The information on this site does not constitute legal advice and is for educational purposes only. If you have a dispute or legal problem, please consult an attorney licensed to practice law in your state. Additionally, the information and views presented on this blog are solely the responsibility of Justin Bathon personally, or the other contributors, personally, and do not represent the views of the University of Kentucky or the institutional employer of any of the contributing editors.
Next Episode: Episode 4 is scheduled for late April. Kevin Brady will be my guest and we will discuss a few issues including cyber charter schools and some of the work we have been doing lately on education law online research. It's possible I might do an AERA episode in the meantime, though, to promote the SIG a little.
These Court cases cost a lot of money, especially when you lose. You might remember that a few years ago some counties in Kentucky wanted to put the Ten Commandments in the courthouse. The case was calledMcCreary County v. ACLU, because the ACLU sued to have them removed. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and the counties lost. Well, not only did the counties have to pay their own lawyers (to lose the case), but they now have also been ordered to pay the ACLU of Kentucky more than $400,000 in attorney's fees.
There is a price-tag to these things and I am amazed how often people are willing to pay it for relatively silly cases. In this Kentucky case, the law was pretty clear that the Ten Commandments was not going to fly in a new display in a public courthouse, even before they ever posted them. They would have been wise to listen to their counsel and forget about it - instead, local taxpayers are going to have to foot the (sizeable) bill.
If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a “tragedy of the commons” situation for news, and no one ever claimed that all problems have solutions. Decay and decline are always options, and—unless some mechanism is found to let producers of information monetize their work—inevitabilities. Absent institutional invention, a government-funded news service seems not just possible but likely, possibly supplemented by privately funded organizations with varying axes to grind.
So, if the government is going to have to be a bigger player, the question is whether there is a role for schools to fill this void? As schools become more technologically savvy and have more and more publishing equipment on hand, perhaps they can play some role in producing local news? Even if it is just online. In some small towns the local news is literally the beautyshop, the church bulliten and the school newsletters. In many rural communities the local newspaper basically was the school marketing arm anyway, publishing everything from sports photos, to the honor roll, to the cafeteria lunch schedule. In urban communities, as the companies cut-back local positions and purchase more and more of their content from AP like sources, the local school events are being ignored.
I think schools need to be better at media and marketing anyway. What if they just took some responsibility to produce a little local news in whatever form they had the capacity to accomplish? I know it is one more thing, but I could see quite a few benefits. First and foremost, from an administration standpoint, you get to control the local narrative. That's very important. But, also, this could help student writing if they wrote most of the stories. They would also learn more about their local communities. Students might go to city council meetings, for instance. It would also help communities by continuing to give them a voice and identity.
This wouldn't be the first time that schools assumed a community role. The downtown playhouses of the past are now just empty shells, but the auditoriums are still in our high schools regularly putting out South Pacific. The school has the local band. Hosts local dances. Provides weekend entertainment with local football and basketball games. In a lot of ways the schools have slowly been becoming the local hubs of entertainment and information anyway. Could this be next?
Something to think about when the local paper closes shop in your community.
the kids don't come back. It's all just junk - or worse than that, pollution. This reminds me of a recent book I read, The World Without Us. Never thought an American public school would be reminding me of this book, but check out this amazing photoessay on permanently closed Detroit Public Schools.
This little recession of ours is a good reminder of why public schools exist. They don't send kids home when the bill is not paid, like private schools do.
So far this year, 7 percent of children enrolled in privates have transferred back over to publics, according to the latest Time Magazine.
Sorry, a little off topic today, but I have spent the better part of the last week in redesign meetings here at the University of Kentucky. We are (re)designing our teacher leadership Master's, our principalship post-master's and our Ed.D. (and Ed.S. and instructional supervisor, etc. ... it's all on the table ... which is both cool and scary).
Anyway, with everything on the table, I find myself thinking perhaps we should make a professional degree for teachers akin to that of law, medicine, veterinary, dental surgery, etc. It would not be the inital degree, but here in Kentucky the state has mandated that all teachers receive Masters degrees within 10 years of taking their first job. So, every teacher in Kentucky is going to be doing graduate work anyway ... so what about doing that in professional schools?
"A professional degree is one that, based on its learning objectives and types of positions its graduates pursue, prepares students with a broad mastery of the subject matter and methods necessary in a field of practice; it typically requires students to develop the capacity to organize, analyze, interpret and communicate knowledge in an applied manner."
