In a shocking affront to the democratic process and to conservative principles, Governor Mike Pence stepped up his efforts to strip away the authority of Glenda Ritz, the elected state superintendent of education.
Her predecessor Tony Bennett was treated as a hero. Ritz is treated as an illegitimate outcast because she disagrees with the Governor’s radical plans to privatize public education and reduce all education to Big Data.
The Governor created a shadow agency, to which he is transferring decision making. The staff of the shadow agency writes proposals for the state board appointed by Pence and his predecessor Mitch Daniels.
The board’s decisions are made by email, and it does not bother to include Ritz, the chair of the board, on its email chain. Ritz and members of the public have lodged complaints about violations of the state’s open meetiings law, this far without success.
Now a group of citizens has filed a lawsuit to stop this travesty and violation of democratic process and state law.
The greatest insult is not to Glenda Ritz but to the voters of Indiana and the rule of law.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With parental support, Ritz will prevail. Parents will register complaints with state legislators. Votes will be tied to local public schools – not corporate reform.
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William McKinsey, a writer for the Dallas Morning News is one of those people who just won’t give up the idea of rigorous testing. He’s touting Poland and their success on PISA.. Anyone have the real facts on this country other than they tested themselves into better outcomes?
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/columnists/william-mckenzie/20131206-will-texas-follow-the-poland-model-for-education.ece
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What an affront to democracy. I bet ALEC is behind this. And I believe the governor will win because of ALEC pouring $$$ into their agenda.
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There’s more to it than just the money. Pence had no opponent. At least not a real one. The Democratic candidate’s sole claim was his hat – I kid you not. Pretty much anyone with half a brain and an ounce of experience could have won against Pence – he really wasn’t that popular. So why didn’t anyone credible run against him? The same thing seems to be happening in Illinois too. Not many people left who can stomach Emanuel, but no one’s running against him. Governor Quinn just slit his throat by picking Vallas as his running mate and signing the pension theft bill, but again, no challenger (except for Republican Rauner who is the same or worse). What’s happening to credible challengers? Is this a nationwide phenomenon?
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I agree that not many people are stepping up to challenge some of these terrible politicians, but Pence’s challenger was John Gregg, a formidable candidate who used his gigantic mustache (not hat) as a way to get attention, which is hard to do as a Democrat in Indiana. What got Pence elected was a local celebrity, Rupert of the CBS Survivor TV show that ran as a libertarian. Pence barely won, getting just 50% of the total votes which is a terrible result considering the political realities of Indiana. But the vote totals reflect the influence of the activism of teachers in the state. We were able to start a true grass roots movement against the GOP and their heavy-handed control of the state, and in the process we have made them really mad. Look for the election 2014 to be a turning point here in the Hoosier state, with teachers and the rest of “Glenda’s Army” putting candidates in office that will back her and put the brakes on the theft of our public education system that Pence is leading.
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My parents are from Hobart – I’m just going with what they said. They said hasn’t been this embarrassing to be a Hoosier since Dan Quayle. If the Democratic candidate was “formidable”, it certainly didn’t show in his campaign. They held their noses and voted for him anyway just because he wasn’t Pence, but they said he was a joke.
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Poland raised its PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores from considerably below average in 2003 to 518 in both reading and math in 2012. Many experts think it did this principally by getting rid of early tracking that prevented large numbers of children from continuing an academic education. The PISA scores are easily available on Wikipedia.
On PISA’s point scale 500 is average by definition and 30 points are said to equal about a year of schooling. In 2012 the US PISA scores were 498 in reading and 481 in math. Poland currently scores about nine months ahead of the USA in reading and a year and a quarter in math (that is assuming a year’s schooling is 12 months, which isn’t quite accurate, I know).
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Couldn’t care less about Poland’s PISA score nor the USA score!
Why not? Because they are meaningless! See Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Quoting Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
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The same thing has been going on in NY State for 3 years. The privately funded Regents Research Fund team of “fellows” have been writing the reform agenda. They are not public servants. They provide their information to Tisch and King.
See:
http://m.timesunion.com/local/article/Wealth-backs-reform-team-5006670.php?t=5abf8544d7
and
http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2013/11/tisch-king-gates-foundation-should-be.html
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May the citizens of Indiana pounce . . . . . .
on Pence.
This is an outright perversion of law, and any court understanding the true mechanisms of law and democracy ought to strike down the governor’s ploy and articulate that Ritz is the go-to person for education policy.
