BuckeyeBlog

Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Education Deborah L. Delisle had this to say about Gov. Strickland’s education plan announced (in part) today.

“There is so much there you could almost ‘gasp’,” said state Superintendent Deborah L. Delisle.

Let’s see, by the Governor’s proposal:  teacher union power grows, top-heavy bureaucracies grow, parental authority is diminished, schools continue to be run primarily for the benefit of adults rather than kids, and there’s no relief or even mention of messes such as communities where dropouts outnumber graduates.

While Superintendent Delisle gasps, the rest of us parents and taxpayers just moan.

Mike Maurer uses below the “F” word – fascism – in describing comments of the incoming superintendent of public education, Deborah Delisle.

For some of you this may come as a shocking and/or irrelevant epithet.  How could such outrageously liberal and statist views be described in far-right terms, you might ask.

I would have thought so as well, except for having recently attended a lecture  by Jonah Goldberg and reviewing a new book by him.

In his “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” Goldberg shows how the ideology of fascism and the American Left have so much more in common than conventional wisdom or the usual sources on US history from 1910 through 1941 would lead us to believe.

Spend some time with “Liberal Fascism”, and take another look at incidental accounts of the era (see here, for example, on how Woodrow Wilson would have hid the fact of 1918-1919 Influenza epidemic from the American people, if not for the overflowing morgues).

After that, I think you’ll agree that the F word applies to Ms. Delisle’s way of thinking after all.

Gongwer, a legislative news service ($) reports on an interview with the incoming Superintendent of Public Instruction, Deborah Delisle. Ms. Delisle, whose resume of school administrative leadership stretches from Mantua to Cleveland Heights, had this to say about two strategies freeing parents from the tyranny of failing assigned-by- and run-by-government schools (vouchers and charters):

“When you provide opportunities for people to escape what is viewed as a problem, without looking at what the source of that problem is and fixing the problem, you’re going to create a further divide among individuals across the population and you’re going to create a greater sense of haves and have-nots,” she said.

“You’ve given some kids an opportunity and you’ve allowed other kids to just wallow behind in a failing school,” she added. “It just is not as simplistic as, ‘Let’s send somebody somewhere else.’”

So what you’re saying Ms. Delisle, is every child assigned to a failing public school must suffer their fate of an inadequate education all in the name of equality of peoples’ senses of having or having-not?

According to your line of thinking, Ms Delisle, rather than boarding the lifeboats, Titanic survivors should have been forced to sit on deck and drown, happily hoping for the crew to repair the hole, since there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone?

Leadership of Ohio’s schools is going to demand of you better thinking than this.