"A research or academic degree program is one that, based on its learning objectives and the paths its graduates follow, prepares students for scholarly careers, particularly in academia and other research settings; it typically prepares students to investigate, acquire, organize, analyze and disseminate new knowledge in a discipline or field of study."
Seems like the former rather than the latter is what teachers need, right? I'm not the first to suggest this. In fact, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate has this consideration as one of its central tenets (and UK is a Carnegie Project University) and some of these universities are openly stating it should be considered along similar lines to the J.D. and M.D.
But, if it is to be a "professional degree" it must come with the benefits of the "professional school."
For me personally as a professor, the flexibility granted to professional schools is what is most attractive. Living in the law school world and the ed. school world are two totally different experiences. It was not that law was more flexible per say, it was just that flexibility was within reach instead of 6 meetings away, like it is in the education world where there is committee approval after committee approval. For instance, while at SIU I started a J.D./M.E.A. joint degree. On the graduate side I had to do faculty senate meetings and lots of others. On the law side, the Associate Dean said "go" and that was basically it.
I also like the prestige that comes with professional school degrees. The J.D. is not equal to the Ph.D. in the eyes of academia, but pretty much everywhere else it is. I see no reason the Ed.D. could not serve a similar purpose in becoming a professional degree instead of an academic "doctorate" per say. At most places the Ed.D. is a somewhat less substantial degree than the Ph.D. anyway, so why not package it into a professional model? It would certainly be hard to pay teachers so little with a "D." in the letters after their name. If "doctor" is too much for your taste, perhaps we could offer the Ed.S.?
I don't know. I am just playing with the idea, but I think it has some merit. There are obviously a lot of issues to work out, such as the number of students (I would venture that there are four-times as many teachers as doctors and lawyers combined ... do you try to get them all the degree?) - but I don't think it is an idea that should be dismissed out of hand.
We got a pretty big problem folks and it is an elephant in the room that no one is talking about. I've mentioned on here before about the pension system disaster that is looming, but its time to talk about it again.
First, read this article from Bloomberg on the potential 1trillion dollar bailout that may be necessary to keep these systems afloat (it's long but stick with it).
Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion.
With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion.
I have researched a little in this area (view report on midwestern systems here) and I can tell you even before the economic collapse these systems scared the hell out of me. The assets just don't really justify the payouts. These pension systems need to make upwards of 8 percent interest every year to try to cover that difference, but even in good years an 8 percent return on investment is difficult. To get there they need increasingly riskier investments, which when the bottom falls out like it has these past months, plummet like rocks leaving the pension system with -30 percent returns, like we have seen: Indiana, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Alabama, etc. Then, absurdly, some legislators have even proposed borrowing against what's left in the pension fund - effectively putting everything at risk. On top of that, we learn in this Bloomberg article that these weird accounting rules mask the real danger and allow legislators to continue to underfund these systems ... basically guaranteeing future failure unless either a) the economy shoots up like a rocket or b) our children and grandchildren try and figure something else out.
And, we should note that this is NOT a social security problem. Just because you hear reports out there that social security is solvent until 2030 or whatever does not mean state defined-benefit pension systems are. In fact, social security potentially is the much more healthy entity here, as is Medicare. Think about that for a second ... social security is the healthier entity!
We need to start seriously considering some changes to these systems, for financial solvency purposes if nothing else. States are making guarantees to teachers in lieu of paying them more up front, which is fine, but if you are putting off payment obligations like that you should also be storing away the right amount of money to cover those obligations, which the states are not doing. Vanderbilt just had a conference on this very issue, but we need more than talk right now. Some states are beginning conversations, but I have not seen any substantive progress yet. As the nation tightens it's belt, states should consider serious pension reforms among the various options. I love a defined-benefit plan as much as the next guy, but if the benefits are not going to be there because a) the benefits are never delivered or delivered in a reduced capacity (most likely) or b) the benefits get put there but bankrupt states (less likely but very possible given our current habit of trillion dollar spending sprees), then it is not really a plan at all. Right now, our plan is see no evil, hear no evil and certainly for the love of god don't speak any evil.
Justin Bathonon Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 6:50PM
The guy that hired me, now the President of NCATE, presented on reforming university-based education schools today at the American Enterprise Institute. But, while I was at the site, I thought I would check if they ever posted their video of their summit on 50 years of judicial involvment in education.
