This video has been available to you since this morning, but you may have missed the link from this column, since there was no graphic link.
So I’m drawing a little more attention to it.
The Charleston mayor came to see us with Spartanburg Mayor Bill Barnet to talk about the global warming issue from a municipal leadership perspective.
This is the first of three videos I’m highlighting from recent interviews with politicians who would be excellent candidates for the Energy Party, talking about our No. 1 issue.
This interview was largely, but not entirely, the basis for my column of Feb. 25.
Best line:
"The French — 80 percent of the power needs of France are met by the nuclear power industry. They are the model. I never thought I’d hear myself say this. They are the model; we should follow the French when it comes to nuclear power."
Thanks to the ACLU, I learn that the following federal initiative is afoot:
The law would federalize the design, issuance and management of state driver’s licenses, creating a uniform identity card and database tantamount to the first national ID card. Residents of states that fail or refuse to comply with Real ID will supposedly be unable to use their driver’s licenses for any activity that requires federally accepted identification, such as boarding airplanes or entering federal buildings.
That is way cool. There’s finally a movement in the works to create something like a national ID card. We could all carry something in our wallets that could save our lives in hospitals, let us breeze through security at airports, prevent people from stealing our credit, help cops catch crooks, and go a long, long way toward solving this immigration issue that so many people seem to be so worked up about.
Of course, the ACLU’s against it. Here I am, thinking, "Why go around our posteriors to get to our elbows? Why not just go ahead and have a national ID card? Wouldn’t that be simpler administratively, and more likely to work, without so many moving governmental parts?"
And the ACLU’s having a total conniption over it.
So much good could be achieved in this world if the libertarian paranoids would just take it easy. I know they have their function, but a canary that passes out before you even get to the mine isn’t much use to anybody.
OK, so maybe I’m a little less concerned about privacy than I should be. Maybe a national ID wouldn’t be the greatest think since sliced pepperoni. But I think it would be pretty good. Why can’t we have a reasonable discussion about it, instead of starting from the assumption that it would be awful?
I realize this is a gut thing to a lot of people, maybe even most people. My gut’s never felt it. I don’t understand the fear, never have. Maybe I shouldn’t sneer and be so dismissive. But the nervous Neds at the ACLU just bring that out in me.
Still catching up on notes and video from the Monday and Tuesday meetings with Sens. DeMint and Graham. Here’s what Sen. DeMint had to say about the anti-Surge nonbinding referendum:
And here’s what Sen. Graham had to say:
For an interesting, other-than-the-usual contrast, here’s what fellow Republican Bob Inglis had to say over on the House floor explaining why he voted FOR the resolution. Either follow the link to the whole thing, or be satisfied with this excerpt:
The President has ordered an increase in troop strength in Iraq.
He thinks a surge in troops will give breathing room for the development of a path to progress.
I’m concerned that a surge will have the opposite effect—that it will give breathing room to the death squads, that our service men and women will be caught in the crossfire and that the surge will end right where it began.
In fact, that’s what happened in Baghdad in August and September of 2006.
I’m concerned that a surge sends a conflicting message. On the one hand we’re telling them, “You don’t have forever; you’ve got to make progress in solving these political questions; you’ve got to stop legging up on your enemies; it’s your country.”
By surging, we may be saying, “Not to worry, we’re increasing the size of that American security umbrella; there’s no urgency; we’re here to stay; in fact, more of us are coming.”
I want all Iraqi factions and leaders of factions to worry.
I want them to see us reaching for the button that would bring that umbrella down.
I want them to imagine the click of that button and the feel of the wind from the descending umbrella.
The resolution before us isn’t written the way I would have written it, but it’s the resolution before us.
Resolutions are the way that Congress discharges its constitutional responsibility to communicate with the President.
This resolution says, “We disapprove of the surge.”
You decide which one you think is right. I’ve got a column to write for Sunday, on another subject.
Somebody came up to me after last night’s "school choice" forum saying he’d like to get together and discuss the subject, perhaps over a lunch, from the Club for Growth perspective.
I did NOT hit him, and I’m very proud of that. In fact, he and I conducted a very civil chat, from the auditorium aisle out into the Richland Northeast High School parking lot, for almost another hour. We were joined by a nice lady from SCRG who had always wanted to meet me and ask a few questions.
