| 'If You Need a Gubernatorial Candidate, Dial the Number on Your Screen…' Look who's thinking of running for governor in Florida: John Morgan is determined to leave a political mark on Florida, one way or the other. The Orlando personal injury lawyer, famously familiar from his ads on TV, buses and billboards, is traveling the state and getting a feel from voters about whether he should run for governor in 2018. In so doing, he's teasing Florida Democrats with the notion of something they have never had: a well-known candidate with name recognition who's wealthy enough to fund his own race, just like Rick Scott or Donald Trump. Wait, the John Morgan who was charged with battery of a police officer back in 1998 and who pled guilty to DUI? Just checking. The arresting officer who Morgan allegedly called "baldy" and "fat [expletive]" is probably retired now and happy to cut an attack ad for one of Morgan's rivals. If Morgan and Morgan sounds familiar, it's because this is the firm that hired former governor Charlie Crist and used him as a pitchman in their cheesy commercials: 
(Back in 2015, Sarah Rumpf looked through Florida's court records and concluded that Crist had been involved in a grand total of eight cases in his private law career, at least three of which are part of the same matter, in which he appeared in court as a litigator. Crist actually failed to complete required continuing-education courses and temporarily had his law license suspended that year.) So it's possible that the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate will be John Morgan, after their 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee was Crist – in Florida, arguably the most diverse state in the country. Never mind finding a candidate from a different demographic; Florida Democrats can't even find a candidate from a different law firm. By the End of the Day, DeVos Should Be DeSecretary It shouldn't have come to this: But Vice President Mike Pence is expected to demonstrate the position's unique duty, and in historic fashion: In his capacity as president of the Senate, he is expected to cast the deciding vote to confirm Betsy DeVos as President Trump's education secretary — the first time a vice president has had to resolve a tie on a cabinet nomination in the nation's history. There's a flaw in the arguments of DeVos critics that they never quite getting around to addressing. Valerie Strauss, writing in the Washington Post: But her critics say that anyone who would call the public school system a "dead end" — as DeVos did in 2015 — does not have sufficient interest in improving it but would rather seek to privatize it — and that is a line they don't want to cross. Hyperbolic, I suppose, but it's not surprising that any reform-minded, results-focused assessor of our public school system would look at the results over the past decades and conclude it's time to show some "tough love." In the United States, you can always find very good public schools and very bad public schools and a lot that fall somewhere in between. Criticism of the nation's public school system as a whole shouldn't be seen as a personal attack on your favorite teacher. In terms of what we would want as Americans – a public school system that gives every child the knowledge and skills they need to go on to succeed in life – the current system falls way short for way too many American families. Almost all of DeVos's critics were perfectly fine with Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan – and in a lot of cases, they were enthusiastic fans. He was, in their eyes, the very model of the modern secretary of education. Frederick Hess noted that after being welcomed into his job with a bipartisan wave of enthusiasm in education reform, Duncan's seven years were marked by mean-spirited partisanship; bureaucratic, Washington-centric programs; smug denigration of Common Core opponents, and an invasive army of lawyers bent on micro-managing local schools. But put aside the policy differences and too-partisan style. More importantly, in the Duncan years, our schools kept churning out the same old disappointing results. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress arrived in fall of 2015 and showed some backsliding from even the traditional mediocre outcomes: "The scores show 64 percent of fourth-graders and 66 percent of eighth-graders are not considered proficient in reading. In math, 60 percent of fourth-graders and 67 percent of eighth-graders are not considered proficient." That is lousy, and that's after seven years of the Obama-Duncan approach. It didn't work. Think about that apocryphal quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – a.k.a., insanity. Duncan did enact some changes that teachers' unions vehemently opposed; in 2014, National Education Association convention delegates passed a resolution calling for his resignation because what they deemed as a relentless focus on testing. But by and large, teachers' unions knew a Democratic secretary of education was never really going to upset the apple cart too much, and would always push for the funding increases they wanted. NEA President Lily Eskelsen García and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten mostly praised Duncan's record upon the news of his resignation. Do you feel like public schools are significantly better today than they were in early 2009? Worse? About the same? How about from eight years earlier? Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, the outgoing education secretary John King, Clinton's pick Richard Riley – they're all nice, accomplished, well-meaning people who have tackled what is perhaps the country's biggest problems… and had little impact on the status quo. "A Nation At Risk" came out in 1983, declaring, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves." How much progress have we really made in the past three decades? Indisputably we've made some, but… enough, considering the expense and efforts? Betsy DeVos isn't a professional educator? Well, we've tried professional educators for a long time now. She isn't part of the system? That's not a bug, it's a feature. She's really different from all previous education secretaries? That's fine, because we're looking for really different results than all previous Education secretaries. When it comes to improving schools his country tried the "nice guy" approach, and we've tried many secretaries who don't ruffle feathers the way DeVos does and… we got the status quo. It's time to try something different. Maybe she'll generate worse results, or more of the same, and we'll know the bull-in-a-China-shop approach to education reform doesn't work. But it's worth a try, because our children deserve better than the same-old-same-old, good-intentions and disappointing-results. Take Your Time, Republicans This is not bad news. Trump and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill have recast their ambitions for a rapid-fire repeal, talking privately and publicly about a more deliberative process that could be phased in over weeks or months. "The political uncertainty surrounding repeal is growing," said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action for America, the advocacy arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "If the House has not passed a repeal bill and sent it to the Senate by mid-March," Mr. Holler added, "that would be serious cause for concern." Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Republican in the chamber, said the Senate hoped to work "systematically, in a step-by-step way." But he conceded "that may take longer than, you know, than people at first thought." He expressed hope that "at some point," if Mr. Trump has a health care proposal, "he'll engage and that we'll be able to work together with him on it." Trust me, Republicans, you don't want to rush the "replace" part of "repeal and replace." Better to take a year to get it right, and deal with some impatient grumbling, than to rush it through and get it wrong and deal with the consequences at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020. ADDENDA: If you're not listening to the Three Martini Lunch podcast with Greg Corombus, then… you're missing out. We're hitting nearly 300,000 downloads a month, and it's ten to twenty minutes of good, bad, and crazy news of the day, delivered fast, funny, and with way too many not-so-subtle Die Hard references. More than 7,400 retweets and more than 13,000 "likes." Further confirmation that the work we spend the least amount of time on is the work that is most likely to go viral. | 
Comments
Post a Comment