The people have spoken.
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Impeachment seems to be a likely path for many of these governors…
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Doesn’t that have to start with the legislature? The Indiana legislature is heavily in Pence’s back pocket.
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I hope that the citizens’ lawsuit prevails, but I can’t help but wonder if School Gal’s suspicions are correct.
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This is how things are done in the U.S. these days. Democratic processes are circumvented by politicians serving as windup toys for plutocrats.
The legislation that established the federal Department of Education specifically prohibited that department from doing curricula. So, since the boys club at Achieve and the Gates Foundation and Murdoch wanted national standards, and since they are the bosses, the fiction had to be created that the new national standards had nothing to do with curricula and were adopted, freely, by the states. (E.D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog, a few weeks ago, that the CCSS in math clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and, of course, the CCSS in ELA have dramatic consequences for curricula.) And we all know about the RttT arm-twisting.
So, clearly, the DOE violated its own charter, and its language to the contrary (e.g., calling the CCSS “state” standards) is just Orwellian Newspeak.
The governor is simply taking his cue from the feds. If you don’t like some democratic process, create a legalistic rationale to go around it. It doesn’t matter how flimsy it is, not in a country that has given up the pretense of being a democratic state.
Welcome to the banana republic without the bananas.
About those politicians and their doublespeak: “And be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with us in a double sense” –Shakespeare, Macbeth
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Looking at the widespread influence of Gates, Walmart, ALEC, Koch Bros, Pierson, and governors like Scott, Kasich, Snyder, Christy, and all those interconnected to privatizing education and e-education, I have to wonder if the bigger scheme of things has to do with recreating the US into mobile and transient populations with little connection to family or community. If you break down community bonds through breaking up schools, you have acn easier chance to change jobs everyb2-3 years and if education is the same wherever you move and if it is via the computer, then the transition won’t be so traumatic. Jus unplug your computer in Houston and plug it in in Pennsylvania. No classmates. No permanence. No loyalties. No obligations. Just trudge through life until you die. Sounds more and more like Orwell was onto something. How far-fetched it once seemed that history, books, even people could be “erased” or that data could be collected on every person …or that computer cameras could spy in our homes. I shuddered when I read it the first time. Now I think, “We are there!”
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Orwell finished 1984 in 1948, so he chose the data arbitrarily as a kind of pointed, grim proclamation that the ugly future depicted in his book was but a projection of trends that he saw around him at the time. It now appears that 1984 was a bit optimistic. Orwell was off by a few years.
We are now creating technologies and systems and precedents for a kind of centralized surveillance state that exceed even Orwell’s most diabolical imaginings.
The two-way telescreens of Orwell’s book are NOTHING compared to our NSA collocation centers for intercepting and permanently storing people’s electronic communications. The helicopters of Orwell’s Minitrue (Ingsoc’s minstry of propaganda and thought control) are NOTHING compared to the miniature spy drones that are currently being refined.
Minitrue would have loved having all citizens carrying around pocket devices that could be used to identify, precisely, at any time, their locations using a satellite system (GPS) and a unique identification number (a cell phone number) and would have loved having national online diaries where people post every little detail of their private lives (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). And what are our cameras on every street with facial recognition technology behind them but first-generation Orwellian public space telescreens?
He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
We’ve already created one of the key conditions that Orwell predicted–a state of being perpetually at war–of being engaged in a “war” without end that justifies breathtaking measures like the consolidation of many, many formerly separate government functions under one directorate–the Dept. of Homeland Security.
And we have given the president absolute extralegal authority, under the NDAA, to declare a citizen a terrorist, based on his or her sole judgment, and then to act toward that person completely outside the legal system (thus creating a legal means for completely eliminating habeas corpus when convenient).
And, we have dramatically undermined posse comitatus by breaking down barriers of communication between police and military intelligence services and by creating, on our own soil, military units for civilian crowd control. In ancient Rome, the legions would carry before them a fasces–a bundle of rods tied around an axe. But while within the city of Rome proper, the axe had to be removed as a symbol that the military and civilian powers were separate. From these fasces we get our word “fascist.” We’re blurring that line between military and civilian authority even as I write this. OVer 30,000 applications for use of drones have been filed with the FDA by U.S. police departments, and every police department, just about, now has firepower of military grade.
And all this seems just fine to most folks.