So, that brings my tally to this in the last couple of weeks: Two-and-a-half hours with my bishop over dinner, with me talking almost the whole time (and aware each moment how rude that was on my part, as his guest); three hours and 20 minutes with three representatives from SCRG on Wednesday, and three hours last night.
All on the same subject: Vouchers and tax credits for private education. And how many hours have I spent in intense debate over substantive education reform ideas, such as funding parity, consolidating districts, greater leeway for principals and superintendents in hiring and firing teachers, merit pay for teachers, and the like?
None.
I am a microcosm. My wasted time represents the time and political energy that South Carolina has wasted on this useless debate over a very bad idea. There is so much we need to do about improving educational opportunity in South Carolina. But we’re not even talking about the real issues.
As for what was said (in vain) at the forum last night — well, it’s hard for me to take a lot of notes when I’m participating like that. Suffice to say that you’ve pretty much heard it all before. What I can do is share with you the notes from which I spoke. I learned at the last minute that I had to have a five-minute opening statement, so I wrote the following, pretty much stream-of-consciousness:
choice talk notes
2/22/07What are we talking about here? Choice? I’m always suspicious of that word. In politics, it ends to be used to dress up the otherwise indefensible. I could elaborate on that, but that would probably make for more controversy than those who invited me were counting on.
What do you mean, school choice? Want to talk the merits and demerits of open enrollment? Fine. But it’s certainly not the most important thing to be talking about – much less sucking up all the political oxygen available for the discussion of education reform. I’d put something like revamping our whole system of taxing and spending in order to provide some parity of education opportunity between rural and suburban kids an awful lot higher on the list.
But we’re talking school “choice.”
Well, we’ve got choice, as proponents of vouchers and tax credits keep saying – for the affluent. Their point is that the same choices available to the wealthy should be made available to everyone else – with the government paying for it.
They don’t call it that. They say, “We’re just giving people back their own money.” They’re talking about the tax credits, which would only be fully available to the middle class, because they’re the only ones who pay enough in taxes to get it. But even if that didn’t leave out the poor, it is indefensible.
It’s not their money. It comes from the taxes they paid – mandated by a duly elected representative government – for the funding of the essential infrastructure of a civilized, secure society (the sort of society without which wealth and personal security are impossible to maintain). Like roads and public safety, public schools are an essential part of that infrastructure – in South Carolina, education is actually a mandated part of that infrastructure.
Now, to vouchers – that would clearly be an expenditure from the public purse, and a singularly irresponsible one. Critics of the public system often complain about throwing money at schools. Taking the money out of our accountability system and handing it to folks and saying spend this wherever it strikes you to spend it, without any controls to protect the taxpayers’ interest in this vital function for which the taxes were raised in the first place – now that’s throwing money.
Back to infrastructure: Say that we committed ourselves to providing a fully effective, comprehensive system of public transportation. We’ve done nothing of the kind, of course, but say we did. There would still be well-off people who would prefer to drive a Lexus or a Mercedes or a Hummer (assuming that government actually kept the roads up), and would have the means to do so. Should we then provide tax credits to folks who could only afford a Chevy to buy something pricier? Of course not. That would be crazy. So is this.
Unlike with public transit, we HAVE supposedly committed ourselves to providing education. We’ve just never followed through to the point that fulfills the promise – particularly in rural areas. To divert a single dime from the legitimate governmental purpose of funding public education – the only kind of education that can possibly be held accountable to taxpayers – is unconscionable, as long as we have such severely underfunded schools in our rural areas.
You’re not satisfied with the quality of public education we’re providing in those rural schools, or in some of our inner-city schools? Neither am I. So let’s fix them. We CAN fix them, because they belong to us. We can do whatever we have the political will to do with them.
Taking finite resources out of that system and throwing it at anybody who comes in and says they’ll start a private school in order to take that money makes no sense at all. And there’s no reason for us to do it.
At the beginning of his op-ed piece that ran in The Washington Post and which he did not offer to us (but no, he has no further political ambitions; perish the thought), Gov. Mark Sanford offers hope that he wishes to reconcile "conservatives" to those who wish to conserve the Earth.
That would be a worthwhile goal.
Unfortunately, no. It reads much more like a partisan battle cry meant to muster the libertarian right to capture the high ground on global warming before those "far-left" nutballs like Al Gore actually go out and do something about it.
