Category Archives: Education

What is the useful role of CHE?

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Waltersgarrison

As foreshadowed in a previous post, we met this afternoon with Garrison Walters, the new (new to us, anyway) head of the state Commission on Higher Education.

Once upon a time, that post was filled by Fred Sheheen — Vincent’s Daddy, for those keeping up with political genealogy — who had an active, aggressive notion of the role the CHE should play in marshaling this poor state’s limited higher education resources to greatest effect. The powers that be, such as those who revere the prerogatives of the godlike boards of trustees of the respective institutions, did not like his style. They moved not only to get rid of him, but to restructure the CHE to make it kinder, gentler and less likely to say "nay" to anything they wished to do — or to have any authority even if it did say so.

Since then, the organization has been a lot more studious and polite — content with a "coordinating" rather than "governing" role. Mr. Walters is aware that our board has long favored a Board of Regents that would treat our collection of public, post-secondary institutions as a system rather than islands. He maintains, as do many who cast doubt on our restructuring fervor (say, the Senate on doing away with the "long ballot," or defenders of the council-manager system in Columbia), that some states with such boards do well, and others do not, while some states without overall governance do fine (he cites Michigan, Illinois and Texas).

My position, as always, is that given a choice between a structure intended to facilitate efficiency and accountability on the one hand, and a structure that one can succeed in those regards in spite of, I prefer the former.

As previously noted, of course, we temporarily have a condition in which our three research institutions, motivated in part by such inducements as the endowed chairs, are pulling at their oars as though they understand that we’re all in the same boat. Mr. Walters made note of that. Our position is to applaud our current state, but to worry about what happens when the current individuals in leadership move on, as Andrew Sorensen is about to do. Below that level cooperation and coordination is less evident, although there are encouraging exceptions to that trend.

Anyway, Mr. Walters held out hope that once a study committee finishes its work in September, we might see a new focus and purpose toward focusing our higher ed efforts. Let’s hope he’s right. In the meantime, I provide a video clip in which I ask our guest what he thinks it will take for South Carolina to get where it needs to go, and what CHE’s role is in that…

South Carolina just got a little smarter

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Morad

This morning I had the honor of meeting Martin Morad, who plans "to develop the world’s first pacemaker made from living tissue," and to do it right here in South Carolina. He’s the latest extraordinary individual that the endowed chairs program has brought here. (That’s him with Larry Wilson and Harris Pastides above. I think those are Ray Greenberg’s arms folded at left; I don’t know the lady in the background.)

There are a lot of things I could say about this guy, and I hope to come back here and say them later (right now, I’m stealing time from other things that need doing today in order to write this — as usual). For now, read the story that was on today’s front page.

I’ll just mention one thing that may seem small to you, but which marks a huge step in my mind…

If there is one thing that holds South Carolina back economically, politically, socially and in every other way more than anything else, it’s fragmentation. Our government is completely dysfunctional thanks to the fragmentation of authority and accountability in the executive branch. On the local level, you see fractals reflecting the same pattern — Columbia as an economic entity can’t get its act together because it’s split into about a dozen municipalities, two counties, seven school districts, various special purpose districts, etc. Even when you distill it down to the tiny political entity that is technically Columbia, political power is fragmented across a seven-member council with no one, elected individual in a position to be responsible for the big picture.

In the realm of higher education, fragmentation has taken us into some amazingly stupid realms in our recent history. First, there is the fact that each of our colleges and semi-colleges is a political entity unto itself, answerable to no one but each institution’s respective board of trustees, each member of which is elected by the 170 members of the General Assembly. This has led to such things as the battle over supercomputers in the late 80s, right after I came back to SC to work at this newspaper — if USC was going to get a supercomputer, then the political "logic" of this state was what Clemson had to have one, too.

We have the charade of a coordinating body — the Commission on Higher Education — which is, by legislative decree, toothless. (Coincidentally, the new head of the CHE is coming to meet the editorial board this afternoon, which puts this even more immediately in mind.) But there is nothing like, say, a board of regents with real power to assign missions, coordinate and focus resources and avoid duplication.

In the last few years, we have been fortunate in that the three presidents of our research institutions — Andrew Sorensen, Ray Greenberg and James Barker — have formed an alliance to work together on a variety of fronts to accomplish some of the things that a unified, rational system of public higher education was accomplished. One of the greatest factors encouraging this relationship to flourish — giving it an undeniable economic impetus — is the endowed chairs program.

Anyway, here’s the thing about Dr. Morad that is in its way as remarkable for South Carolina as, say, developing a living pacemaker: He is the first faculty member in the history of the state to be simultaneously hired by all three research universities at once. (Why? Because it took all three institutions to come up with the talent he needs to make his project happen — which suggests that maybe we should start referring to the three, and governing them, as one institution; put them together, and you’ve got something impressive.) Therefore he embodies the combination of our resources to achieve great things that our petty divisions have kept us from accomplishing in the past. He is the New South Carolinian, the Adam in our new-tech Garden of Eden.

I’ll stop with the metaphors now. Suffice it to say, his arrival in this, his new home, is a big deal for South Carolina.

Bud testifies about the constitutional amendment

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Just so you know Bud Ferillo thinks about more than spending Belinda Gergel’s money, here’s his testimony to the Senate subcommittee considering whether to amend the S.C. constitution to read that the state "will provide a high quality education, allowing each student to reach his highest potential."

