Biggest Loss to Twin Cities Talk Radio

When conservative stalwart Jason Lewis arrived in the Twin Cities, the success of a conservative radio talk show (on AM 1500 KSTP) in Wellstone Country seemed dubious at best. Against the odds, the self-proclaimed "Minnesota's Mr. Right" found his audience and paved the way in this market for the flag-waving AM 1280 The Patriot and its raft of syndicated conservative hosts. Lewis provided a daily afternoon drive-time platform for anti-Profile of Learning activists and claimed credit for the election of Stillwater Republican Michele Bachmann to the Minnesota Senate. He served on the board of the Twin Cities Republican Association and was seen on the floor of the 2002 Republican State Convention doing some late-night arm-twisting on behalf of gubernatorial endorsement candidate Brian Sullivan. Lewis provided many lively Sunday-morning TV debates over issues of the day, always with a smile, opposite liberal Ember Reichgott Junge. His anti-tax, anti-big government rallies on the steps of the State Capitol drew more or fewer from year to year, but warmed the hearts of conservatives nonetheless. Lewis's departure to another market, to the despair of conservatives and glee of liberals, still leaves a void the Twin Cities political scene.

Best Yellow Journalism

The reliably left-wing City Pages weighed in on the Academic Standards debate with Britt Robson's November 12 article, "Right-wingers divine new education standards." Excerpts:

• "It was hard to pick the most egregiously right-wing standard set by the committee."
• "The standards in these states all received either an "A" or "B" grade from the conservative Fordham Foundation." [CP conveniently neglects to mention that they also earned high marks from the American Federation of Teachers, Education Week, and Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, hardly bastions of right-wing thought.]
• "The backgrounds of some committee members are also notable. There's Bruce Sanborn...chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute, whose mission is to 'restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.' ...Matthew Abe is similarly listed on the website as an involved parent. There is no mention that Abe runs the Minnesota Education Reform News website, with a mission to 'inform Minnesota citizens about the shortcomings of performance-based, anti-knowledge, behavior-, and attitude-based education.'" [What, me, right-wing?]
• "...those concerned about a right-wing takeover of classroom learning should pay attention."

Why I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that a Republican administration would appoint "right-wingers" to such an important committee. The point is, even if Phyllis Schlafly, Chester Finn, and E.D. Hirsch were all on the committee, we've seen that the Academic Standards process itself had so much public oversight that it just would not have mattered.

If only the Profile of Learning had been subject to probably the most public writing process in state history, fine-tooth combed public reviews of the drafts, meetings compliant to state open meeting laws, debate aired on op-ed pages statewide, comment from school boards and Education Minnesota, and ample opportunity for public comment over every conceivable medium (with DFL-controlled Senate hearings to come), we would be that much closer to a nation-leading, consensus set of standards that describe what the majority of Minnesotans want public school students to know and be able to do.

Most Revealing Legalistic Hair-Splitting

Minnesota Senator Steve Kelley has an issue with the prominence of the Declaration of Independence in the proposed Government and Citizenship standards. When Sen. Kelley, chair of the Senate Education Policy Committee, said on the floor of the Senate last session that the Declaration of Independence "has no legal standing," he was drawing a bright line in the sand right through HF 302 (the bill that repealed the Profile and defined legislative intent for the replacement grad standards), and foreshadowed this winter's upcoming Senate debate over the standards. The local authority on government, law, restaurants, and right-wing conspiracies, City Pages, backs him up in the article cited above:

The Declaration of Independence is erroneously referred to as "the founding document that sets forth the principles for our nation" (that would be the Constitution)

Fortunately for our country, the Declaration does explicitly set forth the principles of our nation. See my blog, under "The purpose of Social Studies III," for the specific list. Fortunately for the Declaration, having "no legal standing" has its advantages: unlike the Constitution, it cannot be amended, and it cannot be "interpreted" by the courts.

So what? Conservatives love this, but to an activist judiciary and their supporters, that's gotta hurt.

Worst Expansion of the Federal Bureaucracy by a Republican

"No Child Left Behind is in my mind the largest intrusion of the federal government into state policy, and the biggest federal boondoggle, in my lifetime...They have actually created a cash subsidy to encourage states to lower standards." —David Jennings, as interim superintendent of the Minneapolis public schools, Star Tribune, September 21, 2003

Whatever happened to the Republican agenda to eliminate the Department of Education (see: the Tenth Amendment)?