Truly a missed opportunity to find common ground on a critical issue. Sure, it’s just another one among thousands, but it’s still very sad.
A footnote: There’s an element in this piece that is highly relevant to the core of Mark Sanford as a political, or perhaps I should say apolitical, creature. It’s in this paragraph, explaining why a dyed-in-the-wool "conservative" such as he would care about conserving:
For the past 20 years, I have seen the ever-so-gradual effects of rising sea levels at our farm on the South Carolina coast. I’ve had to watch once-thriving pine trees die in that fragile zone between uplands and salt marshes. I know the climate change debate isn’t over, but I believe human activity is having a measurable effect on the environment.
Nothing remarkable about that to you? There wouldn’t be to me, either, if I hadn’t seen a certain trend over time — just a standard rhetorical device of bringing a personal anecdote to bear on a much-broader issue.
But it’s more than that. It’s not a rhetorical device. It’s actually the center of what motivates Mark Sanford. When he said over and over in the 2002 campaign that he wanted to build a South Carolina in which his four boys could have a good future, many misunderstood that to mean he wanted all S.C. children to have a better future.
But it was really, in a fundamental sense, about his four boys. He has pursued policies ever since that appeal to people who think the very same way — MY kids, MY land, MY money. There is no OUR. Whether the subject is school "choice" or cutting the already-low income tax, it’s about people who see themselves and their families and households as islands, not as an integral part of a community with a shared destiny.
It’s about appealing to voters as consumers, not as citizens. It’s about rights without responsibilities. Oh, but they’ll protest, we’re all about Individual responsibility, just not social responsibility. People who think in such terms are the least responsible of all, and a tremendous threat to representative democracy.
Had I not received an e-mail from a teacher saying she’d see me tonight, I would have forgotten that I’m appearing at this event tonight. OK, if you don’t want to follow the link:
School choice forum tonight
A
public forum on school choice will be held from 7 to 9 tonight at the
Richland 2 auditorium at Richland Northeast High School, 7500
Brookfield Road.Panelists will include:
- Cynthia Jackson, a teacher at Hood Street Elementary at Fort Jackson
- Richland 2 superintendent Steve Hefner, chairman of state
Superintendent of Education Jim Rex’s transition team committee on
school choice- Larry Watts of the S.C. Independent Schools Association
- Terrye Seckinger of South Carolinians for Responsible Government, an activist group
- Brad Warthen, The State newspaper’s editorial page editor
The forum will be moderated by Bruce Field from the University of South Carolina.
USC is sponsoring the forum along with the S.C. School Improvement Council and the Richland 2 Teacher Forum.Audience members can submit written questions at the forum or e-mail them ahead of time to barber2@gwm.sc.edu.
School choice has been a hot topic in the General Assembly for
several years. This year, there are competing proposals to offer
private school tuition tax credits or expand public school options for
parents.
I hope I still have something left to say on the subject. I had a three-hour-and-20-minute lunch yesterday (no martinis) with SCRG President Randy Page and SCRG attorneys Kevin Hall and Butch Bowers. It was affable, but it would have been a lot shorter had my good friend Kevin and Butch not come along (no offense, guys). I had just wanted to get to know Randy, since we had talked past each other so many, many times at a distance. Part of my politics-is-people schtick.
Do I routinely have such lunches? No, at least, not that long. In fact, this was a record. I’m still recuperating. Not until it was over did I realize it was longer than the previous record, the three-hour repast I had with the late Gov. John West several years ago when he was trying to do shuttle diplomacy between me and then Gov. Jim Hodges. Needless to say, we pretty much exhausted that subject as well, to little avail.
God bless Gov. West. He said that would go down in his list of personal failures with the fact that he couldn’t further Mideast peace as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I thought that was a bit of an overstatement, but I saw what he meant.
He’d be gratified to know that whenever Gov. Hodges and I run into each other today, we are quite cordial. In fact, I met Mrs. Hodges for the first time at the Galivants Ferry Stump last year, and she was quite charming. Sometimes peace takes time.
Who recently said this? "It’s been easier working with the Democrats:"
The answer? None of the above.
One of the great ironies of the November elections is that the outcome proved empowering for Sen. Jim DeMint, previously known — to the extent he was known, in the shadow of the more bipartisan Lindsey Graham (with whom we’ll meet today) — as a toe-the-line GOP loyalist.