Bud, as you may or may not know, is the guy who made the film, "Corridor of Shame:"

Presentation of Bud Ferillo
Senate Subcommittee
On S.1136
March 13, 2008
9:00 AM
          It is a privilege for me to address the subcommittee this morning, something I have never done before.
          While I served this state, in the 1970’s and 80’s as Chief of staff to House Speakers Rex Carter and Ramon Schwartz and as Deputy Lieutenant Governor under Lt. Gov. Mike Daniel, I come today as a private citizen still in awe of these halls and full of respect for those of you in both parties who serve our state today.
          The Constitution of the State of South Carolina which the legislation before you would amend was adopted in one of the most difficult periods of our state’s history by some of our most unenlightened elected officials. It was the era of Jim Crow and the long shadow of slavery has given way to legalized racial segregation, a cruel, one sided system of rights and privileges for the few over the many. It was not until 1911 that South Carolina attained a majority white population and so the constitution adopted in 1895 was not a declaration of human rights. In fact, it sought to enshrine the benefits of government only to those with political and economic power.
          Our racially segregated public schools remained separate and unequal for another two generations because that was state policy. Even with the Brown decision in 1954, rising from the school desegregation case of Briggs vs. Elliott in Clarendon County, it was not until Governor Hollings declared in 1963 as he left office that “South Carolina had run out of courts” and the state negotiated the admission of Harvey Garnett into Clemson University, followed a year later by the integration of USC and our public school system.
          This difficult history is painful to recall and painful to hear but it explains why we have attained no little progress in securing quality public education for all the children of the state. To be honest, we have not been about the business of providing quarterly education to all the children of South Carolina for very long.
          Even today, sadly, the legal position of our state in the Abbeville vs. State of South Carolina school funding case, still places South Carolina on the wrong side of history. This state continues to claim it has no obligation to provide even a “minimally adequate” education for our children.
          I have come to you today as a witness to the failure of our state to achieve either minimally adequate education or the opportunity for our children to achieve an excellent education which would equip them to contend in a world changing before their eyes at warp speed.
          My plea today is a simple one: I urge the General Assembly to put the issue of high quality public education to the people of this state to decide.
          Our sister states of Virginia and Florida have shown the way by amending their constitutions to require their states to provide high quality education to their children.
          A state’s constitution is its highest standard of governance; it is the document that enshrines our noblest aspirations; it is the final repository of who we are and what we care about as a people. While we were born into an unjust society in South Carolina; we do not have to grow old in it.
          I respectfully urge this subcommittee to favorably report S.1136 so that it might begin its rigorous journey through the legislative process and be given to the people of this state to determine in the general election of 2010. The amendment will serve a useful purpose in setting the highest standards of educational attainment against which future legislative actions and funding can be judged.
          My friend and ally John Rainey, who will address you shortly, and others across this state in a coalition too broad and lengthy to name will soon launch a petition campaign that will allow South Carolinians to participate directly in the legislative process.
          We will soon unveil the web site www.goodbyeminimallyadequate.com where South Carolinians may sign a petition in support of this constitutional amendment. It is our ambitious but accepted challenge to present the signatures of 1,000,000 South Carolinians in support of S.1136 to the General Assembly during the opening day of the 2009 General Assembly.
          We cannot miss this opportunity to involve the people of our state in this process which will, to a large extent tell, us everything about what kind of state we have and what kind of future we will pass on to those who follow.

I’m not entirely sure what practical effect Bud and other advocates believe this wording change will have. I mean, even based on the "minimally adequate" interpretation, all that a court case that started in about 10,000 B.C. has accomplished was a ruling saying South Carolina should do better at early-childhood education, to which the Legislature responded by nodding vigorously, expanding a pilot program, then forgetting about it.

Such a wording change might make a lot of folks feel better, but the fact is that if South Carolina wants to pull up its rural areas to the educational level of the suburbs — which it must do if we’re ever to begin to catch up to the rest of the country — it will do so, whether the constitution mentions education at all or not.

David Shi, Furman president

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Shidavid

Today we had a visit from David Shi, president of Furman University. He also spoke to the Columbia Rotary, and his topic was the same, so if you were there you heard what Mike, Warren and I heard this morning.

He was here to stress Furman’s focus on public policy-related initiatives across the state, which he said was unique (at least, to this extent) among private colleges in South Carolina, and to a certain extent nationally. He knows of no private, liberal arts college anywhere else with the statewide focus that Furman has. Among the programs to which he referred:

  • The Riley Institute, named for former Gov. and Education Sec. Dick Riley, a Furman alumnus. You can read about it here. One program offered under the aegis of the Institute is the Diversity Leadership Academies across the state.
  • The David Wilkins Award, named for the ex-Speaker and current ambassador to Canada, which is awarded annually for bipartisan statesmanship. John Drummond, Bobby Harrell (Wilkins’ successor) and Hugh Leatherman have all received it.
  • The Rushing Center for Advanced Technology, which offers tailored training programs for businesses.
  • Being a signator of The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. One cool thing related to this — a model "green" home being built on the campus for an upcoming Southern Living cover, which after that will become office and meeting space for the university’s overall green initiatives.

There was more, but you get the gist. And why go to so much trouble to engender public leadership? One reason he offered, which I thought a masterpiece of academic understatement, was because Furman is in South Carolina, which is "not really known for prolonged, high-quality public leadership."

‘Choice’ advocate realizes markets aren’t enough

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There was a rather extraordinary piece on the WSJ Web site yesterday that I meant to call to your attention, but the piece was so long I couldn’t find a chunk of time long enough to finish reading it myself. Now I have, and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a link. I hope it works for you; I’m never sure since I subscribe to the Journal, and I can never tell what I have access to as a subscriber and what’s free.

The piece, written by an advocate of private-school vouchers, is a point-by-point explanation what’s wrong with the idea that if we just provide market-based options, our education problems will be solved. What really struck me about it was the extent to which it supports pretty much every point we’ve tried to make as to why vouchers and tuition tax credits are a bad fit for South Carolina.