And the interesting thing is that these technologies and systems that we are creating–technologies and systems that in many respects out-Orwell Orwell–will be in the hands of ANY FUTURE GOVERNMENT OF THIS COUNTRY–whatever its unpredictable morality and whatever the environmental and economic exigencies that exist. Good people can go along with this stuff NOT REALIZING WHAT POTENTIAL FOR FUTURE ABUSE IT CREATES.
Now, one might argue that even if we are creating the means by which a future U.S. government can turn this into a full-fledged totalitarian state, such a turn of events will not last because totalitarian systems will inevitably fail because of their own stupidity, as did the Soviet Union. But history provides many examples of extremely tyrannical, despotic centralized authorities that lasted for hundreds, even thousands of years. See Marvin Harris’s discussion of “hydraulic societies,” like those of ancient Sumer and Egypt, in his Cannibals and Kings.
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And, we have those stalwart defenders of “liberty,” the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, Achieve, ALEC, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute FALLING ALL OVER THEMSELVES to create a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat to decide what will be taught to the young. I would never have thought such a thing possible, for the contradiction between the professed value and the creation is so blatantly obvious. But there is a kind of complete heedlessness to this deform movement–a lockstep inability to think beyond a few platitudes to see what they are enabling.
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I am not trying to get into conspiracy theory. I just believe that, as in each “age” of change, we are dealing with transitions that are culture-wide and not in isolation.
My Orwellian references are not out of fear so much as thinkng we need to look at the totality of the rapid changes that are over-taking our lives in every aspect — for better or worse.
We truly need to figure out where we are headed and, as educators, make sure we lead, not be forced to follow. The ability to lead is being grabbed by uninformed people who have conned their way into wealth and think their data gathering is a meaningful solution to all of society’s ills. We have to stand up against the uninformed but controlling few who have the funding to use their data for their own purposes. There are so many aspects of change happening simultaneously that we have a huge responsibility to stand strong against them. How? I don’t know.
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It’s interesting that I simply made a list of recent events and another blogger responded by saying that she didn’t want to get into conspiracy theory. When such a list makes people think about dark cabals of puppeteers behind the scenes–that, in itself, is interesting. My point is that the technologies and systems that we are creating, however well intended by those creating them, provide very, very dangerous powers to ANY FUTURE GOVERNMENT–powers that one wouldn’t want to have in the wrong hands. We vote on the possibility of turning our federal government to a new set of crooks every four years. Do we really want to have these powers in the hands of ANY FUTURE GOVERNMENT in ANY FUTURE CIRCUMSTANCES?
If it is possible for them to be really dramatically abused, to be used to create a totalitarian state, it is highly likely that they will be, at some point, so used.
Have you ever known humans to create a technology and then to say, “Yeah, but let’s never use that”?
Of course not.
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I don’t know if they are crazy or crazy like a fox. I am not sure some of them are smart enough to be part of a conspiracy or not. They tend to throw out names and accusations that seem to convey a low level of intelligence.
They seem to be lemmings. The parts of the master plan seem to come from unlikely sources that don’t appear to have similar goals.
And maybe they don’t need to walk in concert if they have one set of goals in common. All the pieces are gathering momentum to fall in place if no one can afford to stand up against them.
Privatizing seems to accomplish one thing: it puts decisions and money in the hands of the powerful, the protectors of the pre60s era of American morality and the “haves”. They just don’t seem to care about the people who gained their rights of citizenship in the 60s and onward. It seems anything will be said and/or done to keep “that America” intact. So if there is a conspiracy, that would be it.
But whether ALEC or Gates or Walmart are the coordinators or not, it is happening.
The fall of America will come from the inside.
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The telephone number for Ritz’s office is (317) 232-6613; even though I live in California, I’ll call her tomorrow just to wish her well.
The staff directory for her office is here:
http://www.doe.in.gov/idoe/superintendent
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We can’t impeach or recall the Governor in Indiana as in other states. What we can do is neuter him so he has no power to implement any more of his crazy plans.
In 2014 all the House members and half the Senate members are up for election. We need to remove as many republicans as possible from both houses to get rid of their super majority and hopefully change the leadership in them both.
Take back the power!
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Professor Ravitch:
I just spotted this on the Indiana State Teacher Website:
https://ista-in.org/sboe-website-disappearance-and-botched-video-just-another-example-of-pence-power-grab
And Governor Pence was the keynote speaker for ALEC:
https://ista-in.org/pence-headlining-at-alec-policy-summit-promotes-corporate-takeover-of-schools
What is this…another attempt at “Pence-orship”?
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