From Brown to "Bong Hits": Assessing a Half-Century of Judicial Involvement in Education is now posted with the video, papers and presentations from the speakers. I will have to admit here that I did not watch the video, as it is 7 and 1/2 hours long. But, I wanted to support the AEI for having such a summit and considering these issues, even if we may disagree on some elements. You might want to skip around and try to watch parts of it. If you find parts of it that are especially good, please leave a comment so that I can be sure to check it out.
Megan McArdle at The Atlantic reminded me of a topic I have been wanting to come back to ... the amount of law in education. At ELA this year, we had Philip K. Howard give a general session on his book Life Without Lawyers, the general premise of which is that there is too much law (and relatedly too many lawyers) in society and that we would all be better off if we generally reduced the amount of rules.
It is a general principle of mine that we need more lawyers in education, not less. Lawyers tend to professionalize the situations they are in, which, I guess, is another way of saying they tend to bureaucratize situations. Think of medicine. Lawyers have flocked en masse to medicine in the past few decades. Yes, there are ambulance chasers and the medical system can be a nightmare to navigate and it is way too expensive, but there are also professional boards, competent licensing, real internships, above adequate compensation ... and, let's not forget, life expectancies have skyrocketed (1950 life expectancy of 68, 2008 life expectancy 78 -- ten years is a LOT in a 60 year span - now not all of that is attributable to professionalization, but a lot of it is). So, the beauty of professionalization is there can be direct impacts on people's outcomes and more, real, built in accountability, whether it be health or education.
Thus, on the one hand we have everybody proclaiming that we need more professionalization in education and on the other there is a general notion that there is too much bureaucracy. The lawyers help professionalize the situation, but in doing so they make a lot of new rules.
So, which is it?
Can it be both or are these competing ideas?
Do we agree with Howard and McArdle that less rules are typically preferable? Or, are we willing to live with the rules if it means real gains in student learning?
Today we are debuting a new feature, Edjurist TV. The plan here is to record interviews of some of the movers and shakers in the education law community, giving them an opportunity to talk about their area of expertise. Most of the videos will be both audio and video, but this first one is audio only (i.e. a podcast). You'll see more of these, including with some possible sponsorships, over the coming months.
But, today in Episode 1 I had the opportunity to sit down with Gina Umpstead, an Assistant Professor at Central Michigan University. She has been following the NCLB litigation closely, with a particular focus on the Pontiac v. Spellings case out of Michigan. So, in this episode, we chatted it up about that case and the en banc hearing at the 6th Circuit and its possible ramifications on NCLB reauthorization. I was wholly impressed with her expertise on this topic and I think you will be as well (I think she sort of outshines me by plenty).
It's snowing here in Lexington today. Not a lot, but a little. So, the local schools decided to call off school an hour early, which means all our classes in the department that are hosted at local schools are cancelled as well. Kentucky has had a pretty rough winter (relatively) so students have missed a lot of school already this year and will have to make some of it up in June.
So, with just a dash of snow, just rhetorically I asked out loud, "why are they cancelling school today?" The immediate reply was "because they are afraid to get sued."
That struck me as a very odd answer - but perhaps there is some truth to it. For me, you close school because the roads are dangerous, parents and students are worried, the school doesn't have power (a real problem in Kentucky this past week), or some other reason that ultimately boils down to "the safety of the kids."
But, today we just had a little snow. No reasonable person would really think any student is in danger, even on an old 2 wheel drive bus. Yet, we cancelled school? Perhaps there is some truth to it?
What's odd, though, is that I think it would be the very rare occasion when a school would actually lose a lawsuit from an injured student if a bus slid off the road. The decision to cancel school is a discretionary decision and in most states such decisions are provided immunity from negligence - so, while the school may be sued for negligence in their decision, it is very unlikely that they would win such a lawsuit. Now, when a school district also owns and operates the busses, there is potential for liability to pay for injuries to students - however, this exists all the time, whether or not there is snow on the ground and with just a dusting of snow the risk is really not all that much greater than an inch of rain. And, schools have insurance for just such an occurence.