  • For "choice," in the sense of vouchers and tax credits, to work at all, there have to be real choices — there has to be someplace for kids and parent to spend those incentives. As we’ve said so many times, it makes zero sense to apply a system designed for dense northern cities with an existing, parallel Catholic school system to South Carolina, where the usual problem is in poor, rural areas where there are no viable private alternatives, and where the population is insufficiently dense for such alternatives to arise as an economic response to vouchers or tax credits. As this writer says (about the Catholic schools that are themselves going away, in spite of the availability of vouchers), "where would the city’s disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?" The question has exponentially greater force in the Corridor of Shame.
  • The existence of voucher-backed private competition does NOT cause the public schools to get better. This would seem obvious to most people, who understand that if external pressure were all that was needed, the Accountability Act would have solved all our problems. Ask a teacher whether he or she feels pressure to perform. They’ll probably answer that pressure is about all they feel from the world outside the classroom. As the author says, "sadly — and this is a second development that reformers must face up
    to — the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is
    making public schools better."
  • The only thing that will improve the public schools is — drumroll here — improving the public schools (which, in the absence of the kind of alternative educational infrastructure northern cities once had, are the only schools most kids will ever have the opportunity to go to, with or without vouchers and tax credits).

Mr. Stern holds up Massachusetts as an example of what works:

Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state’s average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.

Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state’s board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Ms. Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students’ academic achievement."

Mr. Stern hasn’t abandoned his faith, in spite of the evidence: "Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools." And he remains one of those ideologues who considers "choice" advocates and school "reformers" to be the same set of people. (We see that in South Carolina all too often, in which people who simply don’t buy into the idea of public education decry others for standing in the way of "reform.") But within his own definitions, he asserts that "we should re-examine the direction of school reform."

And I will say yet again, the proper direction is clear. We should implement the kinds of reforms that our editorial board has pushed for years, starting with curriculum standards (which the EAA is meant to address) to such innovations as merit pay for teachers, principals empowered to hire and fire without interference, and consolidation of districts to get money out of administration and into the classroom.

Unfortunately, every effort to implement ANY kind of educational reform — and "reform," when I use it, means fixing schools, not abandoning them — is quickly suffocated by "choice" advocates in our Legislature, who tie their amendments around the neck of any education bill that tries to get through the General Assembly. This, of course, has the the effect on education reform of tying an anvil around the neck of a swimmer, causing all sides to spend all available political energy arguing about their digressions. So we get nowhere.

Another county heard from on endowed chairs

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Tenenbaumsamuel

Samuel Tenenbaum (pictured above, back when he was running Columbia’s Katrina relief effort) hipped me to this editorial from over in Anderson this morning. An excerpt:

    We’re puzzled by Gov. Mark Sanford’s estimation of the effectiveness of endowed chairs for research, especially considering his usually forward-thinking positions on technology and economic development.
    Last week, Mr. Sanford encouraged House lawmakers to reconsider a proposal that removes the cap on lottery proceeds for the Centers of Economic Excellence program…..
    Before the lottery became official in South Carolina, we questioned whether endowed chairs were the best use of funds. But it’s clear that transforming our state into one that is in the forefront of research into health care, automotives and other economic development opportunities could not have gotten this far without the financial boost from lottery proceeds.
    For once, South Carolina is thinking not just about what next year might bring but what could develop in five years or 10 years or even 20 years in the future as a result of research efforts right here at home.

Frankly, I’m puzzled as to  why the Anderson paper is puzzled. Maybe it’s because it labors under the mistaken impression that Mr. Sanford "usually" manifests "forward-thinking positions on technology and economic development." Where they got that, I don’t know. If he’s done that, I must have been looking somewhere else at the time. His pattern ranges from neutral to hostile when it comes to ecodevo investments. If you’ll recall, his first big move in that arena came in his first month in office, when he put the brakes on Clemson’s I-CAR program. Soon after being hit by a tsunami of outrage from Upstate leaders, he let the project go ahead. Here’s what the chair of our endowed chairs board had to say Sunday about what that project has produced:

For instance, the endowed chairs program is a central component of the Clemson International Center for Automotive Research. The recruiting of three world-renowned experts in automotive engineering has already attracted major investment from companies such as BMW, Timken, Sun Microsystems and Michelin, and — all told more than $220 million in private investment and 500 jobs in the Upstate with an average salary of $75,000.

Also, here’s what BMW had to say recently about that partnership.

Again, as I said in my column Sunday, our governor doesn’t believe, deep down, in public investment in building our economy, whether we’re talking K-12 public schools or endowed chairs. He believes all that is needed for a robust economy is the right "soil conditions," which to him largely means reduced income taxes.

Finally, why did Samuel,  the head of the Energy Party’s think tank, bring this to my attention? Because Samuel is the father of endowed chairs. He came up with the idea of spending lottery funds this way, he fought to convince Gov. Jim Hodges to go along with it, and has fought ever since against short-sighted efforts in the Legislature to kill or curtail the program and spend the money on something more immediately politically appealing. Samuel also served on the endowed chairs board from its inception until Mark Sanford replaced him last year.

But while he may be a cheerleader without portfolio, he cheers just as loudly as ever, and for good reason. The endowed chairs program, his baby, offers a lot to cheer about — and will continue to do so, if it survives the likes of Mark Sanford.

