Date: February 27, 2004
Subject: Where have all the conservatives gone (in the Republican party)?

At yesterday morning's House Ed Policy Committee, where they discussed the legislative auditor's report on the costs of complying with the intrusive, underfunded mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Majority Whip Rep. Marty Siefert (R-Marshall) was feeling like a voice in the wilderness—in a majority caucus under a Republican administration.

Commissioner Yecke, who for years has walked a tightrope of advocating for federal education programs while working, often successfully, for increased flexibility for the states ("local control"), at one point made the most un-conservative comment of the day: "trust the federal government." This was remarkable for someone who, in preparation for her confirmation hearings in the DFL-controlled Senate, has been on the receiving end of every synonym of "right-wing" in the thesarus. She equates the importance to civil rights of NCLB with Brown v. Board of Education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA or "special ed").

Rep. Seifert said that he's an "old time Republican," who believes that the Constitution prohibits the federal government from being involved in education ("Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."). Why, he asked, are we begging the federal government for waivers at all? Have we thrown in the towel? He said that this is "not the kind of Republican I was elected to be."

Caught between the federal government and the courts, with their mandates and invalidation of state laws, who can blame state legislators if they are feeling, like the Constitution itself, a little obsolete lately?

Date: February 23, 2004
Subject: A quarter for your thoughts

Strib columnist Nick Coleman's cheap shots yesterday at Commissioner Yecke ("State's quarter ideas are bad, even deadly," February 22) were ironically exposed by the layout artist who located a related Associated Press story ("Quarter designs aren't always on the money") directly below the Coleman column.

After reading both articles, Coleman's attempts to stick it to the Commissioner ("Maybe she hasn't had time to worry about the quarter, but these designs make us look like hicks from the sticks") made him look either ignorant or like a liberal partisan hack. The truth is, starting with Minnesota, the U.S. Mint changed its design submission procedure. In typical bureaucratic fashion, the Mint required that Minnesota's design proposals be submitted in writing, ostensibly to avoid the complaints that resulted when state-submitted artwork for previous quarters was altered by Mint artists. The result was even worse than under the previous procedure.

"Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke," continued the AP article, "who leads the quarter commission, said that describing scenes with words rather than pictures was challenging."

Although the artwork that Coleman nitpicks did not come from Yecke's artists, the Coleman piece ends, "The governor should just say no. And order Yecke back to the drawing board (she's used to it). There's only one thing to do...Start over." What a nice allusion to the social studies standards, which is, besides Yecke, what Coleman is really attacking, right?

If someone asked me whether I would prefer being "shut out" of the standards committees or "shut out" of the media, I would answer by flipping through my paperback copy of 1984 to this passage:

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

Date: February 19, 2004
Subject: As Seen on TV

Thanks to my role models at the Northern Alliance blogs SCSU Scholars and Fraters Libertas, this newbie to the blogosphere has finally added "permalinks" to these pages (after I finally figured out what they are). These links allow others to link directly to individual blog entries, the better to cross-reference the entire blogosphere to itself. Fascinating, Captain. We now return you to our regularly scheduled coverage of Minnesota education reform news.

Date: February 19, 2004
Subject: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

In this morning's "House DFLers take off gloves in battle over Yecke," the Strib's Conrad deFiebre reported that House minority leader Rep. Matt Entenza (DFL-St. Paul) finds calling someone's agenda "socialist-leaning" is "disrespectful." In the same article, Entenza is quoted saying that Commissioner Yecke "is on the fringes rather than in the mainstream...It's time for her to pack her bags and go back to Washington, D.C., where she belongs." I guess that "respect" is in the eyes of the beholder.

Date: February 18, 2004
Subject: One Sided Reporting?

In an unexpected twist, Norman Draper's article in today's Strib, "History guidelines take another punch," only included quotes by Julie Quist from the (WARNING!) "conservative education group" EdWatch and Commissioner Yecke. He did not identify by name the DFL members of the Ed Policy Committee who "suggested that a gender-neutral word be substituted for 'statesmen,' and wondered why Marcus Garvey wasn't included in a list of black civil rights leaders." In the interest of fairness, couldn't Draper report on something more objectionable in the third draft than the "statespersons" debate or the absence of an obscure, if important, historical figure from the Examples column?

