It's time once again for Scholar to take a look back at the year just past, and ponder what it all might mean for the year ahead.

Best Full Court Press: The Education Establishment

The DFL was spanked in the 2002 elections with the election of Tim Pawlenty as governor, a large Republican majority in the House, and a narrower DFL majority in the Senate. Governor Pawlenty was able to win a noted education reformer and former Bush Administration official as his new education commissioner, even over a competing offer from fellow Republican governor Jeb Bush of Florida. Hired as a "change agent," she hit the ground running, refocusing the department and overseeing the creation of new standards in math and language arts. By 2004, the education establishment was mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore. With the white-hot science and social studies academic standards on the table, and the scent of intelligent design and The Declaration of Independence in the air, the establishment saw the inmates running the asylum, and they were not amused.

Their successful efforts to redirect the standards and deny Cheri Pierson Yecke a confirmation in the Senate is drawing national attention in education circles, most recently in Social Education, the journal of the National Council on the Social Studies, in a November/December 2004 article written by the leaders of the "resistance:"

• Paul Spies, co-founder of the Minnesotans Against Proposed Social Studies Standards (MAPSSS)
• Michael Boucher, founder of Minnesotans for Better Education, Standards, and Testing (MinnBEST)
• Carrie Lucking, Hopkins High School teacher who established an online petition "Alliance to Block the Confirmation of the Commissioner" that collected thousands of signatures
• Jennifer Bloom, Minnesota coordinator for the Center for Civic Education (source of the controversial "We the People" curriculum
• Lisa Norling, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota
• Rick Theisen, former Osseo High School teacher and former president of the National Council for the Social Studies

Norling, with Sara Evans, professor of History at the University of Minnesota, gave a report on this in the November 2004 issue of Organization of American Historians Newsletter.

All of them, except for Spies, served on the committee to write an alternative set of social studies standards (the "[Sen. Steve] Kelley standards"). They were fixtures at the community and the corresponding House and Senate committee hearings. They built web sites, circulated petitions, wrote op-ed columns and letters to the editor, flooded legislators with letters and calls, gained media attention, networked with their allies, and showed up to the meetings in large numbers. Their combination of professional credibility, specific objections, and indignant rage (i.e., lots of shouting) overwhelmed efforts from more conservative Minnesotans (including some of their peers) and finally were enough of a presence at the Capitol to see their stamp in the final standards documents and to show Yecke the door.

The Comeback Of The Year: Cheri Pierson Yecke

In a classic display of final-day-of-session, wee-hours, High Noon parliamentary drama of the Minnesota Legislature, Governor Tim Pawlenty's designated commissioner of the Department of Education, Cheri Pierson Yecke, was denied confirmation on a party-line vote of the DFL-controlled Senate. Immediately after cleaning out her Roseville office, the liberal Star Tribune OpEx page offered to publish her commentaries, she began guest-hosting talk radio shows, and was named Distinguished Senior Fellow for Education and Social Policy at the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis, which has already published two of her studies: "Education Accountability in Minnesota: No Child Left Behind and Beyond" and "Kids, Schools, and Politics: Protecting the Integrity of Taxpayer Resources." Yecke didn't miss a beat between her impressive laundry list of public education reform accomplishments in the Pawlenty administration, and launching her new career as prominent public policy analyst and commentator.

Memo to DFL: confirm this!

Best New Education Commentator: Craig Westover

In August, the Pioneer Press added a new columnist to its pages: Craig Westover, a.k.a. "Captain Fishsticks" (I'll explain in a moment). By way of introduction, Westover explained himself thus: "On one hand, readers will find my columns 'conservative' in that I believe in limited government, individual initiative and responsibility," he said. "On the other, they'll find them 'liberal' in that I strongly believe that in a free society half the time one must defend the right of others to do things one finds morally reprehensible. Government's proper role is protecting liberty, imposing neither artificial equality nor collective morality."

Sounds good to us, but Scholar really sat up and took notice at Westover's immediate foray into education reform issues such as school choice. As chronicled in our blog, Westover's ship came in when he hooked a big fish, Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman, in a debate over the morality of denying low-income kids the choice of attending the school — public, charter, private, homeschool — that best suits their individual needs. What substance existed in Coleman's arguments quickly disintegrated into arrogant, slanderous, ad hominem diatribes ("He looks like the guy on a box of frozen fish sticks"), a typical response of the liberal establishment when they come to the shocked realization that their self-evident, exclusive posession of the truth is being seriously challenged.

In only four months, Westover's reasoned and informed arguments have enlightened the education reform debate in Minnesota, and drawn the blogosphere, the media, and citizens into a healthy debate. Westover's writing appears in the Pioneer Press and in his own blog (http://craigwestover.blogspot.com). We can't wait to see the new horizons that The Cap'n will explore in 2005.

Best Knowledge-Based Education Milestone: Minnesota Science And Social Studies Standards

No, they aren't perfect. But Minnesota's impressionable youngsters will endure unharmed open discussions of intelligent design and Christian concepts in the Declaration Independence. Why is the return to knowledge-based education essential? The answer goes to the heart of why I started this web site at the end of 1999:

"A little sunlight is the best disinfectant." --United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." --John Philpot Curran: Speech Upon the Right of Election, 1790, as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom." --John F. Kennedy

"In Scientia Libertas (In Knowledge, Liberty)." --Scholar the Owl

Related stories:
"Critique of the Minnesota Social Studies Standards" by Michael Boucher
"New Standards: Improvement Over the Profile but still flawed" by EdWatch