Sanford fails to derail progress — this time

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LATE WEDNESDAY, I thought I had come up with an excuse to say something encouraging about Gov. Mark Sanford.
    Such opportunities come so seldom that I didn’t want this idea to get away from me. I sent a note to my colleagues to enlist their help in remembering: “Should we do some kind of attaboy on the governor using his bully pulpit for this good cause (as opposed to some of the others he is wont to push)?” I was referring to his efforts to jawbone the Legislature into meaningful reform of our DUI law.
    Moments later, I read the governor’s guest column on our op-ed page about a flat tax, which was his latest attempt to slip through an income tax cut, which at times seems to be the only thing he cares about doing as governor. This chased thoughts of praise from my mind.
    For the gazillionth time, he cited Tom Friedman in a way that would likely mortify the columnist and author. His “argument,” if you want to call it that: Since The World Is Flat, folks on the other side of the world are going to get ahead of us if we take a couple of hours to pull together our receipts and file a tax return. Really. “Rooting around shoeboxes of receipts” once a year was going to do us in. (And never mind the fact that most paperwork is done on the federal return, with the state return piggybacking on that.)
    Then, he argued that his plan for cutting the income tax (which was his point, not avoiding the onerous filing) was necessary to offset a proposed cigarette tax increase. The alternative would be “to grow government,” which is how he describes using revenue to get a three-to-one federal match to provide health care for some of our uninsured citizens.
    Here in the real world, folks want to raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax to price the coffin nails beyond the means of teenagers. Everybody who has in any way participated in conversations at the State House about the issue over the last several years knows this. Yet the governor of our state, who seems only to have conversations with himself, can ask this about raising that tax: “(W)hat for, more government or a lower-tax option?” In his narrowly limited version of reality, those are the only considerations.
    But enough about that essay from an alternative dimension. What I read on the front page the next morning drove it from my mind: “Sanford: ‘Endowed chairs’ a failure.” It was about his latest attack on one of the few really smart, strategic moves this state has made in the past decade.
    It’s the one good thing to come out of Gov. Jim Hodges’ execrable state lottery. (I used to struggle to come up with good things to say about him, too, but this was one such thing.) The scholarships? We were doing that without the lottery, and would have expanded them without the lottery except Gov. Hodges vetoed that bill (because he wanted a lottery).
    But a small chunk of the new “chump tax” was set aside to provide seed money to attract some of the best and brightest minds to South Carolina, and put them to work building our economy. Gov. Sanford has never liked this idea, because he doesn’t like the state to invest in the future in any appreciable way apart from land conservation (which is a fine idea, but hardly a shot in the arm to the economy). He believes we don’t need to invest more in education, or research, or even our Department of Commerce, which he takes such pride in having trimmed. His entire “economic development” plan is to cut the income tax. This attracts folks who have already made their pile and are looking for a tax haven in which to hide it, and makes him a hero to the only political entity in the nation that sees him as a hot property: the Club for Growth, whose president showed just how out of touch that group is with even the Republican portion of the electorate by suggesting John McCain pick Mr. Sanford as his running mate.
    The thing that made this outburst from the governor particularly galling is that on Wednesday, I had met Jay Moskowitz, the new head of Health Sciences South Carolina — a consortium of universities and hospitals teaming together to make our state healthier, both physically and economically.
    Dr. Moskowitz is the former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, and most recently held a stack of impressive titles at Penn State, including “chief scientific officer.” He made it clear that he would not be here if not for the endowed chairs program. Nor would others. He spoke of the top people he’s recruited in his few months here, who have in turn recruited others, an example of the “cascade of people that are going to be recruited with each of these chairs.”
    These folks aren’t just coming to buy a few T-shirts at the beach and leave. They’re here to make their home, and to build their new home into the kind of place that will attract other creative minds. The endowed chairs program is the principal factor that convinces them to pull up stakes and make the effort. “I had a wonderful job in Pennsylvania,” said Dr. Moskowitz, and he wouldn’t have left it without believing that South Carolina was committed to moving forward on a broad research front.
    He doesn’t say it this way, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t have come if he had thought Mark Sanford’s “leave it alone” approach was typical of our state’s leadership.
    Fortunately, it is not. The S.C. House, led by Speaker Bobby Harrell, rose up in response to the governor’s naysaying and voted unanimously to extend the endowed chairs program.
    This is a moment of high irony for me. For 17 years I’ve pushed to give more power to South Carolina’s governor because our state so badly needed visionary leadership, and I thought there was little reason to expect it would come from our Legislature.
    But on Thursday, it did. And if the Senate has the wisdom to follow suit, your children and my grandchildren will have reason to be grateful.

The Wireless Cloud

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Just got this press release:

February 15, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Representative Cathy B. Harvin

Wireless Cloud to Support South Carolina Learners
    House Democrat Cathy Harvin, Clarendon & Williamsburg Co.’s, has collaborated with House Republican Dwight Loftis, Greenville Co. and 34 other members in introducing a Joint Resolution, H.4692 that would equip South Carolina Schools with a much needed wireless networking capability and would extend this capability to include a 10 mile radius around each school district education campus in support of homebound learners.  The resolution calls for ETV to utilize its existing towers for this purpose.
     Harvin indicates that this capability will allow enhanced learning experiences for students to use computing anywhere on the school grounds where students may now be limited to computer labs and will support children and adult learners in their homes.
     Harvin says,” South Carolina is truly blessed to have received many more communications licenses than any other state.  ETV has had these licenses for years and we must submit a plan to comply with FCC regulations by January 2009 that will indicate how we will move to digital delivery and how we will use these licenses.   What more perfect way to use the licenses than to empower learners in this state.  We now rank 48th nationally, so we have no place to go but up.  We seem to be in a timeframe where it is difficult to find any issue on which democrats and republicans can agree.”  Harvin was most pleased to find when it comes to helping South Carolina’s children learn, there is no argument.

I get excited every time I hear anybody talk about the "Wireless Cloud" proposal — not because I fully understand what it is, but because the name rocks. In fact, it’s now on my short list for names for the band that I’ve been meaning to start since about 1971 (you can’t rush these things, you know; got to find the right name first).

This legislation, or legislation related to it, came up in one of our edit board meetings last week, and I kept asking Cindi to explain it to me. And then I’d have to stop her because she’d get into explaining the politics — who would benefit and who would lose under each alternative (there was something in it about a plan that would give away bandwidth that belongs to the taxpayers, but I didn’t really follow it, because it was like talking about money) — and I wanted to hear the technical explanation: How would a "wireless cloud" work? Could I use it with my present laptop? Would it cost me to use it? Would more cell towers have to be built, or what?

I didn’t get all the answers I wanted. And this release, with all its talk about kids and education and stuff, didn’t help with the self-centered questions I had. For all I know, the idea may not be feasible, or it might cost to much, or something. But it sure sounds cool. Especially the name.

Good news: NEA not endorsing

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Just got this release from the National Education Association, which describes itself as "the nation’s largest labor organization as well as the nation’s largest professional association."

The NEA went to all the trouble of putting out this release to let us know (like I was sitting here wondering or something) that it "remains on the sidelines in the competition for endorsements by the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates."

