Category Archives: Education

WashTimes picks on SC schoolgirl

More than one friend has brought to my attention this piece from Salon, taking up the cudgels for a schoolgirl here in South Carolina:

Friday February 27, 2009 06:11 EST

Criticizing Ty'Sheoma Bethea

I
thought it would come from Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh, but Malkin
is too busy planning her anti-tax tea parties while Rush gets ready for
his close-up at the Conservative Political Action Committee this weekend (which is a collection of nuts so nutty even Sarah Palin stayed away).

No, it was the conservative Washington Times that cast the first stone at Ty'Sheoma Bethea,
the Dillon, S.C., teenager who wrote to Congress seeking stimulus funds
for her shamefully dilapidated school. Obama used her statement, "We
are not quitters," as the coda of his speech Tuesday night, but now the
Moon-owned paper tells us what's wrong with Bethea, in an editorial
with the condescending headline, 'Yes, Ty'Sheoma, there is a Santa
Claus."

Obama "presented" Bethea "as a plucky girl from a
hopeless school who took it on herself to write the president and
Congress asking for much needed help," the Times began, ominously.
Wait, she's not a plucky girl from a hopeless school? The editorial
depicts her instead as a player in Obama's "mere political theater"
because the president has been using her school, J.V. Martin, as a
"political prop" since he first visited in 2005. Wow. Dastardly. I'm
getting the picture: Obama, that slick Democrat opportunist, has
repeatedly visited one of the poorest schools in South Carolina, a
state that voted for John McCain. You just know he leaves with his
pockets stuffed with cash every time he makes the trip.

It gets worse….

And you can read the rest of Joan Walsh's piece here.

You know, I long ago got cynical about these regular folks that presidents of both parties put on display
during their prime-time speeches. I'm actually capable of understanding that public policy affects real people without such smarmy concrete evidence. Such faux-populist gimmicks are the rhetorical equivalent of those insipid man-on-the-street interviews that local TV news shows do, the ones that make me want to scream, "I don't care what this person who has obviously never thought about this issue before thinks! Either tell me something I don't know, or go away!" Such things tend to strike me as manipulative, phony and insulting.

So I'm not here to imbue this little girl with some sort of oracular power or something. But come on, people — picking on a little kid who just wants to go to a decent school? This is where ideology gets you. You get so wrapped up in your political points you want to make, you forget that there's a real person there, even when she's staring you in the face.

Earlier this week, I called a guy in Latta who had rung my phone (according to caller ID) at least 10 times that day, refusing to leave a message. (As I've probably told you, ever since my department ceased to have a person to answer phones, I have to let the machine get it and get back to people when I can, if I'm to have any hope of getting the paper out each day.) But I called back on the chance that he was disabled or something, or there was a problem with my voice mail.

There was no phone problem. He just wanted me to be the latest of several people at the paper he had berated for saying J.V. Martin school was built in 1896, when PARTS of it were built much later. Some of it, I seem to recall him saying, in 1984. Does this seem like a huge distinction to you? It didn't to me, either, but it was VERY important to him. He wasn't saying it wasn't a substandard facility, mind you; he just had that one objection, and he maintained it was the height of irresponsibility on the part of the newspaper not to point out that distinction.

Anyway, the situation is what it is. J.V. Martin is a facility that stands out in a part of the state not exactly known for stellar school facilities, as you've read many times before in our paper, seen in Bud Ferillo's "Corridor of Shame," and read in Kathleen Parker's column last week. You know, that wild-eyed liberal Kathleen.

Is that Dillon County's worst educational problem? Probably not. There's the bizarre governing setup for local schools there, whereby the high school football coach, by virtue of being the only resident member of the county legislative delegation, decides who will be on the school board. The caller and I discussed that, and he thought it was worse that a certain other party — the son of the late South of The Border founder Alan Schafer — has too much influence. I don't know anything about that, but the Coach Hayes thing has always been weird and Byzantine enough for me.

South Carolina should be able to do better than J.V. Martin, and if it can't, that's an argument for getting some federal help, as much as I dislike federal involvement in school matters. All this kid did was ask for something better, and a newspaper derides her as an emblem of "irresponsibility." That's a hell of a thing.

