Governor Tom Corbett has made a cushy deal for his former stat education commissioner, Ron Tomalis.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Tomalis is paid full salary, has no office, and no one is sure what work he does. He is supposed to be a higher education advisor.
“When Ron Tomalis stepped aside as state education secretary 14 months ago, he landed what seemed like a full-time assignment in a state struggling to boost college access and curb ever-rising tuition prices.
“As special adviser to Gov. Tom Corbett for higher education, Mr. Tomalis was tasked with “overseeing, implementing and reviewing” the recommendations made by the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Postsecondary Education.
“Despite the state’s fiscal crisis, the former secretary was allowed to keep his Cabinet-level salary of $139,542 plus benefits and — initially, at least — work from home. At the time, state Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller explained that the newly created job did not require an office, and Mr. Tomalis “is a professional and doesn’t need to ‘check in’ each day.”
“Now, more than a year later, records obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette through requests under the state Right-to-Know Law raise questions about how much time the governor’s office required Mr. Tomalis to spend on those duties.
“The records produced included a work calendar showing weeks with little or no activity (explore it below or click here), phone logs averaging barely over a phone call a day over 12 months and a total of five emails produced by Mr. Tomalis. The state was not able to provide any reimbursement records suggesting Mr. Tomalis traveled the state in support of his work.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am a Pennsylvania resident and tax payer. When will cronyism end? As a retired teacher and former Phila. teacher who had to beg for supplies and materials, this type of waste in state money is sickening. Let’s start from the top in education reform. It’s a grassroots effort.
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Denise,
You are SO RIGHT! It’s time we started a grassroots effort NATIONWIDE against ALL of this nonsense!!
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Walk outs, sick outs and teaching to the contracts, would be a good way to start.
These ed-reformers don’t hesitate to play hardball……….neither should teachers!
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I agree with hard ball. :o)))
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I don’t often watch news on TV, but last night I watched the local news and the “I Team” (the investigative team) was patting themselves on the back for exposing two state fair commissioners for accepting free beer tickets from their vendors. The reporter acted like this was the scandal of the century.
Now, I don’t support even minor kickbacks like free beer tickets, but all I could think was, really? With cronyism everywhere you look in this state (Illinois), they’re crowing about nailing a couple of pols for beer tickets? In a city where the head of UNO charter schools is the mayor’s campaign director? Where Gulen schools regularly fly pols out to Turkey on junkets? Where one of Mayor Emanuel’s hand-picked appointees fled to Pakistan to avoid corruption charges? And I could go on and on and on, but beer tickets at the state fair was the best they could come up with? Really?
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This on Illinois campaign finance will make your head spin:
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/07/one-gop-consultant-two-campaigns-and-a-snarl-of-outside-groups/
There is just no way an individual voter would have the time and energy to unravel this.
Voters who wanted to make a reasonably well-informed decision based on who is buying their candidates couldn’t do anything else but investigate where campaign money comes. It’s too time-consuming and complex. The whole country would grind to a halt while we all followed these money trails.
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Maybe he’s getting paid to think. For instance, my wife claims she’s working on her next book by just thinking about the plot construction and character development when she’s lifting weights, taking a shower or out jogging. This working while she thinks can go on for two years sometimes before she writes the first word of the rough draft.
In fact, lawyers are known to charge clients for thinking about the clients and/or their cases. Is this guy a lawyer? Does he play golf? Maybe Pennsylvania is paying this guy to play golf while he thinks of new ways to close public schools and turn them over to for-profit charters.
I read about a lawyer who admitted that he charged for the time he thought about a case while in the shower,eating breakfast, driving to work, etc. Once in the office, he told his secretary how much time he spent thinking of each case. Maybe he charged for his dreams while he was sleeping if the dream was about one of his clients..
The problem is that this particular lawyer must have had multiple threads of thought going on at the same time, because he charged all of his clients for the time he spent in the shower thinking about them and/or their cases. Either that or the showers and drive to work were really long.
Stretch that a bit, and the male lawyer is in the shower at 6:00 AM thinking of the young leggy female client and what she would look like nude, so he charges her for thinking about her. A half hour of sexual shower fantasies at $450 an hour would cost the client $225.