The groups seems to think this is a state of affairs that everybody’s going to want to jump to change right quick:

    With the failure of Super Tuesday to define a clear-cut favorite for the Party’s nomination however, the most valuable, and perhaps the most important, endorsement remains unclaimed by either Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

No mention, by the way, in either the e-mail or the attached Word file, of anyone at the NEA waiting to be wooed by any Republican candidate. Probably an oversight.

In any case, whatever your party, I hope things work out so that the NEA stays out of this, for the simple fact that the presidency should have little to do with K-12 education. Here’s the way the NEA looks at it:

“Both Democratic candidates have strong records on education, but our members want to know about their visions and their plans for the future, and we haven’t really heard that yet. If they haven’t made education a central part of their campaigns, how can we feel confident that they will make education a central part of their administration?”

The NEA’s position is self-contradictory. It complains that "For the past eight years, America’s public schools have been the victims of top down, manage by mandate federal education policy," when the clear and obvious solution is to get the federal government out of the business of trying to oversee education.

Sheesh. These people make no more sense than those self-described "conservatives" who are trying to help elect Hillary Clinton.

Anti-school forces have one less lawmaker to pick on: Bill Cotty to give up seat

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This release just came over the transom:

S.C. REP. BILL COTTY ANNOUNCES HE WILL NOT RUN FOR RE-ELECTION
COLUMBIA — House District 79 Representative Bill Cotty announced that he
has accepted a private sector job opportunity that will result in his not
seeking re-election in 2008. 
    "Over the Holidays one of my long-time clients made me a wonderful business
offer," Cotty said. While the terms we agreed on will allow me to serve out
my current term, I’ve promised to work with them full time after the House
adjourns in June."
    "I’ve been blessed by voters to have the honor of serving in elected office
the past 20 years, eight on the Richland Two School Board, and the 14 in the
House.  It’s time now to give someone else a chance and I wanted to let
folks now immediately so anyone interested in running has time to decide
before filing deadline at the end of March."
    "This is an opportunity for me to work on innovative land use planning
projects that incorporate new technologies for recycling and resource
conservation practices, something I’m very passionate about.  My wife and I
have places to go and grand babies to hug, the fifth of which is expected in
May."
    Rep. Cotty is a Columbia Attorney and was first elected to the House in
1994.  House District 79 encompasses Kershaw and Northeastern Richland
counties.

                    -30-

I certainly wish Mr. Cotty well in the future, but he will be missed in the Legislature. The Richland Republican has been a stalwart supporter of public schools in an era in which out-of-state, anti-public-education money has been spent by the bucketload to try to get rid of real conservatives (the kind who support society’s fundamental institutions, as opposed to the libertarian radicals who want to tear them down) like him.

So that’s a few thousand bucks that SCouRGe and its fellows will save in smearing Mr. Cotty’s name in this year’s primaries.

Beyond that, it will be interesting to see if Anton Gunn takes time away from the Barack Obama campaign (which we assume will still be going strong at the time) to make another run at the seat. He was a very promising newcomer, make District 79 one of those few districts with an embarrassment of riches — a choice between two very good candidates, rather than the all-too-common opposite situation.

Must we fight about evolution AGAIN?

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This morning I was in the men’s library (to use an old Knight Ridder Washington Bureau euphemism) perusing The New York Times. Turns out it was the NYT of Dec. 19, but under such circumstances beggars can’t be choosers.

Anyway, I ran across a piece about Mike Huckabee’s famous "floating white cross" TV commercial. We’ll set the cross controversy aside for the moment. What struck me was the Times‘ assessment of the potential downside of the ad:

While that may work in Iowa, the religiosity of the message may turn
off more-secular voters elsewhere, and remind them that Mr. Huckabee
has been dismissive of homosexuality and indicated that he does not
believe in evolution.

We’ll also, if you don’t mind, set aside the homosexuality thing. What got me going was the bit about how "he does not
believe in evolution."

What does that mean — "believe in evolution?" As an overriding credo — as opposed to, say, believing in God? If so, then put me in the disbeliever’s corner with Mr. Huckabee.

Or does it mean believing in evolution as a mechanism through by which organisms have developed into their present shapes? If so, yeah — I believe in evolution. But I can certainly understand why Mr. Huckabee has been dodgy on the issue, saying such things as "I believe God created the heavens and the Earth. I wasn’t there when he did it, so how he did it, I don’t know."

Or at least, I can understand why I would be dodgy about the issue, were I in his shoes. I would resist every effort to pin me down on one side or the other of what I see as a false choice: That between religion and science.

To me, this dichotomy is as bogus, as pointless and as unnecessary as the chasm that the MSM tell us exists between "liberal" and "conservative," "Democrat" and "Republican," or what have you. I’ll tell you a little secret about this universe: Very few things that are true fit into an either-or, yes-or-no, black-or-white model. At least as often as not, it’s "both-and" or "neither."

Trying to make a Southern Baptist preacher either offend secularists by asserting that the world was created in six days or dismay his co-religionists by saying that’s a metaphor is a lot like those wise guys asking Jesus to offend either his followers or Caesar with the trick question about taxes. I’ve gotten nothing against asking a guy to be clear; I do have a problem with a question that seems designed to make the questioned a bad guy either way.