Going after the stimulus

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

WOLF BLITZER: Should South Carolina take the money?
GRAHAM: I think that, yes, from my point of view, I — you don’t want to be crazy here. I mean, if there’s going to be money on the table that will help my state….
— CNN, Wednesday

LINDSEY Graham said that in spite of his strong opposition to the stimulus bill as passed. His aide Kevin Bishop explained the senator’s position this way: “South Carolina accepts the money, future generations of South Carolinians are responsible for paying it back. South Carolina refuses the money, future generations of South Carolinians are still responsible for paying it back.”
    Good point. And now it’s time to think about how South Carolina gets its share.
    A number of local leaders were already thinking about, and working on, that issue while debate raged in Washington. Columbia Mayor Bob Coble and University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides led a group of local leaders who came to see us about that last week. (It included Paul Livingston of Richland County Council; Neil McLean of EngenuitySC; John Lumpkin of NAI Avant; Tameika Isaac Devine of Columbia City Council; John Parks of USC Innovista; Bill Boyd of the Waterfront Steering Committee; Judith Davis of BlueCross BlueShield; Ike McLeese of the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce; and attorney Kyle Michel.)
    The group, dubbed the “Sustainability and Green Jobs Initiative,” sees the stimulus as a chance to get funding for projects they have been promoting for the advancement of the Columbia area, from Innovista to riverfront development, from streetscaping to hydrogen power research.
    The idea is to make sure these local initiatives, which the group sees as synching perfectly with such national priorities as green energy and job creation, are included in the stimulus spending.
    Mayor Coble, who had already set up a “war room” in his office (President Pastides said he was setting up a similar operation at USC, concentrating on grant-writing) to track potential local projects and likely stimulus funding streams, saw little point in waiting around for the final version of the bill, saying we already knew what “90 percent” of it would be, whatever the conference committee came up with.
    Some specifics: Mayor Coble first mentions the North Main streetscaping project, which is already under way. President Obama wants shovel-ready projects? Well, says Mayor Bob, “The shovel’s already out there” on North Main. Stimulus funding would ensure the project could be completed without interruption.
    He said other city efforts that could be eligible for stimulus funds included fighting homelessness, extending broadband access to areas that don’t have it, hiring more police officers and helping them buy homes in the neighborhoods they serve.
    But the biggest potential seems to lie in the areas where the city and the university are trying to put our community on the cutting edge of new energy sources and green technology. With the city about to host the 2009 National Hydrogen Association Conference and Hydrogen Expo, Columbia couldn’t be in a better position to attract stimulus resources related to that priority.
    The group was asked to what extent Gov. Mark Sanford’s opposition to stimulus funds flowing to our state created an obstacle to their efforts. “There’s no use arguing with the governor,” the mayor said. But the local group’s efforts will be focused on being ready when an opportunity for funding does come — whether via Rep. James Clyburn’s legislative end-run, or through federal agencies, or by whatever means.
President Pastides says, “The governor has deeply held beliefs and philosophies and I respect him not only for having them,” but for being straight about it and not just telling people what they want to hear. At the same time, with the university looking at cutting 300 jobs and holding open almost every vacancy, “there are almost no lifelines for me to turn to” to sustain the university’s missions. An opportunity such as the stimulus must be seized. He sees opportunities in energy, basic science and biomedical research.
    As big as the stakes are for the Midlands regarding the stimulus itself, there are larger implications.
    A successful local effort within the stimulus context could be just the beginning of a highly rewarding partnership with Washington, suggested attorney Kyle Michel, who handles governmental relations for EngenuitySC. He noted that many provisions in the stimulus are the thin end of the wedge on broader Obama goals. This is particularly true of the effort toward “transitioning us away from… getting our energy from the people who are shooting at us,” which he describes as the administration’s highest goal. “What are we going to do over the next four years to play our part in that goal of the Obama administration? Because this 43 or 49 billion is just the start.”
    He also said what should be obvious by now: “If we don’t draw that money down… it doesn’t go back to the taxpayer. It goes to other states.”
    President Pastides said, “This is almost like someone has announced a race with a really big prize at the end,” and you don’t win the prize just for entering; you have to compete. That appeals to him, and he’s eager for the university and the community to show what they can do.
    This group is focused less on the ideological battle in which our governor is engaged, and more on the practical benefits for this part of South Carolina. It’s good to know that someone is.

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

Troubles in the private college sector

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You know about all the budget cuts that have hit USC and other state institutions, but I was just talking to Caroline Whitson, president of Columbia College, and trying to operation a private college is no bed of roses these days, either. She had called me earlier in the day, and I got her back on her cell while she was walking the dog…

Most of the college's funds come from tuition (I had guessed it was from gifts, but I guessed wrong), and that's not exactly the most dependable funding stream at the moment. With so many families hurting, and student loans harder than ever to get, she said she's "not sure what enrollment is going to look like in the fall." So the college is looking at all sorts of contingencies.

