to sit down and work something out. He can flat get a bill passed, sometimes in the face of considerable odds.
    While he can do what the governor can’t, Sen. Moore is lacking in the very department where the governor is blessed with an overabundance. When I suggested as much to him last week, noting that he seemed to lack as strict and specific an agenda as the governor’s, he said rather grumpily that “I’m glad you didn’t say I didn’t have ideas.”
    Well, I didn’t. But by the time the interview was over, he had provided little in the way of specific proposals. If I put all the ideas he set forth in that meeting in my pants pocket, I could turn it inside-out without making much of a mess on the floor.
    This is not good. I’ve lived all over the country, and I’ve never seen a state that needed principled, effective leadership as much as my dear native South Carolina.
    Some would say I’m asking too much. But people who would fit that bill do exist in our state. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley for one. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for another. They have vision, they see how things are connected, they see what needs to be done, and they have the skills to work with political friend and foe alike to bring about results that represent significant progress.
    But they aren’t running for governor. Instead, we get an ideologue who is so into libertarian think-tank theories that he has no idea how to persuade real people — even in his own party — to work with him. That’s been our governor for four years. And our alternative is a very grounded, realistic veteran deal-maker who can work with whatever you bring to the table, but who doesn’t throw much on it himself.
    This is not to say Tommy Moore lacks principles. In fact, I’d say his principles — grounded as they are in real-life experiences — are probably closer to those of the average South Carolinian than the hothouse hypotheses of the incumbent. He’s certainly a lot closer to me when it comes to understanding the role that government must play in improving life for all South Carolinians.
    “I agree with those folks who are saying, ‘More money isn’t the answer’: More money isn’t necessarily the answer,” Sen. Moore said. “But I can guarantee you that less money over the last three and a half years hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”
    He said he would want his legacy to be that he made government more efficient in performing its legitimate functions.
    “The government can be a partner to people,” he said. “Government isn’t evil. You don’t need to starve government to where it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub.” That’s a reference to the governor’s ideological ally Grover Norquist, who has said that’s his ultimate goal as leader of a national anti-tax group.
    “The easiest thing is to come to Columbia and be against something,” said the senator. “The hard thing is to be for something.”
    Trouble is, it’s hard to find much that Sen. Moore is for, specifically, when it comes to education. He’s definitely against being against the public schools. But that doesn’t quite add up to being for a substantive agenda for moving the schools forward.
    He wants to improve prenatal health care and early childhood education. He wants comprehensive tax reform. He would pursue economic development for rural areas. But when you dig for specifics, they are scarce. He keeps saying he wants to hear other people’s ideas. He’s confident he can then sell the good ones to the Legislature.
    The general impression is that he would be a reactive governor who would deal with things as they were brought to him, but would not initiate particular proposals.
    By contrast, the current governor is all about throwing out his ideas to see what will happen — which, generally, is nothing, except for a lot of hard feelings.
    He claims that his pushing of extreme ideas such as the “Put Parents in Charge” bill has led to accelerating public school choice and the development of charter schools. So should we interpret his advocacy of paying people to abandon public schools as a mere strategy to achieve some more moderate goal?
    No, he admits, “because I actually take those extreme positions.” He laughed, and said “I would love to get there if I could.”
    Ultimately, he said South Carolina needs someone who believes in fundamental change, not someone who knows how to work the system.
    “We come from different vantage points,” the governor said of himself and Sen. Moore. “I come from outside the system; he comes from within.”
    “He’s basically said the system ain’t broke…. We say the system is broke.” So if he gets four more years, will we be able to look back and say the system is fixed to any degree? “Nah,” he said. “The political system is such that we all know that you never get the whole bite of any apple.” Nevertheless, he hopes he’d have “a material impact” on government restructuring.
    The governor misses the point. It’s not an either/or. South Carolina needs a governor who is not only committed to positive change, but who also has the ability to work with others to make that change come about.
    Once again, when we go to the polls Nov. 7, we won’t be offered a candidate who fits that description. We need and deserve better.

Talk about your bad timing

22 Replies

A press release to this effect moved at 1:28 p.m. today from the Rex campaign:

(COLUMBIA)  Today, as Karen Floyd continues to hide behind
news releases and refuses to debate Jim Rex, campaign manager Zeke Stokes called
on Floyd to explain how she plans to pay for her outlandish plan to put a camera
in every classroom.

"There are more than 43,000 classrooms in South Carolina," said Stokes.  "It
would cost tens of millions of dollars to place a camera in every one of them
and hire the additional personnel needed to monitor every classroom for
disruptive behavior.  This over-the-top ‘big brother’ approach would require
another one of Karen’s favorite things – a massive tax increase.  Isn’t her
half-a-billion-dollar Voucher Tax enough?