Meanwhile, John Welsh at the PiPress, who also quoted Quist from the "conservative" EdWatch, gave a little more coverage to the critics. He actually identified Parents United as a "more liberal" group in his article today, "New standards keep critics abuzz." I thought there was something in the AP Stylebook that prohibits identifying liberal groups or persons as "liberal," but requires them to identify conservatives as "conservative." Or so it would seem.

Date: February 17, 2004
Subject: Third draft

Now that the social studies standards hot potato has landed in the lap of the House Ed Policy Committee, Republican legislators and Commissioner Yecke are struggling to craft a third draft that will pass out of committee (which includes MAPSSS friend Rep. Jim Davnie (DFL-Minneapolis)) and onto the floor of the House, where it is expected to pass. At today's House Ed Policy Committee hearing, the third draft caught heat from EdWatch for being crafted behind closed doors by Yecke and legislative leaders Rep. Barb Sykora (R-Excelsior), chair of the House Ed Policy Committee; and Rep. Alice Seagren (R-Bloomington), member of the same committee and chair of the House Ed Finance Committee. Julie Quist of EdWatch called for a return to the second draft, which was created by the citizen committee, of which yours truly is a member.

One of the more interesting revisions to me was the deletion of this benchmark:

Students will explain that Lincoln’s understanding of the founders’ principles includes that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are universal and applicable to all people at all times. (Emphasis added)

This is a big deal because the Declaration of Independence says that certain rights are inalienable, meaning that the government can't ever take them away. Why would anyone object to this benchmark, unless perhaps they believe that the rights to life, national sovereignty, and property rights are not so inalienable after all?

DFLers are fuming over the standards and education funding, and they will have a field day in the Senate, where they hold a slim majority. Forget tweaking content in the Senate, look for Sen. Steve Kelley (DFL-Hopkins) to scrap the social studies standards and start over with a new committee composed of liberal interest groups and education establishment types. The confirmation of Commissioner Yecke also hangs in the political balance. How will the new Senate majority leader Dean Johnson (DFL-Willmar) play these issues? The bigger question is how far will our popular deficit busting, hockey-playing governor go during eleventh-hour negotiations to save the social studies standards and his education commissioner. Do you believe in miracles?

Date: February 9, 2004
Subject: Standards sophistry

The PiPress ran the following letter from Paul Seeba today. It's a clear example of the standards opponents' embrace of identity politics, and ironically, elitism:

The composition of Education Commissioner Yecke's social studies writing committee needs to be questioned by the people who currently use the public schools in Minnesota. As a member of this committee, I found it strange that the users of the public system (i.e. public school parents, teachers and administrators) were grossly underrepresented, while the non-users of traditional public schools (i.e. private and charter personnel, home-schoolers and ideologues who have little contact with public school children) were grossly overrepresented, given the tiny percent of the population they represent.

Minnesotans ought to know that not one public school administrator served on the final committee, yet a private school headmaster was given a starring role. This is especially strange as private schools are not held to these standards.

Gov. Pawlenty has stated publicly that we need "standards that stand the test of time." How can this happen when the actual users of the public schools find out the standards were largely written by a coalition of people who do not use the traditional public schools?

Personally, I find it strange that the non-users of traditional public schools (i.e. private and charter personnel, home-schoolers and ideologues who have little contact with public school children) are nevertheless compelled by law to surrender tax dollars to support the public schools. Oh, I know that public school districts are compelled by law to provide them with access to services such as transportation and extra curricular activities, but I'd wager that most would gladly pay fees for such access if tuition tax credits were also part of the bargain.

The truth is, most private school parents I talk to are willing to pay taxes to support the public schools, even though they are "non-users" who have "little contact with public school children." They understand that all Minnesota citizens — even the headmasters of private schools — have a big stake in a high-quality public education system. Conversely, don't Minnesota's children deserve the academic standards that draw from the best that education has to offer, regardless of where those ideas originate?

It's true: the personal backgrounds and ideologies of the Academic Standards committee members would not have reflected those found at an Education Minnesota convention. The committee was much more diverse than that. The "public" is back in "public education" like never before.