As for gifts, well… whether your name is Pastides or Whitson, you tend to hear from a lot of people that their portfolios are down, and this just isn't the best time…

Me, I find it hard to imagine being in that situation, because I've never had a flippin' portfolio.

Real life anecdote follows: As I was getting off the phone with Caroline, my wife called on my cell to remind me that she'll be home late, so I might want to stop at the grocery on my way home if I want to eat. And I should remember that there is $15 in the checking account until I get paid, so don't go over that. Of course, as I recall she told me the day after I got paid LAST time — after she'd paid the bills — that there was only $11 in the account. I guess the additional $4 is all that's left from her pay after we paid some MORE bills.

You know how they say you should always have two months salary in an accessible account in case you lose your job? That always makes me laugh maniacally, because the only time I ever have two WEEKS pay is for about five seconds after I get paid every two weeks (and of course I never have two weeks gross, just net). And no, I'm not complaining. I know I'm well off. All I have to do is look around me — at work, in the community, among friends and family — to see how well off we are. But how other people build up portfolios, I don't know. Somehow, the world always knows EXACTLY how much is in my paycheck, and all the bills add up to that amount — give or take $15. I don't know how they coordinate it. Actually, I don't think they do. You know what I really think it is?
God doesn't want me to have money — he knows me too well, and doesn't trust me with it or something. I'm not being facetious. I'll explain my theological view on that another time.

Oh, and when they call from our alma mater — Memphis State, which has changed its name — seeking contributions, I do not laugh maniacally, but only because I'm polite.

If you want to be a hero, then just follow me…

Midlands leaders band together to take advantage of stimulus

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This afternoon we were visited by a rather distinguished and diverse group of business, academic and political leaders who have been putting their heads together to see how our various interlocking existing community ecodevo initiatives — Innovista, the 3 rivers greenway, hydrogen and fuel cell efforts, and so forth — can position our community to take advantage of the stimulus funds once they start flowing to achieve some of our existing goals.

As Lee Bussell said when he asked for the meeting:

With the first mention of the stimulus bill we pulled together a working group of about 25 people representing business leaders, USC, the city, counties, Midlands Tech, Central Midlands, The Chamber, Good to Great Foundation, SCRA, Columbia USC Fuel Cell Collaborative and a number of others .
Our purpose was not just to make sure Columbia participated in the creation of jobs through this special program. We identified that for the last 5 years we have been working toward building a sustainable and green community with the creation of an economy based on alternative energy solutions. Sustainability and green jobs have become a central part of our community development strategy.
I am asking on behalf of all of these groups that you consider pulling together a group at the State that we could come meet with next week. We think it’s critical that you understand what we are attempting to accomplish. It could truly enable our regions to find opportunity to not only create jobs, but also to create an everlasting impact on the sustainability of our community and a whole new economic approach.

Lee didn't actually make today's meeting (he's out of the country, I understand) but the following folks did come (starting with left to right in the photo above, from my phone):

Paul Livingston of Richland County Council
Neil McLean of EngenuitySC
John Lumpkin of NAI Avant
Columbia Mayor Bob Coble
Tameika Isaac Devine, Cola city council
USC President Harris Pastides
John Parks, USC Innovista
Bill Boyd, Waterfront Steering Committee
Judith M. Davis of BlueCross BlueShield
Jim Gambrell, city of Columbia
Ike McLeese, Cola Chamber of Commerce
Kyle Michel, Kyle Michel law firm

… and several other folks who I know I must be forgetting as I try to reconstruct who was sitting around the table (or whose names I missed).

Basically these folks represent a lot of different efforts that will be combined and coordinated as the situation warrants to seek funding for things they were going to do anyway, with the goal of long-term economic transformation for the community. As Harris Pastides said, the test of success will be whether, after the construction workers are gone, we still have jobs here that put us on the cutting edge of the nation's move toward a greener economy and greater energy independence.

Toward that end — and with Congress not yet decided toward the final shape of the stimulus — Mayor Bob has set up a War Room in his office at City Hall. Pres. Pastides says he'll be doing the same at USC. The watchwords, says Coble, will be nimbleness, persistence and resources as opportunities are seen to match local projects with stimulus funding streams.