At about the same time, the nation was learning about this:

Milk Man Storms Amish School, Killing 3

NICKEL
MINES, Pa. (AP) — A milk-truck driver carrying two guns and a grudge
stormed a one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday, sent the boys and adults
outside, barricaded the doors with two-by-fours, and then opened fire
on a dozen girls, killing three of them before committing suicide. It
was the nation’s third deadly school shooting in less than a week, and
it sent shock waves through Lancaster County’s bucolic Amish country, a
picturesque landscape of horse-drawn buggies, green pastures and
neat-as-a-pin farms, where violent crime is virtually nonexistent.

A member of my immediate family is teaching pre-school up in Pennsylvania, probably less than an hour’s drive from where this happened. I spoke to her just before she was going into a 6 p.m. staff meeting, at which security is likely to be discussed. I expect at this particular point in time she wouldn’t mind a camera in the classroom one bit, whatever the cost.

The gloves go back on

10 Replies

If you click on the first link on my last post now, you’ll find nothing but, "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria."

That’s because after I posted it, the Rex campaign took down the item in question about Karen Floyd. (See the comment from campaign aide Zeke Stokes.)

Apparently, the Rex campaign is sensitive to y’all’s good opinion. But is it too late for that?

The gloves come off

29 Replies

Just when you thought you had figured out Jim Rex as the mild-mannered-professor type, this comes out on his blog. Apparently, an alternative paper finally printed the stuff that everybody’s been muttering about Karen Floyd — her three marriages, etc. — and Mr. Rex wants to make sure you don’t miss it.Rex3

Mrs. Floyd has been worried that her personal life would be used against her from the beginning. I
think it was a major consideration she had to overcome in deciding to run. She made it through the five-way primary unscathed — except for all the talk, which didn’t reach most of the voters.

Now it’s out, and I find myself wondering who will be hurt more by it — Karen Floyd, or Jim Rex. I have to say it raises certain chivalrous hackles in me. A gentleman doesn’t speak publicly about a lady’s past. But, trapped in that Jane Austen mode of thinking as I am, I find myself wanting to give Mr. Rex some benefit of doubt. Do you think it’s actually written by him? Do you think he even reads it? Is Zeke Stokes or somebody acting on his own?

Still, Mr. Rex is responsible for it, just as Andre Bauer is responsible for the MySpace site he says he has nothing to do with.

So what do you think? Does this make you think less of Karen? Or of Jim?

Jim Rex, superintendent of education

15 Replies

Rex1

Wednesday, 11 a.m. — Finally, we meet Jim Rex. About time, too, with less than six weeks to go before he faces Karen Floyd. And so it is that we are able to answer the question that so many have asked since we last looked in on the contest to replace Inez Tenenbaum: Is there more to Jim Rex than not being the official PPIC candidate?

Well, yes. After all, the man has spent 30 years in education, from K-12 to higher ed, both public and private — ending as president of Columbia College. He’s retired from all that (except for some consulting work), he seems well off, he doesn’t need a job.

But he wants to make the public schools in South Carolina better, so he’s running for this office. He was talked into it by Dick Riley, who stressed two arguments:

  1. South Carolina needs an educator in the job.
  2. This is likely to be the highest-stakes election for the future of education "in our lifetimes."

Mr. Rex says he appreciates those of us who have been sticking up for the hard-won progress that our public schools have made, in the face of years of denigration by the governor, SCRG and others whose goal is to persuade our state to despair and give up the daunting, expensive (and the expensive is what actually matter to them) enterprise of trying to educate all of our children.

But for his part, he’s frustrated with how the schools are doing. He has been for a couple of decades. While he sees "incremental progress," it’s not enough because we’re not catching up to the rest of the nation.

"What our state desperately needs," he says, is "a comprehensive plan to reform, improve and support public education." And you need all three — you can’t reform without support, you can’t improve without reform, and you won’t get support without improvement.

The issue is whether the state will buckle down and undertake that task. "My election is a referendum, I hope, once and for all" in favor of the mission of education, "and a denunciation of distractions." For that reason the former high school English teacher and football coach (he said his players told him he was the only coach they’d ever had who yelled at them in complete sentences) plans to "go on the offense for public education."

His intent would be to spend his first 12 months in office building grass-roots support for his comprehensive plan, "so that when we roll it out, no matter who the governor is" or who is running the Legislature, they won’t be able to stand in the way of the changes.