In fact, in the interest of clarity, here’s what I believe:

  • Evolution seems to me exactly the sort of majestic, awe-inspiring way that God would have created us.  He’s no magician doing parlor tricks, as in Poof, here’s a man! or Zing! There’s a mountain; he’s the actual Master of Space and Time (and more; I just can’t explain it, being trapped as I am in space and time). He’s the only Guy I know who can complete a project that  takes billions of years. Therefore evolution has his handwriting all over it. It’s his M.O.
  • I believe in "natural selection," if by that you mean mutations that adapt an organism to his environment and enable him to
    survive to reproduce are the ones that prevail. The guy who can
    outrun the saber-toothed tiger is the one who gets all the grandkids.
  • I do not believe in "natural selection" if by that you mean "random chance." I don’t believe those  aforementioned mutations just happen. That offends me intellectually. So many adaptations seem so clever, so cool, so inspired, that there’s just gotta be somebody out there to congratulate for having come up with the idea. Yeah, 4.54 billion years gives random chance a lot of room to work with, but not enough to satisfy me. If you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with a typewriter you do not get Shakespeare; you get an infinite amount of monkey poop smeared on a perfectly good sheet of paper.
  • I believe that, judging by this photograph, Charles Darwin may indeed be descended from an ape. Check out the brow on that guy!
  • I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, in that it describes better than any other book the development of a continuing relationship, a blossoming revelation, between Man and  God over a period of thousands of years.
  • I do not believe that Adam and Eve were actual individuals, living at the same time, whom you could photograph if you had a time machine, the way you could photograph Benazir Bhutto if you dialed that same machine back a couple of weeks (and had a plane ticket to Karachi). I read a lot, you see, and I’ve developed a knack for telling poetry from prose, hyperbole from understatement and the like. And reading Genesis, it’s pretty clear that this is an allegory that describes truths about our relationship to God, not a court stenographer’s version of what happened in a leafy garden in Mesopotamia one week long ago. Have you never noticed that novels often tell us more true things about how life is lived in the world than, say, nonfiction textbooks about geology or algebra do? There is great moral truth in Genesis, and that’s what we’re supposed to take away from it.
  • I do believe that some wise guy asked Jesus (who was probably known as "Yeshua" among friends) the aforementioned trick question about taxes. That has the ring of a very real situation, one that takes its meaning from the particular political situation in which a first-century rabbi would have found himself. It was clever, but not nearly as smart as his answer, and it’s just the sort of thing his friends would have remembered and told about him later. It also contains great moral truth, as does the story of the Garden of Eden.

Well, I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I get offended when someone is questioned in a format that seems designed to make him choose sides between the "godless Darwinists" or the "Bible-thumping rubes."

Finally — and this is really where I was going with all this; the Huckabee stuff was just my way of warming up — do we really have to have another stupid, pointless argument over evolution in the classroom? This story I read over the holidays seems to indicate that we do. May God deliver us.

Whoa! Didn’t Sorensen just GET here?

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People come and go so quickly here. Don’t know if you’ve seen this news….

    University of South Carolina President Andrew Sorensen plans to announce at 3 p.m. today that he intends to retire in the second half of next year.
    Sorensen took office in July 2002, following six years as president of the University of Alabama. His formal investiture as USC president took place Dec. 14, 2002.
    He will be 70 years old next July. He has set July 31 as his retirement date, according to board chairman Herbert Adams.

… but it strikes me that he just got here, and he’s started some good stuff, but it’s just gotten started. So how can he leave?

Quick thoughts about S.C. State

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When I learned that S.C. State’s trustees were coming back into session at 5:30 today, I had to cancel plans for a live editorial (that is, one for Friday’s paper), for fear that it would be outdated by events that could occur Who Knows When tonight. At this time of year, it becomes necessary to work ahead so we can make it through the holiday, so holding pages past usual deadlines militates against that. Besides, we try to be deliberative and include the full board in decisions, which constitutes another reason to avoid late-night, off-the-cuff, pontification. One hardly wants to be as precipitous and reckless as the S.C. State board now appears to be, does one?

But here are three main points that would have been included in that editorial, and are likely to appear in one at some future date:

  1. S.C. State University is a state-funded institution of post-secondary education, which is another way to say it is a public institution. The trustees, alumni, donors and others involved have no right and no business to run it as though it were a private club. The trustees, in particular, have a clear and compelling obligation to explain their actions in firing Dr. Hugine. The president is not their personal, private employee; he is employed by the taxpayers of this state.
  2. Once again, we are reminded of the need for a Board of Regents to run all of this state’s higher-ed institutions (and to close some of them), rather than having them run by autonomous respective boards of trustees.
  3. The steady erosion of public funding for public higher ed is probably a contributing factor in this tendency of institutional boards to misunderstand their fiduciary duty to all of the state’s people. When most funding comes from tuition and grants (even when the original sources for those funds are public), it can be easier for those in positions of immediate responsibility to fail to see their obligation to be accountable to the state.

A bit of perspective on our place in the world, by the numbers

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Energy Party consultant Samuel sent me this, which figures. Samuel is the guy who came up with the idea for the endowed chairs program, which bore impressive fruit yet again this week. He’s still the most enthusiastic cheerleader of that program, even after our governor replaced him on the panel that oversees it:

This video — really, sort of a powerpoint presentation, only on YouTube, is worth watching. There are some figures in it that I find suspect (I’m always that way with attempts to quantify the unknowable, which in this case applies to prediction about the future), but others that are essentially beyond reproach, and ought to make us think.

What they ought to make us think is this: So much of what we base the selection of our next president on — party affiliation, ideological purity, our respective preferences on various cultural attitudes — is wildly irrelevant to the challenges of the world in which this person will attempt to be the leader of the planet’s foremost nation. Foremost nation for now, that is. If we don’t start thinking a lot more pragmatically, it won’t be for long.

Stuff I learned about long division — today

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As I write this, my wife is drilling my granddaughter on division, with flash cards. Being a being a benevolent sort of patriarch, I tried to change the subject by mentioning to my wife two things that I learned today about long division — two things that they didn’t teach us back when I had it in school, in the last century.

First, there’s that symbol itself — you know, the vertical line attached to the longer horizontal line overhead, which together form a sort of capital L that has been rotated 90 degrees clockwise. That is, I always thought it was a vertical line — a plain, straight line. That’s the way my teachers drew it, and that’s the way I always drew it, and they never marked me wrong.

Now, it turns out it’s really a close-parenthesis mark attached to a horizontal line. It’s curved. It’s more like a sideways cursive L than a Roman one. It’s that way on the flash cards, and it was that way on the Web when I looked it up, earlier today. It occurred to me that this was an innovation that adapted something we once did longhand to the keyboard, or something. But my wife says that’s the way they taught it in HER school. I remain doubtful.

