Charter Schools for Freedom and Liberty

Lurking in the back of the Capital Annex hearing room yesterday was David Adams, Campaign Manager for a Tea Party gubernatorial candidate who tea partiers don't even know - Phil Moffett. Moffett, like Adams, was associated with the Bluegrass Institute and apparently favors giving public dollars to private groups under the guise of school choice. It was Moffett who funded Rep Brad Montell's legislative field trip to an Indianapolis charter shcool in April.

Adams sat in for about a half an hour during the Joint Interim Committee on Education.

Adams, Waters, Moffett and their co-conspirators at the Bluegrass Institute love freedom and liberty. They want to be free to take liberties with public dollars. They prefer vouchers. But they'll settle for charter schools, for now.

You may recall Adams was recently the Campaign Manager for the Rand Paul campaign - which I believe it is safe to say is THE most prominent senatorial race in the nation. Adams deserves credit for Paul's very successful primary campaign. But much of the attention on Paul is also owed to the rise of the Tea Party movement and Paul's father Ron, who was once a presidential candidate.

Paul has also helped himself garner press by sharing several thoughts out loud that he had to immediately retract, or at least try to explain away. Much of the campaign so far has involved Paul making statements and his opponent Attorney General Jack Conway saying "no take backs." Last time I looked, Paul was up by 8 in some poll.

Immediately following one such gaff - when Adams allowed Paul to do the Rachel Maddow Show - Adams was "promoted" to Campaign Chairman, where he was clearly no longer in charge.

Adams was since demoted, one supposes, to Campaign Manager for Moffett. In any case, it was good to see him on the education beat yesterday. He always makes for good copy.

Other reflections on yesterday's meeting:

It was delightful to see KASA's Wayne Young, as always. And he was extra gracious when he introduced me to Robert Lewis. He didn't call me an agitator, or claim that all college professors do is invite practitioners to teach their classes, or anything.

I wonder how big the number is. How many comittee meetings/hearings/seminars/etc... has Cindy Heine sat through in the past twenty years? Three meetings a week? Five? More? I'm tthinkin' thousands. ...and that's a lot of briefings.

I introduced myself to CHNI's Ronnie Ellis, and sat next to him and Greg Stotlmyer in the press section. I told Ellis I appreciated his work on Comment on Kentucky and am a regular reader of his work. Later, I overheard a brief exchange between him and Jim Waters of the Bluegrass Institute. Apparently Waters was trying to tell Ellis what to write when Ellis responded, "I'm not going to debate with you guys."

But you've got to give it to the BIPPS boys. Despite being called ideologs by one legislator, they keep on plugging away. What a great country.

In his comments to the panel, Rev Stephenson said he would be calling on a higher authority for his remarks. So it was particularly gratifying that he chose to quote extensively from Kentucky School News and Commentary's Penney Sanders. In her article, "Unfinished Business," Penney writes,

A cursory analysis of the 2008 -2009 list of low performing school reveals that the majority of the seriously low performing schools (Tier 5) are in Jefferson County. The remaining schools on this list are scattered around the state with no region dominating...

After 20 years, if the full promise of the Kentucky’s school reform is to be met, these failing (seriously low performing) schools must, once and for all be dealt with...

Interestingly, KERA envisioned such provisions. The KERA framers believed that schools, after 3 or 4 years of poor performance, would be closed or the children given the option to go elsewhere. Sadly, we have not seen those sanctions-the ultimate hammers ever used.

The question is WHY NOT???

I'm going to have to start treating Penney with more respect...so I don't get struck by lightening.

Kentucky Board of Education: Inexperienced board lacks seasoning in Erwin mess, H-L editorial writer says.

Presents one image to the board behind closed doors,
another to reporters

I am a podcast listener of Comment on Kentucky, KET's long-running public affairs program hosted by journalist Al Smith. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to listening to last Friday's program until this morning - while I restacked the firewood onto a palet I made.

At any rate, the show (June 15, 2007) included comments from Herald-Leader Editorial Assistant Jamie Lucke and CNHI News Service reporter Ronnie Ellis on the Kentucky Board of Education and the Erwin situation. (Note: video runs about 3 minutes and starts 2/3rds of the way through the program.)

Sitting in for Al Smith last week was Director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at UK, Al Cross.

Al Cross: The state board of education met this week, and the new commissioner, Barbara Erwin, is not on-board yet, but...can you tell us why the state board picked the controversial Barbara Erwin and why they're sticking with her?

Jamie Lucke: Well, I...can only surmise, but I have to surmise that they must not have had a very strong field of applicants to begin with. Perhaps because of the uncertainty about a change in administrations, that this governor may lose and that whoever got the job would have to deal with a new administration. And then I think they just got so deep into the process without having been informed by their search firm, their professional search firm that she had a lot of baggage. I mean this is the kind of baggage that a reporter googling her can find out in fifteen minutes. Why the board was taken by surprise is something that I don't know. But it just seems like they were too far in to back out. It's a fairly inexperienced board. All of the board members now are appointees of Governor Fletcher and you know, they don't have the seasoning that some...earlier boards have had and they just stuck with their choice. I suspect she must be very dynamic in person because they spent a great deal of time with her in a closed session and came out and said 'we're stickin.'

Ronnie Ellis: And...she can be a very good interview. She can be dynamic. I think she perhaps is presenting one image to the board behind closed doors and dealing with reporters in a little bit different light because there have been a number of things that we were told that board members were told differently in that meeting. And,, just quickly, all of the board members were appointed by Fletcher. ...Keith Travis, the chairman, was originally appointed by Paul Patton, and reappointed. All the others are Fletcher appointees for the first time.