In an article today, Indiana GOP leaders announced their determination to pursue Tony Bennett’s anti-teacher, pro-privatization agenda even though Bennett lost his bid for re-election.
Bennett’s challenger, Glenda Ritz, collected more votes than Mike Pence, the Republican who won the governor’s seat.
She won despite Bennett’s expenditure of ten times as much as she had for the campaign.
She won despite the support of national rightwing groups promoting Bennett as the exemplar of school “reform.”
But the GOP thinks the voters didn’t really mean it, or made a mistake, or maybe the voters didn’t know what they were doing.
They hope to ignore the mandate at the polls.
Ritz has a Herculean task moving forward with a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, and laws mandating policies intended to destroy public education.
All she has on her side are the votes of 1.3 million Hoosiers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At least, according to the article, there appear to be a few people in the legislature who are willing to work with Ritz. I am sure she is aware of those people who are at least willing to listen.
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http://ahuntingtonteacher.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-ritz-won.html
So many stories are circulating focused on why Tony Bennett lost his rebid for State Superintendent of Public Education in Indiana. His support for Common Core did him in. It was the power of the teachers’ unions. Over-emphasis of standardized testing alarmed parents. At the most, each story is perhaps a small piece of the puzzle. More accurately, these pieces represent the perspective of out-of-state analysts and preservationists of education reform profit schemes.
Here’s more to why Ritz won. I believe it to be more truthful than what I’ve read so far because I witnessed it firsthand. Before the narrative, a little hometown background.
Huntington County, Indiana is the conservative “hometown” to Vice-President Dan Quayle. In 2012, Bennett received 54% of the vote here, as compared to 66% four years earlier. Given a bit more time, Bennett might have become the first republican to lose a statewide election here in decades.
How did 2,000 voters in one small county switch to Ritz this year? Hard work and passionate activism. Many educators, parents, and those who knew of Bennett’s detrimental policies in this county made contacts with everyone they knew, and even approached strangers to get the word out. They worked social networks, made phone calls, sent postcards, and communicated the message by all means. By November, the message was buzzing and growing exponentially.
More importantly, why did this happen? Every article I have read to date is not only off topic, but repeatedly fails to even mention the most important factor of the election – children. The group of citizens who worked to elect Ritz in Huntington, and Ritz herself, did it because they care about all children.
And so it went from county to county as Ritz criss-crossed the state uniting all those concerned about Hoosier children. Not surprisingly, concern for children turned out to be a non-party issue.
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This is the first honest analysis that I have read of why Bennett was voted out. Thank you!
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Bennett and his policies were incredibly detrimental to the education of Hoosier children. Hatchet men were placed as trustees of universities – not to support strengthened teacher education program, but to demean and demolish programs that are internationally perceived and practiced as excellent. An all out war was waged to de-professionalize teaching, which would result in putting less-qualified teachers in classrooms, raise class size, and force teachers to teach to tests rather than teach for critical and creative thinking. Why? Follow the money folks. . . who stands to gain financially if PUBLIC schools are declared failures and forced to close? Who is financially invested in charter schools? Who stands to gain if children are taught to accept the authority of someone else’s interpretation of facts rather than learn to question, explore, and discover? Who would rather have a population of followers than thinkers?
That’s why Bennett lost – and why Ritz won. Truth does matter, and news media who served the interests of big bucks and insidious political agendas rather than the interests of an honestly informed populace did themselves in . . . Parents and teachers looked for more reliable sources of information, because parents want the best for their children. They want their children to thrive!.
Unfortunately, it looks as if those who promoted Bennett have not given up the idea that with enough money, lies, and time they can wear the public down and hoodwink Hoosiers into accepting lesser standards for teacher preparation, un-inspired didactic instructional approaches, and curricula that value test statistics above the curiosity, imagination, and deep intellect of our children. I’m hopeful that parents’ love of their children and desire of all Hoosiers to see our children truly thrive will continue to resist Bennett’s political backers in the statehouse and allow Ritz to lead us along a path to true academic growth and freedom for our children.
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