The group was very optimistic that the sorts of things they're working on here in the Midlands are a good match, and at a good point in the pipeline, for matching up with priorities they're seeing in the stimulus, and also with longer-term priorities of the Obama administration.

That's what I recall off the top of my head; I haven't gone back through the recording I made. (Sorry, no video; I took out my camera last night for a family birthday party, and forgot to put it back in my briefcase.) I expect some of the news folks who were there will have something in the paper that will flesh this out a little. I just wanted to go ahead and get my contact report filed…

(And no, in case you're wondering, neither the governor nor any representative of his was there. As Coble said, our governor is seen as an obstacle in this process; whether that obstacle will be surmountable or not remains to be seen, but the folks in the room seemed determined to try…)

Moby Dick is a squitchy good read (Surprise!)

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Doug Ross mentioning The Canterbury Tales back on this post — which I never read (somehow, I escaped its being required of me in school) — reminds me of something I'm reading at the moment and sort of enjoying, much to my surprise:

Moby Dick.

For years — for decades in fact; almost four of them — I refused to read Moby Dick on principle. You see, we spent like six weeks on it in my honors English class in the 11th grade at Robinson High School in Tampa, and I never did read it, at least not past "Call me Ishmael." And yet I got an A-plus on the six weeks test on the book. How? First, because it was an essay test — which always gave me a leg up in school. Multiple choice can be such a brutally effective means of telling whether you actually know the material. With an essay, you can be careful to stick to what you know you know, and steer clear of your blank spots. And some, but not all, teachers are dazzled by a nicely worded essay. Although not all teachers — I had one prof in college who wrote on one of my better B.S. efforts something like, "Nicely written; I enjoyed it. But obviously you are not familiar with the material." Enough teachers were snowed for me to get by, though. And I confess this played a not inconsiderable part in my decision to write for a living.

Also — and this is the bigger point — how on Earth could I possibly not be familiar with all the themes, characters and plot after six weeks of listening to people talk and talk and talk about it in class, even if I was only half-listening, which was probably the case?

Anyway, I took such perverse pride in that grade — one of my most dramatic coups of skating without having done the work in my educational career — that I avoided reading the book subsequently because I didn't want to spoil the perfection of my slacker record. I had read — and enjoyed — other books years after I was supposed to have read them in school. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance. But I kept myself pure on Melville.

But I picked up a copy recently, tempted by the fact that I'm such a huge fan of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring tales and thinking I might actually enjoy this one, although not having high expectations.

And you know what? While I doubt it will ever be my favorite novel, I've been really surprised by how accessible it is. I mean, I always had the impression (based on the way the people who actually read it in school groaned about the experience) that it was just something that no one in our era could possibly relate to, that it was way too 19th century for that (and not in a fun way, like Mark Twain). But on the contrary, I'm struck by how modern its tone and style is in parts. Also, it's very bite-sized — the chapters are no longer than a typical newspaper column, and each one a well-crafted nugget all by its lonesome. So you can read a chapter, think "That wasn't so bad," then read another, and really feel like you're making progress without a lot of time invested all at once. (Try that with Dostoevsky, someone I actually did read and enjoy when I was supposed to in college, but not a guy you'd describe as "accessible" in the sense that I mean here.)

Far from being some boring old guy telling us stuff in boring old language, Ishmael as a narrator is actually sort of hiply ironic. He has a detachment and amusement toward his heavy subject material that is very late-20th century. And sometimes, the language itself goes along with the tone. For instance, in this passage very early in the book, describing a painting he puzzled over at The Spouter Inn:

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.–It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.–It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.–It's a blasted heath.–It's a Hyperborean winter scene.–It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Who'd have thought Melville could have written such a line as "A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted?" That is a very New Journalism use of language; one could imagine Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson being responsible for it. Or, to speak in fiction terms, it can be almost as modern-feeling as Nick Hornby or Roddy Doyle. It strikes me that way, anyway. Way more modern-seeming than much-later writers such as James Joyce or Fitzgerald or even Hemingway (who sounded WAY modern in the 20s, I suppose, but not so much later on).

As I read on, Ishmael is not what I'd call a likable character — he's too much of a wise guy for that, tossing out ironic comments about everyone and everything. But he's certainly accessible.

And that surprised me.

How many ‘Carnegie units’ do kids need?