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“The Chicago mayoral race is partly a referendum on the national contentious debate over charter schools. Emanuel is a strident champion of charters, while Lewis considers them union-busting privatization and vehemently opposes them. Adding fuel to Lewis’ fire, Juan Rangel, a civic leader and an adviser to the mayor, was ousted from his post at the United Neighborhood Organization over a scandal involving the group’s alleged nepotistic politics and financial dealings at its charter schools. The organization had millions in grant money suspended, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation. In addition, another charter chain welcomed by the Emanuel administration is being investigated by the FBI.”
Is there a mayor or governor who is closely identified with anti-public school “ed reform” who is actually popular among local voters? You know, the people who use public schools (unlike Emanuel). Why don’t the people in these places like ed reform? Shouldn’t these ed reform crusaders and anti-public school activists be polling better in their own cities and states?
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/rahm-emanuel-karenlewischicagoeducationpolitics.html
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Reformers pump money into legislative campaigns in PA. There are FBI investigations of some charter schools. Teacher evals are tied into junk science VAM and worse SLO’s. There is pending legislation to overturn LIFO rule. Districts are operating on bare bones and have tightened as much as they can without sacrificing programs. The school district of Philly is crying for resources and help. All this attack against education and I believe PA is tied for third with college graduation rates. Am I surprised by this recent revelation about Mr. Tomalis-nope.
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Ooh, I’d do that job even more responsibly! Pick me, pick me! I’d even move back to PA for that kind of money. LOL
Oh, wait….. I don’t know anyone in PA government. That and I have education degrees that might be relevant. My bad. 😛
Perhaps his work in one of these related capacities qualifies him to remain on the job: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=21875676&ticker=NAUH
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Tom Corbett has been nothing short of a nightmare for public education.
If you live in Pennsylvania, please vote for Tom Wolf, the candidate who believes in teachers and children. When my ten-year-old daughter asked him about Corbett’s devastating budget cuts, he promised her that he will restore public school funding. He will amend the damage that Tom Corbett has done and lead Pennsylvania into a new era of reconstruction.
Cut and paste this URL if you would like more information on Tom Wolf’s views on education: http://www.wolfforpa.com/sections/page/education
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“Houston state Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor nominee, vowed to reach out to all Texans in his general-election campaign.
Addressing his party’s June 2014 state convention, Patrick continued: “I’m going to go into Democratic strongholds and I’m going to tell them about school choice and educational opportunities, because we have a 40 to 50 percent dropout rate in our inner-city schools, and that cannot stand, for those families and for our state.”
We wondered about those proclaimed dropout rates.
The numbers from Patrick, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, contrast sharply with those cited by the the Texas Education Agency, which reported a statewide high school dropout rate for the class of 2012 of 6.3 percent. (Austin’s high schools averaged a 3.7 percent dropout rate, topping out at LBJ High School’s 8.4 percent rate, according to the agency.) The state said nearly 88 percent of more than 316,000 seniors graduated in 2012, with another 5 percent staying in high school and 1 percent receiving GED certificates.”
So where did he get his numbers? From lobbyists!
“Spence also suggested we contact Caroline Neary of the Houston-based Children at Risk Institute; she told us the group was the source of the graduation rates that Patrick used.
Neary said the institute, which describes itself as a non-partisan research and advocacy organization dedicated to addressing the root causes of poor public policies affecting children, works from state data to calculate school graduation rates in part by choosing not to believe some of the reasons schools use to account for students leaving before graduation.
But unlike the state, the institute doesn’t assume students recorded by schools as leaving for private school or moving to a school in another state or country actually did so, instead considering such students all to be dropouts, Sanborn confirmed.
Summing up: By Patrick’s approach, the dropout rates for his subset of 11 inner-city schools ranged from nearly 41 percent to 53 percent. By the accepted state and federal gauge, the rates ranged from 5 percent to 27 percent.”
How many times have these made-up numbers been cited, I wonder?
Also, he CHAIRS the education committee, and he gets all his information from lobbyists.
Is this just sheer laziness and a refusal to do their jobs on the part of lawmakers, or actual malice?
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2014/jul/27/dan-patrick/dan-patrick-incorrectly-says-texas-has-40-percent-/
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Yes, to both
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Ron Tomalis is a “virtual” adviser in the state which, under Corbett, is the leader in virtual charters and K-12 virtual education. Same thing – wasting taxpayer dollars to win elections by paying off supporters. Tomalis’s salary would pay for three teachers, nurses, or counselors in Philadelphia but that doesn’t matter to creeps like these. Greed rules.
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