Cindi Pastore created this multiple-choice exam for the people of Infiana.
It illustrates the current crazy situation there. Glenda Ritz won a startling upset victory last fall, winning more votes than Governor Pence. Yet Governor Pence has worked unceasingly to dilute Ritz’s authority and render her powerless to carry out her official duties. He and the unelected state board are thwarting her so they can continue to privatize education in the state of Indiana.
Here is the test:
An Eight Question High Stakes Test for Governor Pence, Brian Bosma, David Long, and Members of the State Board of Education
1. Who was elected by an overwhelming majority (roughly 1,300,000) of the voters (many of whom crossed their party lines) of this state to be the Indiana Superintendent of Public Schools?
a. Claire Fiddian-Greene
b. Brian Bosma
c. GLENDA RITZ
d. David Long
e. Mike Pence
f. Any of the appointed Members of the SBOE
g. Daniel Elsener
2. Who campaigned and won on the platform of re-introducing evidenced-based educational methods, policies, and standards including: more teaching and less testing, more local control for implementing standards, safe and respectful schools, high standards for educators, improved vocational education, and reserving public dollars for public schools?
a. Claire Fiddian-Greene
b. Brian Bosma
c. GLENDA RITZ
d. David Long
e. Mike Pence
f. Any of the appointed Members of the SBOE
g. Daniel Elsener
3. Who is a National Board Certified Teacher, holds two masters degrees with licenses to teach elementary, middle and high school in the areas of special education, general education, and library science, and has won both the Teacher of the Year for Washington Township Schools and a Golden Apple Award?
a. Claire Fiddian-Greene
b. Brian Bosma
c. GLENDA RITZ
d. David Long
e. Mike Pence
f. Any of the appointed Members of the SBOE
g. Daniel Elsener
4. Who held a Community Partners School Improvement Summit and started the Hoosier Family of Readers program since beginning her elected job of Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction?
a. Claire Fiddian-Greene
b. Brian Bosma
c. GLENDA RITZ
d. David Long
e. Mike Pence
f. Any of the appointed Members of the SBOE
g. Daniel Elsener
5. Who has been continually thwarted in her attempts to carry out the duties of her office, the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, by a bombardment of politically motivated and unnecessary requests for ill-conceived action and irrelevant information?
a. Claire Fiddian-Greene
b. Brian Bosma
c. GLENDA RITZ
d. David Long
e. Mike Pence
f. Any of the appointed Members of the SBOE
g. Daniel Elsener
6. Who is being hurt by the Governor, the members of the SBOE, and those legislators who are being obstructionist to Superintendent Ritz’ work?
a. The CHILDREN of this state
b. The CHILDREN of this state
c. The CHILDREN of this state
d. The CHILDREN of this state
e. The CHILDREN of this state
7. Whose money is being wasted by the creation by Governor Pence of an agency with an non-elected head, that is essentially an attempt to be a duplication of the Indiana Department of Education?
a. The TAXPAYERS of Indiana
b. The TAXPAYERS of Indiana
c. The TAXPAYERS of Indiana
d. The TAXPAYERS of Indiana
e. The TAXPAYERS of Indiana
8. Who will respond to the bullying of Superintendent Ritz by the Governor, the SBOE board members, and members of the state legislature?
a. The VOTERS in Indiana
b. The VOTERS in Indiana
c. The VOTERS in Indiana
d. The VOTERS in Indiana
e. The VOTERS in Indiana
Answer Key: For each of questions 1-5, the answer is c. For each of questions 6-8, the answers are a,b,c,d, and e.
Grading Scale: A= 8 correct answers F= 0-7 correct answers
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is GREAT. Says it all.
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Pence’s appointed leader:
“Fiddian-Green will be responsible for implementing the Governor’s vision for K12 and higher education, including the development of the administration’s policy and legislative agenda. In that role, she will provide leadership to the State Board of Education, Education Roundtable, and Indiana Charter School Board.
Currently, she serves as the founding Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board (ICSB), a statewide charter school authorizing agency created during the 2011 legislative session. There, Fiddian-Green is responsible for the overall planning, coordination, and supervision of the ICSB’s operations, including its process for authorizing new charter schools, monitoring authorized schools and holding these schools accountable for performance. She previously served as President of The Mind Trust and Grants Officer for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation.
Prior to her role at the Foundation, Fiddian-Green was employed by Eli Lilly and Company as a Senior Analyst in the company’s Corporate Finance Investment Banking group, where she focused on Licensing and Mergers & Acquisitions.”
A focus on corporate finance and Licensing, Mergers and Acquisitions probably comes in handy on a board created to promote charter schools 🙂
I notice reformers always place a charter promoter/advocate in state leadership positions. Is this equitable? Where’s the public school promoter in Pence’s administration or do public school kids just not get a special advocate? Why should there always be a special position devoted to promoting charters? I was told they were public schools.