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Somehow, in all the discussions I've engaged in over the years, I don't recall running across the "Carnegie unit," until I read the piece we had on our page today from a 20-year teacher, who said in part:

I am in my 20th year of teaching, and I can tell you that our educational system is not working the way it should, not in South Carolina, not in the nation. We have tried several types of “fixes” that have not worked. We still have an abysmal drop-out rate.
At fault is the foundation of our system, the Carnegie unit, which was developed in 1906 by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation to “standardize higher education.” To earn a Carnegie unit, the student must be in a classroom for 120 hours. S.C. students must earn 24 of these to graduate from high school….

This teacher is saying, based on her experience, something that I have thought (since my own school days) based on my own intuition: That we place too much emphasis on TIME spent in the classroom, with the widespread assumption that more time is better.

For me, the subject usually comes up in connection with proposals for year-round school, or when we see the school year extended to make sure kids get the holy 180 days in the classroom (which apparently applies to home-schoolers and private schools as well as public). This brings out memories of being bored to death in school as a kid. If my attention hadn't wandered — to reading on past where the class was in the book, or passing notes or pulling pranks or otherwise misbehaving — I would have gone totally nuts. Of course, some of you would say I DID go totally nuts, but that's a matter of opinion. I mean, if you had told me the first day I walked into a class that I would have to spend 120 hours there, the temptation to jump out the window would have been strong.

Whenever I invoke that, and say "Let kids have their summers," someone will tell me that I was not typical, that most kids struggle to retain what they learned the year before and need excessive review, etc. And I grumble and shut up. I know that a lot of things about school (testing, for instance) came easier to me than other kids, and that going on about how bored I often was (when behaving) sounds like bragging. (I say "when behaving" because I don't want to make you think I disliked school; I was frequently able to find it entertaining.)

So it was interesting to see this teacher playing to my own particular prejudice on the subject. I don't know whether she was right, and I'm not terribly impressed that when she asks kids themselves whether they want to go at their own pace — of course they answer in the affirmative; who wouldn't when asked whether they want school personally tailored to them? And while SHE believes she'd have no trouble teaching 20 kids at 20 different levels, I wonder how achievable that is for most teachers (I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it; but then I doubt I could teach).

But I found the piece interesting.

In praise of good ideas, starting with school district consolidation

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You know, I sort of damned the good news about the growing DHEC consensus with unfairly faint praise earlier today. (Or darned it, at the very least.)

I need to start looking more at the bright side. I don't spend enough time looking at things that way these days. We're all so overwhelmed by the economic situation — and if you are in the newspaper business, you are steeped in it (nothing is more sensitive to a slowing economy than an already-troubled industry that is built on advertising revenues). It's very easy to dwell on such facts as this one that has stuck in my head since last week: That not only did the U.S. economy lose 2.5 million jobs in 2008, the worst since 1945, but 524,000 of those jobs lost were in December alone. To do the math for you, if the whole year had been as bad as the last month, the total would have been over 6.29 million. And there's no particular reason to think January won't be worse than December.

I'm not a big Paul Krugman fan, but stats like that make me worry that he was right in his column, which we ran on Sunday, saying that the Barack Obama stimulus plan, overwhelming huge as it is, won't be nearly big enough.

And these are not cheery thoughts. Nor is it cheery to reflect, as I did in my Sunday column, about how resistant policy makers in South Carolina are to policies that make sense — even the more obvious policies, such as increasing the cigarette tax to the national average, or restructuring government to increase accountability, or comprehensive tax reform.

That's what we do in this business. We harp. Year in, year out. We can be tiresome. We can, as I suggested Sunday, get tired of it ourselves. But little victories such as this emerging consensus on DHEC, or the signs that we saw last year that even some of the stauncher opponents of restructuring in the Black Caucus are coming around on the issue (which is a real sea change) are worth celebrating, and encouraging — like putting extra oxygen on an ember.

So it is that I applaud Cindi today for, instead of doing her usual thing of mocking the stupider ideas among the prefiled bills, giving a boost to the better ideas. There were some good ones on her list.

In fact, I was inspired to do a little followup on one of them:

H.3102 by Reps. Ted Pitts and Joan Brady would shut off state funds to
school districts with fewer than 10,000 students, in an attempt to make
inefficient little districts merge.