He wants to instill in South Carolinians the kind of spirit that ran through the state when Mr. Riley was governor: "(T)here was a feeling of optimism. There was a feeling that South Carolina can be as good as anybody and better than most. And we haven’t had that" for a long time.

It’s good to hear from someone who thinks we’re up to the challenge. The last time anyone running for office said we "desperately needed" something, it was Jim Hodges. And he was talking about the lottery. Mr. Rex agrees with me that the lottery is "not too dissimilar from saying, ‘Let’s have a voucher.’" Both approaches are nihilistic. Both are about saying, "We can’t do this together." Both are about placing one’s hopes on individual venality, rather than working together to achieve the common good.

Here are the five main components of the comprehensive approach to education reform that he would advocate:

  1. Innovation. He says that sure, there is plenty of innovation already, here and there in the public schools across the state, but "most of that we have occurs in spite of the state, not because of it." South Carolina can’t just hope for individual initiatives here and there to pull it up; it’s going to take a concerted effort. "We’re doing too many things still, far too many things, that don’t work."
  2. More options and flexibility. "Americans expect choices," and public schools need to deliver it, shifting from a rigid structure something that offers a lot more options to kids and parents. The answer to that demand, however, is most certainly not "this serpent called vouchers."
  3. Reforming reforms. "In every pill there’s a bit of poison," and even the best cures have had their harmful elements. For instance, he believes that while the PACT does a pretty good job of measuring accountability, it’s too expensive, too cumbersome, and has come to loom over the school year to the point that teachers teach to the test too much. The accountability function could be accomplished just as well by sampling the student population, rather than everyone having to take it. If everyone’s going to take a test, it should be something more diagnostic, which would help teachers know how to help individual students.
  4. Elevate and rejuvenate the teaching profession. It’s not only not attracting enough people, it’s not attracting enough of the right people. He cites his roles in establishing the Teacher Cadets program and the PACE program. The first helps promising young people who show an interest in education to continue on that path. The second allows people with valuable knowledge and experience to become teachers without having to go through college again.
  5. Adequately fund education for all children. In other words, fix the inequity that causes those in the Corridor of Shame and other poor areas to fall further behind.

"I don’t think any one, two or three of those things can take us where we need to go. I think we need all five," he said.

He has no qualms about taking on the education establishment. He spent two hours talking to the  SCEA — which ended up endorsing him — and spent an hour of that talking about a form of merit pay.

Sure, educators always protest that such an approach can’t be administered fairly, but he doesn’t swallow that. "If you ask any teacher who are the best and worst teachers" in their schools, "they would know."

"And yet, at the end of the year, they all get the same pay increases," which makes no sense.

Teachers, he said, are going to have to lead the change, not stand in the way of it. "I’ve told educators, it’s kind of now or never."