What's amazing is that some districts have made a decision to virtually never cancel school; Chicago hasn't cancelled in 10 years and even when they did in 1999 it took 22 inches of snow (Pres. Obama joked about this the other day). They are not flooded with litigation. Universities regularly hold a non-closure policy (The University of Michigan hasn't cancelled classes in 30 years). In fact, I would probably argue creating the expectation of rarely or never cancelling school will probably result in even fewer lawsuits as parents are not faced with uncertainty and the room to question the administration.
The fear of litigation really should not be driving schools to close because even though you may be sued, you are probably not going to lose. Administrators should feel confident in holding classes on days with snow as long as the reasonable safety of the students is not in question. And, I am sort of against erring on the side of caution here as well as missed learning is a substantial detriment to students. By the way, studying the motivation of snow days would make a great dissertation for somebody.
Update: Here is a handy guide for school administrators.
Justin Bathonon Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 12:16AM
Just wanted to point all my readers to this great resource from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on school law. Be sure to check out their School Law Topics and their Index of School Law with citations to statute. Very well done Missouri. Kudos.
Justin Bathonon Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 12:17PM
That's the amount of money ready to be invested in schools in America's cities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has released a report outlining all the projects that are "ready to go" that could potentially be funded by the Stimulus Package that is being put together right now in Congress with guidance from the Obama Administration. Ready to go meaning that the project would begin in 2009 and would be finished by the end of 2010. Also, remember, this is not all the school projects across the U.S., it is just those in cities with populations over 30,000 (the required population to be a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors).
The list of school projects is quite interesting. There are 1066 line items, but the line items vary greatly from projects under $10,000 to projects over $100,000,000. The descriptions of the projects also vary widely. I've included some comparisons below so you can get a sense of the requests.
Overall, I think there are wide differences in the types of Stimulus spending requests. I am concerned that the list is populated with a lot more fixing roofs and a lot fewer installing fiberoptic networks, but I was impressed with some of the requests. There were a lot of projects that were meant to green schools, and it is hard to see how those will not be funded under the Stimulus Package. While I understand that school infrastructure is a necessary operation and in tight budget times upgrades to facilities are few and far between. But, I would much rather see these Stimulus dollars going to projects that change the operation of the school (such as solar panels, wireless access, fiberoptic connections), rather than projects that just maintain the status quo (new boilers, roofs, busses, etc.).
Anyway, feel free to check it out and see what your city is asking for.
The big education story in the New York Times today is on the Public Service Academy and I wanted to highlight it because I am indirectly connected to it through a friend of a friend and it is gaining momentum to the point where it is probably more likely to happen than not (a lot of new folks in the Obama Administration support it, although not Obama himself, yet anyway).
Here's the idea: We have West Point to train the best of the best in the Army. We have the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. Why not have a top flight Academy for Government Servants as well? Students would get a four year free ride in exchange for five years of paid public service. In theory it is a win-win (as long as those students prove useful for the money the government spends on them).
My friend Suzanne Eckes, who worked in Mississippi with the guy who started it, told me about the idea as far back as a couple of years ago and I have never settled on whether I liked or disliked it. Several of the campuses around D.C. already serve this purpose, such as George Washington U., which my sister attends. And what of all the public oriented programs around the United States such as the Patterson School of Diplomacy here at UK? Plus, I don't really like the name (I hope the Congress gives it a name other than the Public Service Academy) and the logo is even worse (I think the need to hire a creative director!). On top of all that, there is no guarantee this is going to work. Are the best and brightest really going to go to the Public Service Academy rather than Kennedy School of Government? The military academies pretty much have a monopoly whereas this school would have to compete with the best of the best that have been around for centuries.
Well, I am officially going to support this idea and I will probably send a note to my Congressmen here in Kentucky about it. The fact is that we do need people more excited about being in government. Does anyone send their kid off to college to be a bureaucrat? Yet, as these hard times have made clear, we need to reflect on who really runs this country? Who's got this country's back when times are hard? Its our government servants that are there to steady the ship. As a country, we need the best and brightest to be willing to leave Wall Street and take a job on Independence Ave. (its the street on which the Department of Ed. sits). Yes, I think there will be challenges for the PSA (see, that doesn't work at all), but for a relatively low price (200 million/year) we could potentially train a consistent crop of educated and informed bureaucrats that could make our government better from the inside. I think that is a chance worth taking.
