State BOE peace overrated

“I hope there will always be that clash at times. I don’t think we’re doing our job if everybody agrees on everything.” – Carol Rupe of Wichita, on the Kansas State Board of Education’s future and sometimes stormy past, as she and Steve Abrams, Bill Wagnon and Sue Gamble finished out their time as board members last week

5 Comments

  1. Chrisfrommactown
    Posted December 14, 2008 at 6:51 am | Permalink

    Thank you Steve Abrams for your years of service and enlightened leadership. To the other three, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Good riddance.

  2. Pedant
    Posted December 14, 2008 at 8:11 am | Permalink

    Steve Abrams: like Sam Brownback another Kansas fundamentalist who is perfectly happy to discard plain evidence of nature if such evidence conflicts with his faith, a wannabe 21st century Cardinal Ballarmine (although Abrams is more like a foot soldier in the American version of Bellarmine’s polemical theology), a wannabe ayatollah happy to hamstring the life-changing power of Christianity by reducing it to mere dogma.

    Thank God this brain dead bozo is over and out.

  3. nunyer
    Posted December 14, 2008 at 8:20 am | Permalink

    Yes, Steve Abrams, thank you for your years of leadership. You made sure that Kansas became a national laughingstock because of the state board’s anti-science antics. You and your buddies appointed the unqualified political hack Bob Corkins to head the state department of education. You declared yourself fit to judge who’s a “real” Christian and who’s not. You think your own limited veterinary experience makes you smarter than 99.99% of the world’s research scientists.

    As you pursue your political career in the Kansas Senate, be aware that your misdeeds have not been forgotten by the rest of the state. Your leadership has been enlightened only in the sense that you’re trying to roll back the Enlightenment.

  4. TomPaine
    Posted December 14, 2008 at 5:54 pm | Permalink

    now you get steve abrams in the state senate, hell probably do less damage as I BOE member

  5. JWink
    Posted December 15, 2008 at 10:35 am | Permalink

    Actually I don’t believe much if anything the Kansas Board of Education does reaches the teacher and student level in Kansas schools. I suppose in some mysterious way, the KBOE coordinates the 300 or so Kansas school districts.

    I do remember the previous administrator of the KBOE (sorry can’t remember his name now) wanted to establish a data base at the state level to include the names and progress of every Kansas student. He claimed some “educational purpose” but mostly its purpose was to establish a very expensive state government bureaucracy over which he would reign.

    Probably very little would change if the Kansas Board of Education would be eliminated.