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We’re starting to get confused on nomenclature in Ohio. Charter school promoters have renamed charter schools “community schools.” I don’t know if the word “charter” has negative connotations now or what the reason for the shift is, but they’ve dropped charter. The implication is that public schools are NOT “community schools” which is of course the opposite of the truth.
I love these subtle marketing changes, I have to say. King in New York won’t use the word “private” to describe private schools. He says (ridiculously) “non-public.”
I suppose the intent is to blur the line between public and private.
I look forward to the merger of the two terms in the next iteration: “non-public community schools” will be next.
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Very astute observations. The line between public and private has been shifting for many decades. One of the biggest problems with a democratic republic as diverse as ours lies in the interpretation of freedom for the individual and the individual’s responsibility to the community. This conflict is the main reason so many fringe politicians are elected into positions of great power. We segregate our beliefs into political platforms pitting social group against social group, demographic against demographic. Aren’t we all citizens with rights to our society? The only right citizens do not have is that which takes advantage of or brings harm to others. However, the issue of appropriating rights is never as simple as that.
It is no big surprise that with all the focus on math and reading, we have lost our collective interest in philosophy and civics. Our culture of singularity has been aided and abetted by the tech industry. Now those fringe politicians have a larger audience. By not educating that audience on social issues, we stand to further divide as a country.
Social networking without social education does very little to promote positive social skills among children, and now the first Internet generation is in charge of both making the rules that govern our communities and raising the children of today. We need policy-makers who promote learning that includes a rich curriculum of social sciences and the arts as much as reading and math.
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I wouldn’t put it past Pence and his cronies to find a way to cheat on this exam.
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Bwahahaha. You’ve got that right.
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A feature of the Republican party, which was kept hidden for many years, but now is coming out of the closet is their disdain for anyone who knows anything about the field they are supervising. Whether it is climate science, health care, monetary policy, or in this case education, if you have degrees in the area, worked in the area, win a nobel prize in the area, and have published in the area you immediately become unqualified to supervise the area. Of course the other characteristic of this party is their total disdain for the academic community. The Pence’s, the Cruz’s, the Paul’s believe that common sense and deep beliefs in their ideology will bring us through the complex problems we confront in the 21st century —after all look what no child left behind did for our schools.
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That’s not just a feature of the Republican Party. Emanuel has it in spades. Even Obama, although he’s somewhat more successful at hiding it by pretending to be deeply interested in expert input.
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Indiana gets national recognition once again!
We are ‘leaders’ in many areas…eighth most polluted air in the nation, broken infrastructure, roads with cracks and potholes, 47th in the nation for adults with college degrees, most polluted rivers in the U.S., underfunding of public schools [so more money can go to charter schools], eighth most overweight population in the nation and our recent achievement in outstanding ‘education reform’ is an increased number of vouchers and charter school expansion!
Add to this list of achievements the desire of our GOP controlled Congress and Tea Partier Governor Pence to dilute Superintendent Glitz’s responsibilities simply because she understands the needs of children and teachers.
It sometimes feels overwhelming.
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Your comment just makes me want to cry because it’s so true. God help Indiana.
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excellent
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I wonder:
How would these politicians, school board members, et al feel if they had spent a minimum of 4 years of collegiate study, spent thousands of dollars in preparation for THEIR job and then THEY were to be evaluated by people who had spent NO time in collegiate study nor thousands of dollars to prepare them for THEIR jobs, had not spent one day in doing THEIR job?
Actually the last I knew school board members were not required to even have a high school diploma to be a school board member in Indiana and yet they are the direct representative of the governor, have final say in the superintendent’s pay and tenure and at least in our school district, virtually everything of educational importance is “run past them” where they approve or disapprove of it.
AND
as Dr. Ravitch once pointed out, state school boards in Texas and California actually approve or disapprove of what is in their textbooks and if ANYTHING is in those texts which meets with their disapproval the books are not adopted which means a huge loss for the text book companies. Ergo: texts become innocuous saying virtually nothing which MIGHT be construed as controversial. As these states are so large and therefore so important …
AND we call this “education”????
What ever happened to the things which humankind’s greatest minds perceived as the goals of education: the love of knowledge, wisdom, the search for “glimmers of truth”, for virtue, integrity, etc etc.?
I am reminded of the fable of the lemmings and their mad dash to the sea to their destruction.
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As a former Indiana PS teacher, I am embarrassed by the GOP in mky natal state.
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Is Infiana a combination of Indiana and Infantile? Infantile, as in how Pence, Long, Bosma, and members of the Indiana SBOE are behaving towards Ritz and the voters? (-:
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