Justin Bathonon Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 12:41PM
Some controversial new FERPA regulations are set to take effect on Jan. 8th. FERPA stands for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and in schools, both K-12 and higher ed., it is the set of regulations that govern how student information is released. The Act authorizes the Department of Education to pass regulations clarifying the details of the law and it is under that authority that the DOE is releasing these new regulations, which the Wall Street Journal called the most sweeping update in twenty years.
NSBA's LegalClips sums up the provisions in the new regulations thusly:
The final regulations clarify permissible disclosures to parents of eligible students and conditions that apply to disclosures in health and safety emergencies; clarify permissible disclosures of student identifiers as directory information; allow disclosures to contractors and other outside parties in connection with the outsourcing of institutional services and functions; revise the definitions of attendance, disclosure, education records, personally identifiable information, and other key terms; clarify permissible redisclosures by state and federal officials; and update investigation and enforcement provisions.
The Student Press Law Center has come out with a harsh criticism of the new regulations as unduly limiting the public's ability to get information about the performance of schools and students. But, having read some of the details on this, I just don't see that much wrong with these amendments. I think the expansion in the definition of personally identifiable information is not that much different from the original. The new language is essentially whether a "reasonable person in the school community" could identify the student in the educational record "with reasonable certainty." That doesn't strike me as an unreasonable definition, but I would agree that it is likely to make school officials even more restrictive in the types of information they allow the public to see. As the SPLC notes, simple redacting may not be enough anymore under these regulations ... but I don't really see the problem with that. Perhaps you disagree, but I don't really have a problem with the regulations privileging privacy over accountability, which is what the SPLC complains about.
Undoubtedly there is a lot of misinformation out there about FERPA and it is one of the least understood of the federal laws that apply to education. These new regulations surely do not help that as much of the new regulatory structure is adding additional requirements on schools. For instance, if a school wants to contract with an outside evaluator to run some of the school's data, there is a whole new set of procedures to assure the outside evaluator treats the student information correctly. Additionally, these regulations require new paperwork between schools and researchers that are using student data. So, I don't really see anything in these regulations that are going to make this easier to understand for school officials. But, I also don't see anything in the regulations that strike me as inappropriate. Most of the changes seem to make some sense. The DOE even incorporated the Supreme Court's ruling in Owasso. Overall, I don't see anything that is going to be too difficult for schools to deal with. But, feel free to disagree in the comments section.
I am not going to spend a lot of time criticizing the pick beyond what I already said about my disappointment of an Illinois pick and how this reminds me of the Rod Paige pick - and we all know how fabulously that worked out. If you want analysis of the pick here is Eduwonk, Carl Cannon, Yglesias, BoardBuzz, ASCD, and Alexander Russo has some more links to background on Duncan (really Russo has been all over this - he did a good job, especially with this post saying we all need to slow down a little). Also, be sure to check out Eduwonkette's look at NAEP scores under Duncan with the Quick and the Ed following up. Anyway, there is plenty of analysis out there, just google it.
Here is my thing: Obama is entitled to put some of his friends in the cabinet and this was clearly one of those circumstances -- he picked his basketball buddy from Chicago. Sure he has some creds, but, being honest, he is not qualified for this position. He clearly has some political skills, but the guy has never even been a teacher.
I am not totally annoyed by this because we have come to expect it. But, let's compare this to the energy pick announced yesterday, Steven Chu ... literally a Nobel Prize winner, professor at one of America's best colleges, and director of one of our national research labs. He's written, he's researched, he's served, he's practiced - he is superbly qualified. That's a serious pick showing serious committment to energy reform. Duncan in comparison to Chu looks like ... well, a basketball player.
That leaves me with 2 questions:
1. Where are the qualified people like Chu in education?
2. Why are we not serious about producing people like Chu?
And, sorry if this post is long, but I want to address both of those.
1. It is hard to blame Obama because I am not sure there are qualified people like Chu in education. First, we separate research from practice. I struggle with this in my own department. We produce school leaders that may research. The policy department down the hall produces researchers that may practice, but there is little expectation that either live in each other's world. This Duncan guy has probably read fewer that 10 scholarly articles in his life. So, literally, there was no one like Chu out there to choose from. Duncan and Klein and Rhee and Bennett and others have some practical experience and some interdisciplinary skills (mostly lawyers and politicians), but they have never researched, are probably not well read, have little or no teaching experience, etc., etc. On the other hand, folks like Linda Darling-Hammond, who is extremely well qualified on the research and scholarship side, has little administrative experience outside higher ed. Why don't we have educational administrators that also research and publish as a matter of course?