He’s still certainly a Republican, but he has found that the fact places fewer constraints on him in the new Congress. Democrats are in charge, and he feels freer to go ahead and just get things done, rather than having to carry water for his own leadership.
This has had its most dramatic effects so far in the bipartisan effort to curtail earmarks, but our junior senator sees other possibilities as well. See for yourself…
More confusion on the rally.
First, The Associated Press said:
Hundreds of people, including many school children who arrived by the
busload, gathered at the Statehouse on Tuesday, rallying for
legislation that would help parents send their young ones to private
schools.
Later in the day, The Associated Press said:
Thousands of people, including many private school children who arrived
by the busload, gathered at the Statehouse on Tuesday, rallying for
legislation that would help parents send their young ones to private
schools.
Maybe the busloads of "private school children" arrived after the first version was filed. I don’t know. Note the AP picture above, which was taken from a rather different angle from mine. And possibly at a different time; I don’t know.
Anyway, remember — for the truth, in all its infinite variety, come to Brad Warthen’s Blog, which is always first with the burst.
OK, so maybe there weren’t any official estimates. But if you want to estimate how many people were at
the "gimme some money for sending my kid to private school" rally today at the State House, you can look at the image at right.
I know; it’s pretty low-res. I didn’t have my camera, and shot this with my phone. But I think you can tell, at the very least, that the "organizers" who estimated the crowd at 4,000 were evidently a little, shall we say, overly enthused. I’ve seen a lot of crowds at the capitol, and this looks a good bit short of that figure to me.
You’d think they could have pulled more together, especially in light of reports that (to my sorrow as a Catholic), St. Joseph’s school gave kids the day off to attend. That’s what I by a parent and a grandparent associated with the school. If that’s correct, this is pretty anemic turnout.
I shot this from across the street, where I was having lunch with the governor’s chief of staff. Maybe I saw it before the crowd had fully assembled or after it had dissipated. But the governor’s man saw what I saw, and did not suggest anything of the kind.
So you’re for ‘school choice.’
What do you mean by that?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY likes “school choice,” it seems. S.C. Superintendent of Education Jim Rex is for it. Gov. Mark Sanford is for it.
Even my bishop, Robert Baker of the Diocese of Charleston, favors it, as he said in a letter
that
appeared in our bulletin at St. Peter’s Catholic Church 14 days ago.
But look just a bit closer at what “school choice” means to each of them, and you find profound differences.
Personally, I’m suspicious when any policy issue is summed up as a matter of “choice.” It often means that the people advocating the given position can’t sell it on its merits. They may be avoiding less palatable, but more descriptive, terms such as “abortion,” or “public subsidies for private schools.”
But not always.
Of course, the governor is pushing public subsidies for private schools.
Mr. Rex seems to be clothing his proposed liberalization of school attendance rules in the “choice” mantle, at least in part, in order to head off the folks on the governor’s side.
In last year’s election, he essentially said to the school privatization crowd: You want choice? I got your choice right here, in the public schools.
Then, he trotted out his proposals in a press conference the day before the usual crowd unveiled its usual private-school-subsidy plan last week.
Not that I don’t think Mr. Rex is sincere. He really does want to make it possible for parents to send their kids to the public schools of their choice. It’s an attractive idea.
But the idea has its limitations. Richland District 2 — which already has a generous intradistrict “choice” policy — can’t make enough room when every child in Fairfield County wants to come on down. How will the state pay to transport those children, when — as is too often the case — their families can’t afford a car?
The other side has the same problems. Even if we fantasize that an excellent, welcoming private school even exists in a poor, rural child’s county, and has space for him and his voucher — how’s he going to travel the 10 miles each day?
I know Mr. Rex has thought about those things, by contrast with the private-school choice advocates. We’ll see how well he addresses them.
The governor is sincere, too. He really does want to use tax money to pay people to desert public schools.
I know my bishop is sincere. He believes parents should determine what sort of education their children receive, and that it’s important to provide an option for them that teaches Christian values. I agree completely.
Where we differ is on whether it’s right to ask state taxpayers to subsidize Catholic education. I say no. We shouldn’t do that any more than we should ask the state to fund a new steeple for us.
The bishop’s letter pretty much freaked me out, because it used rhetoric of the more extreme advocates of privatization. Worse, it urged Catholics to attend a rally those folks are holding at the State House on Tuesday.