But that’s not the main thing I learned today. The main thing I learned is that the thingie I just described has a name. Really. And it’s a really weird, counterintuitive name. It’s called a "tableau." I swear the thing did not have a name when I was in school. They taught us all those other names that I have never had any sort of use for, such as dividend, divisor and quotient. (I’ve always thought of math as something you do, not something you describe; such names still seem to me useless to anyone but a math teacher.)  Anyway, the thingie has a name, and it’s one I would never have guessed in a million years. I couldn’t even remember it from this afternoon, and had to go Google it to tell my wife. To me, a "tableau" is what you call the thing I was a part of when Mrs. Sarah Kinney, the Latin teacher in Bennettsville, made us dress up like the Roman gods and pose together on a stage. I was Mercury. (Back then, it was a "tableau." Young people today would call it "way gay.") We were so good at this that — I am not making this up — we won a prize for it at a state convention in Rock Hill.

My wife asked me how in the world such a thing would come up in the course of a working day. That’s where it got complicated. I explained that it was in a New Yorker article about N.Y Gov. Eliot Spitzer that I read today — someone had sent me an e-mail at work with the link, urging me to read it, and the article endeavored to explain the shape formed on a may by the more populated parts of the state, and said it was like "a mirror image of a long-division tableau." "And you just had to read that," my wife asked. "At work?"

I recognized this right away as a trick question. It was, of course, a sly reference to my attention deficit problems, and my notorious habit of pursuing any distraction that is waved in front of me. "Yes, I did," I said, fighting my corner. "Because… I blog. Because he’s been in the news…" finally, I got my stride, explaining that Spitzer has been very controversial lately because of his effort to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, which put him at the center of just about the hottest issue out there, and one which got Hillary Clinton in hot water, and…

Before I got all that out, she allowed as how she had heard something about that, and I quickly left the room before she asked any more questions, and she went back to drilling my poor granddaughter with those flash cards.

But why should I be defensive about this? This is how you learn stuff — by being intellectually curious. How else do you explain that I got a really high score on my math SAT? And I did it without knowing, until today, that that thingie is called a "tableau."

Shealy says District 5 stepped out of line. Did it?

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Not only did District 5 lose another bond referendum this week, but now it’s fending off a charge from referendum opponent Rod Shealy Jr. that it made inappropriate use of public resources in the failed effort.

Here’s what Mr. Shealy — a political consultant who had been retained by Chapin-area opponents of the referendum — had to say in an e-mail that was copied to me yesterday:

    Bill, as I understand it, the press release below was sent during school hours from a district computer and was also posted on the district Web site. My question is this: IN WHAT ALTERNATE UNIVERSE IS THIS EVEN THE SLIGHTEST BIT APPROPRIATE? Does this serve any purpose other than a purely political one? It’s campaigning on the taxpayers’ dime, and it is what they’ve been urged repeatedly not to do… part of the reason many people lose their faith in the district’s leadership.
    I opted not to send this to you before the campaign so my intent would not be misconstrued… just wanted you to know where I was coming from.
     (Maybe your editorial board, in its alacrity for criticizing those who do not agree with them on political issues, should focus on this type of stuff. think i’ll copy them on this email)

Thanks,
Rod Jr.

Here’s the e-mail to which he referred:

Newspapers endorse bond referendum

IRMO—This week, editorial boards of two local newspapers endorsed the Lexington-Richland Five bond referendum, which will be held on Tuesday.

    Rod Shealy, Sr., publisher of The New Irmo News, wrote in a front-page editorial of the November 1 edition of his newspaper, “I have generally opposed bond issues….This time, however, I will be voting ‘YES.’”

    In addition, an editorial in The State on November 2 endorsed the referendum.

    The State’s editorial incorrectly stated, “the owner of a home with an assessed value of $100,000 would pay an estimated $235.60 annually over 20 years to pay back [the] loan.”

    In actuality, if the referendum is successful, the owner of a $100,000 home will pay an additional $39.60 per year, or a total of $792 over the course of 20 years.

Totally apart from the intergenerational drama going on here between the Shealys, we have the question of whether the side that Rod pere was on stepped out of line.

Mind you, Rod fils isn’t claiming the law was broken, although he clearly believes it wasn’t kosher. As he said to me in a follow-up:

    … to be clear, my contention was not that it is illegal — although I do believe it is, or at least should be…
    whether or not it is technically legal, it is inappropriate…
    a majority of the voters in this district opposed this bond plan, which means the taxpayers of this district had resources for which they pay used in a political campaign against them…
    Brad, this has been an issue between the school district and me going back several years… I’m the good guy on this one…

Rod Jr.

The district’s response came before I had even read Rod’s first missive. Michelle Foster, the district’s "Community Services Specialist," sent me copies of an e-mail exchange between her and Cathy Hazelwood of the State Ethics Commission. Here’s the inquiry:

Ms. Hazelwood,

Buddy Price asked me to forward you the attached press release for review. We would like to clarify some misinformation that was printed in The State this morning by posting this press release on our district home page.  If possible, we would also like to send it to our listserv, consisting of parents and community members.

Please let me know your opinion.

Many thanks,
Michelle Foster

Here’s the file Ms. Foster attached to her query. And here’s the terse response:

The news release is fine, so you can distribute it to whomever.  Cathy

Folks, this hits me in a bit of a null space. Unlike most of my colleagues, I’ve always been sort of fuzzy and undecided about stuff like this, so I leave others to write about it. I’m more for doing the right thing, and so many ethics considerations seem to be about the appearance of morality, rather than the real thing. I can sympathize with the folks at the district, who saw the newspaper endorse their proposal while at the same time misrepresenting an important factual consideration. (The one thing I know for sure in all this shoulda woulda coulda is that we shoulda gotten the numbers straight the first time.)

At the same time, having our live-and-let-live State Ethics Commission say something is OK is almost, but not quite, enough to persuade me that it’s not OK at all.

