Yesterday I posted a letter that Superintendent Paul Perzanoski wrote to his staff in Brunswick, Maine. He defended educators against the bullying of the governor and–since the governor had such disdain for the state’s students, teachers and public schools– suggested that the governor should take a standardized test and publish his scores. Since I have often made the same suggestion, I admired him for saying so. Here’s the local press reaction.

There’s been quite a bit of reaction in the Maine press over Superintendent Perzanoski’s letter. The Portland Press Herald’s editorial was one of the more interesting for its cowardice (http://www.pressherald.com/opinion/editorials/school-heads-comments-about-governor-out-of-line_2012-08-24.html) by agreeing with the Superintendent’s points and then demanding that he apologize for getting “involved in politics”, which for the editors means criticizing our loud-mouth bully of a governor.

One of the funnier (although I assume unintentional) comments was:

Calling the governor a bully, as Perzanoski did, or implying that he’s not intelligent — “I think we should challenge (LePage) to take the SAT and make the results public” — is another way of telling people how to vote.

First, when I read the letter I took no inference that Mr. Perzanoski was making fun of our governor’s intelligence (which the Press Herald itself does from time to time); I thought he was pointing out that those who want to make test scores public should be willing to take the same test publicly themselves, since test scores traditionally have been private matters between students and teachers. Apparently, it was the editors of the Press Herald who thought the governor would not look so smart if asked to take a test.

Second, how these comments amount to “telling people how to vote” is beyond me, although the Press Herald may not think much of the voters in Brunswick since the editors think they are so easily suggestible.