Now that's the beginning of a good idea. Like most obviously good ideas, it isn't new. We've been pushing for school district consolidation as long as we've been pushing restructuring and comprehensive tax reform, etc., and with even less success. Everybody says they're for it in the abstract; no one lifts a finger to make it happen. Even Mark Sanford gives lip service to it (but won't work to make it happen, preferring to waste his energy on ideological dead-ends such as vouchers).

So it's encouraging that Ted Pitts and Joan Brady (and Bill Wylie and Dan Hamilton) want to at least set a starting place — a numerical threshold, a line that the state can draw and say, "We won't waste precious resources paying to run districts smaller than this."

Mind you, I'm not sure it's the RIGHT threshold. I've always thought that the most logical goal should get us down from the 85 districts we have now to about one per county — which would be 46. The 10,000 student threshold overshoots that goal, as I discovered today. I asked Jim Foster over at the state department of ed to give me a list of the sizes of districts. The latest list that he had handy that had districts ranked was this spreadsheet
(see the "TABLE 1-N" tab), which showed that as of 2006, only 18 districts in the state had more than 10,000 pupils. One of those — Kershaw County — has since risen over the magic mark, so that makes it 19.

Maybe we should have only 19 districts in the state, although I worry that a district that had to aggregate multiple counties to be big enough might be a little unwieldy.

But hey, it's a starting point for discussion on an actual reform that would help us eliminate ACTUAL waste in our education system, and provide more professional direction to some of our most troubled schools (which tend to be in those rural districts that just aren't big enough to BE districts to start with).

So way to go, Ted and Joan (and Bill and Dan).

I was particularly struck that Ted was willing to put forth an idea that would have an impact in his own county (although perhaps not, I suspected, in his actual district). That's the standard reason why district consolidation gets nowhere — lawmakers balk at messing with their home folks districts, because voters tend to be about this the way they are about other things; a reform is great until if affects them.

I suspected, and Jim's spreadsheet confirmed, that while Lexington 1 and District 5 were big enough to retain state funding under this proposal, Lexington 3 and 4 were not. More than that, Lexington 2 falls below the threshold, and at least part of Ted's district is in Lexington 2. (Unless I'm very mistaken. Ted is MY House member, and my children all attended Lexington 2 schools.) As for Joan Brady — I think her district would be unaffected, as Richland 1 and 2 would be untouched (even though they shouldn't be — they should be merged). But I still applaud her involvement.

Anyway, way to get the ball rolling on this, folks. Let's keep talking about this one.

Editorial on Gamecock ‘gift’

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Earlier this week we had an editorial about the USC athletics department’s recent "contribution" of $15 million to the university. An excerpt:

A ‘gift’ that isn’t
a gift, and shouldn’t
be seen as such
PERHAPS YOU shouldn’t look a gift chicken in the beak, but there was something more than a little off-putting about all the self-congratulation and awe that accompanied the USC athletics department’s recent “contribution” of $15 million to the university to help pay for … academics.
This clearly is a large amount of money that has the potential to do a great deal of good at a school that is struggling under state budget cuts and the larger economic crisis. Just as clearly, such a gift is extraordinary and such a gesture, in the words of one USC trustee, “historic and symbolic.”
But there shouldn’t be anything extraordinary — certainly not “historic” — about university money being used to further the core mission of the university. In fact, it should be expected — the sort of thing that deserves commentary only in its absence. As difficult a concept as this seems to be, money generated by the athletics department, or any other part of a university, belongs to the university….

Any thoughts on that?

I bring it up because when we ran the piece, I had expected to hear a good bit of reaction both pro and con, and things have been fairly quiet. So I thought I'd bring it up here, to see what y'all thought about it.

Blogger runs for school board

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

Happy New
Year!

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

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

In Richland District Two, we need to

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

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

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

Thank
you!

Best
Regards,

Michael Rodgers,
PhD

www.michaelrodgers.org

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

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

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

30 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inez Tenenbaum for Obama’s Cabinet?

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

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

Take another civics quiz — please

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

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

You answered 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97 %

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An exchange about macroeconomics

13 Replies

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

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

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

Kathryn
—
Kathryn Braun Fenner
Attorney at Law

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

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

Dick Riley makes TIME’s Cabinet Top 10

1 Reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hefnersteve

Rex’s ‘4-day-school-week’ idea

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

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

TO: News media

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

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

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

Several things to consider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

Palling around with terrorists in S.C.

27 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

Gosh, where do we start?

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

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

Dohrnayers

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

66 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spartanburg on ‘belittling progress’ in SC schools

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

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

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

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

bradwarthen.com

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