So what do you think? Which is the greater sin — sending out an e-mail to set the record straight, or primly sitting on one’s hands and leaving voters in the dark?

The War on Spontaneity

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This morning, I had a meeting with Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex, Education Oversight Committee czarina Jo Anne Anderson, and various members of their respective retinues.

That is, I was supposed to have a meeting with them. It was placed on my calendar a couple of months ago (and had somehow neglected to set the Treo to remind me the way I always do), and for a time earlier than I usually arrive at the office, and I didn’t realize it was happening until I was halfway through breakfast, and by the time I got here I was more than half an hour late for it. I can’t remember the last time anything like this happened, and I am very, very sorry it happened this time; it was embarrassing.

The meeting was ostensibly to talk about the 2007 Report Cards, and I missed that part (since Cindi Scoppe had been hosting them, and I rely on her to pay attention and remember stuff even when I am here, we were covered — I just haven’t had time to get Cindi to regurgitate it to me yet). I know that the info they had to share wasn’t amazingly good news, since we had already seen the PACT scores — upon which the report cards are mostly based — and because I saw Jim Foster’s face (see below). Jim’s more of a class clown than I am, always with the jokes. (Long ago, three superintendents ago, Jim worked at the paper.) If he’s looking this glum, watch out.

Anyway, right after I got into the room, talk turned to discipline, and I started to squirm, not only because I’d come to class late and unprepared, but because I was once one of those one or two kids who distract the class, to put it mildly. (So was Jim, I’m sure, despite his severe mien below.) I sat there thinking how very, very lucky I am that I made it out of school before the era of Zero Tolerance. Which suggests a digression…

Honest, I’ll try to come back with some serious info from this meeting once I’ve caught up with it, but for now I’d like to share a piece from this morning’s WSJ about how increasingly unfriendly this country is getting toward kids like me. The op-ed was headlined "Adult supervision." An excerpt:

    The Christian Science Monitor reports that colleges across the country now require permits or permission slips for undergraduate pranks. This was perhaps inevitable: First they came for dodgeball. Then tag. How long could something as spontaneous and fun as the prank escape?
    Educational administrators justify the new prank rules by invoking 9/11, though most college pranks have as much to do with terrorism as a greased pig in the hallway has to do with the invasion of Poland. But the war on spontaneity continues….

At this point, either you’re nodding in smug approval at efforts to get those hooligans in line, or you’re cringing like me. Another taste:

At Mascoutah Middle School in Illinois, 13-year-old Megan Coulter was recently given detention for hugging two friends goodbye before the weekend — a violation of the school’s ban on "public displays of affection." One California school district worried about "bullying, violence, self-esteem and lawsuits" also banned tag, cops and robbers, touch football and every other activity that involved "bodily contact."

You know, when it comes to most things, I try to side with the grownups. Society needs to have rules. Hence my strong disagreements with the libertarians. But at some point, short of engaging in life-threatening behavior of the kind I worried about in my Sunday column, there’s a space where adults should let the children play. And please, please forgive them when they wander in a bit late… I’m sure they feel bad about it.

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Hey! Romney! Leave them kids alone!

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One thing I never ask presidential candidates about is education. I’m a big believer in subsidiarity, and I basically hold that K-12 public schools are none of the federal government’s business.

But that doesn’t keep some of these candidates from telling us what they want to do to — uh, I mean, for — our schools. Interestingly, more and more these days, the candidates we hear from most on the subject is the ones who want to position themselves as "conservatives." Of course, these days that usually means they will be pushing something that is in no way conservative, but a classically liberal idea — the diversion of funds from the public schools under the guise of our governor’s cause, "school choice." Just so you can keep it straight, folks: Undermining core institutions — of which public schools would be one of the most fundamental, in this country — is pretty much the opposite of conservatism.

And sure enough, this Mitt Romney release, detailing the proposals he unveiled right here in capital city today, is true to that form. Ironically, the very first thing Mr. Romney — shown above at Columbia’s Edventure this morning — says about schools is this:

Governor Romney Believes Our Education System Works Best When We Have More Local Control Of Our Schools.  While there is a proper role for the federal government to play in education, it is not in telling parents, teachers, kids and local authorities what to teach or how to run their schools.

To which I say, OK, so why don’t you butt out? Excuse me, but you are running for president, right — not another term as governor of Massachusetts?

Then, the very first item under the heading, "Governor Romney’s Conservative Strategy To Raise The Bar In Education" is that most anti-public school agenda that we’ve all heard more about than we ever need to hear:

Governor Romney Will Promote School Choice.  He believes that when parents and kids are free to choose their school, everyone benefits.  That’s because competition and choice in educational opportunities – whether it comes from private schools, charter schools, or home schooling – makes traditional public schools better and improves the quality of education for all of America’s kids.  Governor Romney believes that it is especially important that students in failing schools be able to exercise school choice so that they can get access to the resources and opportunities they need to succeed.

That said, I’ll give the governor snaps for promoting merit pay for teachers, and for understanding that NCLB is flawed. But the solution to that is to ditch NCLB, not try to "fix" it. And you can ditch the U.S. Department of Education while you’re at it, if you’re so inclined.

But my bottom line for Mr. Romney and anyone else seeking the presidency is this:

Hey! Candidate! Leave them kids alone!

How did you vote in the District 5 referendum, and why?

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Let’s have a little real-time civic discussion here.

I notice that interest seems high in my posts from yesterday on the subject, here, here and here.

Now that the voting is actually going on, let’s analyze it, and let’s not do it the bogus, TV-style, talking-heads-guessing way. Let’s hear from real people who have voted today:

How did you vote in the District 5 referendum, and why?

I’ll do my best to keep up with approving comments, to keep this as current as possible. Now, let’s see what happens.

Video: What’s different about THIS referendum?

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One last word on the subject of the District 5 referendum. Now, on the eve of the vote, is a good time to revisit my video clip in which the unanimous board explains, in their words, what’s different about this bond proposal, as opposed to the ones in the past that divided the trustees.