Rex2

Boyd and Jim column

9 Replies

Up close, even the most clear-cut,
polarizing issue turns gray

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LET’S SET aside all the partisanship and polarization and stupid name-calling for a moment to remind ourselves that when you dig into them deeply enough, things aren’t nearly as bad in our politics as they tend to seem. Or at least, not always.
    That’s because you have people involved. And people are more complicated, and therefore better, than the boxes we would put them in. God bless them for it.
    Look, for instance, at the S.C. House District 75 race in which Richland County Democrat and political newcomer Boyd Summers is challenging Jim Harrison, a 17-year veteran Republican representative and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
    In his recent endorsement interview, Mr. Summers said one of the main reasons he was runningSummersmug_1
was that Rep. Harrison had swung to the “hard right” on such issues as support for public education. The incumbent has been a prime pusher of the “Put Parents in Charge” bill, which would use tax credits to pay parents to abandon public schools.
    The challenger is adamantly against PPIC because “I am firmly in favor of public education,” and he doesn’t want to see finite public resources diverted away from our schools to the private sector.
    Mr. Summers brags that he’s supported by the S.C. Education Association, while the Republican is on the side of “South Carolinians for Responsible Government,” an organization that exists only to push PPIC. It doesn’t get more black-and-white than that.
    But it does get less so. Mr. Harrison chafes at being painted as anti-public school. “I think you’ve got to look at 17 years, and not just one bill,” he says. And he’s right. Besides, he says, his two children went to public schools all the way through — Rosewood Elementary, Hand Middle and Dreher High.
    In fact, Mr. Harrison began his interview by aggressively challenging Mr. Summers’ support of public education, pointing out that his challengers’ two young children do not attend public schools. Of course, one of them is only 3 years old. But the older one, Mr. Harrison says he has heard, is in first grade at Hammond School.
    Not true, Mr. Summers says: The older child is in 5-year-old kindergarten at Hammond.
“What my wife and I have made,” he said, “is the decisions we think are best for each child.” OK, so what about the future? “We evaluate it on a year-by-year basis,” he said, and “we haven’t made any decisions yet” about next year.
    But, he insists, he is a firm believer in the importance of public education, and voters can rely on him to make policy on that basis — a confidence he says they cannot place in the incumbent in light of his advocacy of an extremely destructive idea.
    Has Mr. Harrison caught his opponent in a fatal contradiction? Maybe, maybe not. I understand him. I have always believed in public schools, yet our oldest children started their educations in a Catholic school in Tennessee. We switched to public in 1988.
    Still, I wasn’t running for public office on a platform of “I’m for public schools and he isn’t.” The issue is relevant. It gives voters in the district reason to question Mr. Summers’ level of commitment. He may have a good answer, but it gives them a good question.
Harrisonmug_1
    Mr. Harrison says it’s especially relevant because parents who live in Mr. Summers’ neighborhood behind the VA hospital worry that the local school, Meadowfield Elementary, hasn’t been doing well on the PACT.
    They believe, he says, that if parents in the community would “stick together to work to improve their school rather than bailing out,” it would show improvement.
    He said they felt parents turning to the private option were “not giving Meadowfield a chance.”
Not good news for Mr. Summers. But it also complicates things for Rep. Harrison. I couldn’t help pointing out that he had just described very well what was wrong with PPIC — that it would entice the most motivated, most involved parents to leave troubled schools behind, and those schools would only get worse as a result.
    He didn’t disagree. In fact, he reminded me that he had talked in his earlier interview about how he had been motivated to champion “choice” only for children “below a certain income level.”
    “I could live very easily without that provision in the last bill that gave a thousand-dollar tax credit, no matter where you lived and no matter what your income was,” he had said. “It ought to be focused on failing schools and low-income families.”
    Of course, PPIC had included the tax credit for the affluent, which was politically necessary to generate the bill’s only in-state constituency: those who already home-school or send their kids to private schools. And Mr. Harrison had pushed it in that form.
    Still, I had to sympathize with his lament that it was unfair to use that as an excuse to call him “hard right,” or anti-education, in light of his record otherwise. He said there was something wrong with a system in which “people in the middle that are trying to find some viable options get labeled as extremists.”
    I couldn’t agree more. Of course, I think his advocacy of PPIC is quite a bit more relevant to his public education credentials than where a Summers 5-year-old attends kindergarten.
    But I don’t think the issue is as up-or-down as the likes of SCEA and SCRG would have us believe.
Fortunately, they don’t decide elections. In this case, the voters of District 75 do. And they have a lot to consider.

Art restoration

15 Replies

John72
This is one for you art lovers out there. My roommate from my USC days recently took part in the special pre-demolition reception for former inmates of the Honeycombs. He will remain nameless for now — all I will say is that he was an art major, and that is him at the bottom of the above image.

As you see him, he has just restored a graffiti work from his early Gonzo-minimalist period — or restored it as well as he could, working in a hurried fashion before the university authorities could notice he had slipped away from the group.

By the way, my roommate was the responsible one in our duo — he kept his side of the room spotless, with all his art supplies neatly stacked and categorized, his clothes put away in the closet. He was the one with the short, conservative hair. I think he even used to make his bed.

My side looked like a waste dump, featuring pots with week-old food cooked on with my contraband hotplate, sloppily-hung posters and dirty clothes. The finishing touch was my mountain of State newspapers, not one of which I ever tossed, constantly spilling over to his side, and earning me the sobriquet "Ratso Rizzo" (we had both seen "Midnight Cowboy" over at the Russell House). He still calls me that, even though I’ve cut my hair and shaved.

Connoisseurs of early-1970s, 4th-floor Snowden culture will recognize the above hastily-penned reproduction as only dimly evocative of the original, once-thought-to-be-immortal work that was scratched deeply into the paint that coated the concrete-block wall. It was located over the elevator immediately across from our room, and was still there when I took my bride by there on our honeymoon three years later. I was proud to play the docent and explain to her the history behind this treasure. She was suitably impressed, I think — she was speechless.

Unfortunately, the original was lost to a later renovation of the building — probably about the time they put those sissy dividers in to make separate shower stalls in the floor’s one bathroom.

But all is not lost! My roommate and I are planning a guerrilla revisit to the site in the next few days, and hope to restore the original to its rightful place, so that the building’s boisterous spirits will lie at rest when the Big Crash comes. If you would like to help in bringing about this once-in-a-lifetime testament to the (adolescent) human spirit, your cash gifts can be sent to this blog.