Last week, conservatives on the State Board of Education changed the criteria for evaluating candidates for state education commissioner and de-emphasized the importance of education experience. As a result, the national group that was helping the board identify candidates quit. Now, of the five candidates the board is considering, a main qualification of two of them seems to be that they are hard-core conservatives.
Bob Corkins, for example, does a good job providing conservative state lawmakers with information on how the state is spending too much money on schools and why it should provide private school vouchers. But Corkins, who has no education experience, is not the right person to be our state’s top education official. As Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, noted to the Lawrence Journal-World, picking Corkins “would be like putting Phill Kline in charge of Planned Parenthood.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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10 Comments
Lordy, what are they thinking? oh, that’s right. They’re NOT thinking. They’re posturing, picking idealogues that agree with them.
Good on Hensley. I still say the new commissioner should be a qualified accountant to avoid another fiasco like the one we just had.
Could it be that this is a smokecreen by the “conservatives”? Could their true goal be to find someone with their religious zeal to make Christianity the state sponsored religion in the classrooms?I am not saying it is, just asking..
Please God, don’t let them do anything that makes us look more foolish than they already have.
Commissioner Phelps?
Ray! I think so. I think they are just trying to change the criteria as to give preference to people they WANT as the commissioner, not really an individual who is best for the position.
Sounds like Corkins wants to try the old “drown the government in the bathtub” approach on Kansas schools. We all saw how well THAT worked in New Orleans, didn’t we? Hiring Corkins would be like hiring a fired Arabian horse association leader to run FEMA.
LORD HELP US!!!!!!
Yay! A little more of this ridiculousness and some of the crazies will be voted off next year, no doubt. Kansans aren’t THAT stupid. We’ll wake up and say “OMG! The public schools are being run by acid-head crazies! We should DO something!”So, BOE, keep it coming! ::laughs maniacally::
“Kansans aren’t THAT stupid.”Tara, I hope you’re right, but I wouldn’t count on it. We thought we’d settled this the last time the BOE went nuts, but the ultra-conservatives are back. There’s a war going on for the soul (as if they had a soul) of the Kansas Republican Party and guess what? It doesn’t look good for the moderates. I look for Kansas to roll back to the 18th century any moment.
Bob’s a good guy. Although he worked for the KCCI, he is more liberal than the politics would suggest. Of course, he is very conservative when compared to Anthony Hensley. Of course, 99.9% of the world is more conservative than Hensley. Posted by a liberal republican.