2. This of course leads to the second question of why we are not serious about producing people like that? Is it money? That might be part of the problem. It probably took several hundred thousand dollars to educate Chu and probably several million to equip him with labs and tools. Is it the subject? That might be part of the problem. It is a lot easier to do experimental science on a molecule than a kid. Is it infrastructure? That might be part of the problem. There were plenty of labs and colleges for Chu to work at. In education there are only a few and they rarely hire. I could go on, but its not necessary. The fact is that when it comes to energy America has made a serious committment to people. When it comes to education ... well, we're good at talking about being serious ... here's Obama:
For years, we have talked our education problems to death in Washington, but failed to act, stuck in the same tired debates that have stymied our progress and left schools and parents to fend for themselves: Democrat versus Republican; vouchers versus the status quo; more money versus more reform – all along failing to acknowledge that both sides have good ideas and good intentions.
We cannot continue on like this. It is morally unacceptable for our children – and economically untenable for America. We need a new vision for a 21st century education system – one where we aren’t just supporting existing schools, but spurring innovation; where we’re not just investing more money, but demanding more reform; where parents take responsibility for their children’s success; where we’re recruiting, retaining, and rewarding an army of new teachers; where we hold our schools, teachers and government accountable for results; and where we expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college and get a good paying job.
Sounds good, right? So why don't we just get serious about this for once instead of picking our buddies as our leaders?
Update: Sorry, I do hate to keep harping on this, but I do feel this was a very instructive moment. First, check out Alfie Kohn in The Nation who actually makes a lot of the same points I do. Second, I am attaching a video at the end here to illustrate the difference between Arne Duncan and Steven Chu. First, you are probably not even going to find Arne Duncan in videos like this, but even if you do, compare what he is likely to say against what Chu says in this clip. Chu proposes a RADICAL idea: photosynthetic machines. He is interested in disruptive innovation. Duncan, at best, is interested in incremental innovation.
By now you have probably seen the reports. Rumors are swirling around Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and with the Obama team, where there is smoke there is fire so I feel pretty confident we will see a presser in the next couple days announcing this.
As I said before, Arne Duncan was the only person on the list I was absolutely against. I don't know his background (apparently he is a basketball player and has no graduate degree in education, again!) and I have certainly never met him, but after the Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings homer picks from Texas, the one criteria I would not budge on with this pick was that it not be from Illinois. With all the qualified candidates throughout the entire United States, why in the world do presidents insist on bringing in their home state players in education? I thought the Duncan pick was probably dead after the Illinois debacle of the past week, but apparently not. I also thought Obama's pick for Energy, a world renown scientist, signaled a respect for demonstrated expertise, but apparently not.
I may have more to say on the pick over the next couple weeks as this plays out, but for now I am just sort of disgusted that the transition team picked an education chief that works only a mile away from their headquarters in Chicago. Highly disappointing.
Sort of off topic, but I am a proud Kentuckian today. By now you have heard the governor of my home state of Illinois has been arrested. This is just the latest in a long line of corruption stretching back decades. It is embarrassing.
I have sort of alluded to it before, but I don't miss Illinois politics at all. I never had a ton of experience in it, but going to law school in Illinois and working with the department of education for a couple years was enough for me. When I moved to Indiana it was a totally different story and it is similar here in Kentucky. Here is a post I wrote earlier this year which is worth reading again.
You are never going to get all the politics out of education, but Illinois has taken politics to a whole different level. There is so much politics in Illinois that at some point it becomes only about the politics and power, not about democracy.
Justin Bathonon Saturday, December 6, 2008 at 10:52AM
In his weekly YouTube address this week President Obama outlined his economic recovery infrastructure building plans, which included a major statement about our schools. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of this as I have been advocating for our schools to "go green" in a coordinated manner for a long time as well as upgrade our technological infrastructure. This is just flat a good idea and it is good to see Obama helping to stimulate our economy by helping to ensure our future.
Here is the relevant section:
Third, my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.
As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.
Thank you Sec. Reich for paying attention to what this economic crisis is doing to our schools while we hand out Monopoly money to every Citi, Fannie and Ford that sticks their hand out.
Justin Bathon on 