Since then, the bishop has assured me that he did not mean to back any movement that criticized or attacked public schools. And while he’s not withdrawing his support for the Catholic “choice,” you won’t see him at that rally.
“I apologize for the tone of my letter,” he said, referring to portions that repeated the “South Carolinians for Responsible Government” mantra that “most of our children are not receiving a sound education” from public schools. “I would reword it” if he had it to do over, he told me Friday. He “would like to be seen as a respectful partner in dialogue” with public educators.
He just wants people to be able to afford the Catholic option. The diocese closed a number of schools that served poor and minority communities back before he became bishop, and he’d like to reverse that trend.
He would only seek state subsidies “for the working poor and people who are economically at the poverty level.” That’s just what Mark Sanford said he wanted when he ran for governor in 2002. But when out-of-state libertarian extremists started funneling vast sums of money into the state, he embraced their far more radical agenda, which has its roots in the notion that “government schools” are essentially a bad idea.
My bishop doesn’t embrace that. Of course, I oppose even the more limited funding of Catholic schools with public money. If we Catholics want to provide education to the less fortunate — which we should do — we need to dig into our pockets and pay for that ministry ourselves.
Jesus didn’t fund his ministry with the money St. Matthew had squeezed from the public as a tax collector. He didn’t take from the world; he gave. He told us to do likewise. We Catholics are far too stingy when the collection basket comes around, and that should change. We shouldn’t force Baptists, Jews, agnostics or anyone else to make up for our failing.
Uh-oh; I’m preaching again.
Another eminent Charlestonian told me he was concerned about the bishop’s letter, and kept meaning to say something to him, but hesitated because of his reluctance as a lifelong Catholic to tell his bishop what he ought to do.
As a convert baptized at Thomas Memorial Baptist Church in Bennettsville, I was not so inhibited. I sort of went all Martin Luther on the bishop. That’s OK, he said: “You’re free to say you disagree.” Which I do. But not entirely. I’m glad we spoke.
Bottom line: When somebody says they’re for “school choice,” ask for details. The differences are huge, and of critical importance to what kind of state we’re all going to live in.
For the bishop’s letter, my letter to him, and more, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.
As a public service, I’m going to elaborate more prominently upon what I just said at the end of a response to some comments…
Some folks are unhappy with my increasing aggressiveness with people who are determined to make this blog into something that is the opposite of what I founded it for. I’m not going to let that happen, and I’m determined to convince you of that.
My whole purpose here is to provide an alternative to the hyper-partisan, bad-faith, yelling-past-each-other game that far too many people believe is political discourse. I’m certainly not here to play that game with you. You try to play it with me or anyone else here, and your comment will disappear.
If you don’t like that, go someplace else. Most of the blogosphere
is set up for just what you want to do. If you stay here, and don’t
change your habits… well, to quote Dr. Evil, "I have a whole bag of ‘Shhh!’ with
your name on it."
Note that today’s op-ed page
deals entirely with issues of central concern to the Energy Party. (Mike
was out yesterday, so I picked the content and put that page together myself. Therefore it reflects my obsessions.) It also provides an opportunity to say again what our platform is, and what is isn’t.
Someone who doesn’t think long enough about it might say the two pieces are at odds. Jim Ritchie sets forth his excellent set of initiatives for our state to do its part in promoting energy-efficient buildings, hybrid cars, and such, and Robert Samuelson says beware of politicians announcing grand plans to save the Earth from global warming.
But they actually support each other, and together sort of explain why I take the approach I do in proposing this party.
True, proposals such as "cap and trade" that politicians are likely to get behind (because they see the parade marching that way) will not stop or reverse global warming. Even if you do all the "politically unrealistic" things I propose, the trend will likely merely slow down, and surely not reverse in our lifetimes. Of course, that’s all the reason to do everything we can (and NOT just what we want to do, or think we can afford) to put the brakes on the trend. Otherwise, things get worse, and at a faster rate.
But as Sen. Ritchie makes clear, what we CAN do is grab hold of our energy destiny. What he proposes won’t completely solve the problem, but it’s a damned good start from the perspective of what state government can do. And the broad coalition he’s got behind it is extremely encouraging — not only in terms of Energy issues, but others where we’ve been stymied by partisanship and ideology.
Pragmatism is on the march. Let’s all join. Except, let’s get at the head of the parade and start a new, double-time pace. Otherwise, the battle will be over before this rapidly coalescing army gets to the field — and we all will have lost.
This blog, like its author/host, has no sense of time. Sometimes I’ll blog on something I’ve been meaning to get to for a week or so; other times we go real-time.
This is sort of one of the latter cases. As I type, Jim Rex is about to announce his first major initiative as S.C. superintendent of education. Here’s the release:
TO: Editorial page editors
FROM: Jim Foster
RE: Rex conference call this afternoon for editorial page editorsDr. Rex will hold a news conference at 10:30 this morning in the lower
lobby of the Statehouse. He will be joined by a large bipartisan group
of legislators and K-12 education leaders from across South Carolina to
announce a three-year public school choice initiative. An embargoed
news release is attached.Superintendent Rex’s proposal is the result of many conversations in
recent months, particularly in recent weeks, with K-12 administrators,
local school board members and a number of state lawmakers. The pilot
projects he proposes will be designed to answer many of the questions
and concerns he has heard during those conversations.This afternoon at 2:30, Dr. Rex will hold a special telephone
conference call for editorial page editors to discuss his proposal.
Cindi, who’s gone over there to check it out, says she’s heard from at least one source (a certain GOP senator), that this proposal is fairly extensive, and has strong backing, although she’ll be interested to see just how broad it is.
For my part, I’ve set the bar high. Based on what Cindi said she’d been told, I sent the following to Jim Foster, head flack at the department of ed.:
At our meeting this morning, Cindi said Rex had assembled an "amazing" coalition. I’m going to be really disappointed if they’re not wearing superhero tights. I’m planning art on this.
We’ll see.
I‘m having lunch at a LongHorn Steakhouse in Savannah. It smells better than our LongHorn in the Vista.
Here’s why:
When I walked in, I asked for a table in nonsmoking. The hostess dismissed my request with the finest words I’ve ever heard in a restaurant:
"There’s no smoking in Georgia."
AND SHE WASN’T KIDDING!
I am stunned. This is so fantastic. I’m just sitting here, breathing freely and deeply, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Which, if you actually THINK about it for a change, it actually IS, even though it is a departure from what I’ve experienced my whole life up to now.
Why, in the name of God and all that makes any kind of sense, did I have to wait 53 years for this? Why will I NOT be able to experience it when I go home?
I can think of no reason.
Watch closely, now — you especially, Mary: Here’s how we disagree with someone respectfully.
You’ll recall that I had nice things to say about Peggy Noonan. My attitude on that point is unchanged.
But she was 180 degrees wrong when she wrote "He’s Got Guts," in defense of Chuck Hagel. (In this, my attitude is ALSO unchanged.) She quotes at some length his speech in favor of the spineless resolution griping about the Surge, but doing nothing about it — except, of course, signal to the enemies those 21,500 Americans will be fighting that if they just kill a few more of our boys (and yes, for those of you who are sticklers, sometimes girls, but in this case we’re talking combat infantry), then we’ll probably cave, because we are SO divided about this already.
She includes in her excerpt this quote, which I had read elsewhere in forming my previous judgment:
"Sure it’s tough. Absolutely. And I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line on this. What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why are you elected? If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."
Precisely. So if you don’t want the troops going, stop them. Don’t holler, as they climb on the plane, that you really don’t think this is a good idea, but you’re not going to do anything about it.
If that’s your idea of being a stand-up guy, maybe you should be selling shoes.
Yeah, I get Peggy’s point about all the falseness and cowardice in Washington. But how that resolution is a departure from that rule is beyond me.
And no, I don’t want him to stop the troops from going. That would be disastrous. But passing a resolution saying they shouldn’t go, but taking no concrete action, is contemptible.
Nobody’s proposing a comprehensive energy plan, so I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.
I’ve had this idea percolating lately that I wanted to develop fully before tossing it out. Maybe do a column on it first, roll it out on a Sunday with lots of fanfare. But hey, the situation calls for action, not hoopla.
So here’s the idea (we’ll refine is as we go along):
Reinvent the Unparty as the Energy Party. Not the Green Party — it’s not just about the environment — but a serious energy party. Go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do:
You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right; go all-out to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
THEN, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Change the name to the Pragmatic Party then. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that?
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, 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:
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.
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?