Tenure at college should have regular reinstatement

Ben Sasse Made Enemies Within the University of Florida Because He Followed State Law

Florida has instituted a five year post tenure review of professorships to ensure those with this privilege continue to deserve the honor. Below is a summary from a National Review article. This should be expanded to K-12!!

He took post-tenure review seriously, as he was expected to do.

Recently, I published a defense of Ben Sasse’s legacy as president of the University of Florida. The barrage of attacks against him are not substantive, I argued. Rather, they are ex post facto political retribution for his monumental efforts to reform the university.

An important part of the story lay within the political landscape of the University of Florida (UF) itself. In addition to the pressure that Sasse and his administration received from external media and politicized naysayers, they faced an internal threat as well, from disgruntled faculty.

In the spring of 2023, the Florida State Legislature passed Senate Bill 266, which (among other things) required each tenured state faculty member to “undergo a comprehensive post-tenure review every five years.” Governor Ron DeSantis pushed tenure review as a way to cinch the belt of the state university system. “The most significant deadweight cost at universities is typically unproductive tenured faculty,” DeSantis said in a press conference before the bill was passed.

The legislature listed a few metrics that must be included in the review, but it required the Florida Board of Governors — the governing body for all public universities in the state — to further define the post-tenure review process.

The board may include other considerations in the regulation, but the regulation must address:

1. Accomplishments and productivity;

2. Assigned duties in research, teaching, and service;

3. Performance metrics, evaluations, and ratings; and

4. Recognition and compensation considerations, as well as improvement plans and consequences for underperformance.

In response, the Florida Board of Governors issued Regulation 10.003. The regulation states that each state university’s board of trustees “shall adopt policies requiring each tenured state university faculty member to undergo a comprehensive post-tenure review” that must accomplish the following:

(a) Ensure high standards of quality and productivity among the tenured faculty in the State University System.

(b) Determine whether a faculty member is meeting the responsibilities and expectations associated with assigned duties in research, teaching, and service . . .

(c) Recognize and honor exceptional achievement and provide an incentive for retention as appropriate.

(d) Refocus academic and professional efforts and take appropriate employment action when appropriate.

The Board of Trustees of the University of Florida (to whom the university president reports) took Regulation 10.003 seriously.

While UF came under fire for following the law — with Sasse’s administration facing accusations that it was ideologically purging the faculty — nothing in UF’s post-tenure review rubric was political.

Post-tenure review is intended to: recognize and honor exceptional achievement; affirm continued academic professional development; enable a faculty member who has fallen below performance standards to refocus academic and professional efforts through a performance improvement plan and return to expected levels of performance; and identify faculty members whose pattern of performance is unsatisfactory and to take appropriate employment action. Matters such as political opinion, expressive viewpoint, and ideological beliefs are not appropriate matters for evaluation and shall not be considered in post-tenure review.

To begin the process, tenured faculty provided a current curriculum vitae to their department chair, along with a one-page narrative of their work and any further documents they wished to include that highlighted their service or research. The department chairperson then attached further information to the faculty member’s collection of documents, including the last five years of their annual evaluations, data on their sponsored research, and their disciplinary record. Taken altogether, this information constituted the “Post-Tenure Review Packet.” This packet then made its way across the desks of the dean of the college and an advisory committee and ultimately landed at the desk of the provost.

The review process did not examine what faculty were working on, but rather whether faculty were working.

Each department within UF was issued discipline-specific guidelines on the criteria for the “grades,” from “exceeds expectations” down to “unsatisfactory.” The standards for review offered both quantitative and qualitative measures, such as the number of peer-reviewed articles published or the kind of service performed in their field.

The UF faculty union was particularly outraged with post-tenure review, and they expressed their anger publicly. Meera Sitharam, president of the United Faculty of Florida union’s UF chapter, told Inside Higher Ed, “There’s no mincing words: Tenure’s gone. It’s been replaced by a five-year contract.” She said UF’s implementation of the policy “really gives them a chance to get rid of people they don’t like.”

Such criticism misses the simple fact that most of the faculty members who were reviewed met the standards — and many exceeded them. This reality is obscured by headlines on the topic, such as that published by The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Why U. of Florida Professors Decry ‘Chaotic’ Post-Tenure Review That Failed Nearly a Fifth of Those Evaluated.”

In fact, post-tenure review at UF did not enable the university to fire faculty for publishing or teaching something that the university leaders “don’t like.” Faculty can, however, get fired for publishing or teaching nothing at all (or diminished quantities of low quality, as determined by their peers). Regardless of tenure, the job is a job, and it has to get done. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. Tenure does not exist to protect academics from their duties.

Sasse’s administration did not lead a vast purgation of tenured faculty. The number of tenured faculty who lost their positions as a result of the review is very small. Of the 262 faculty members up for review at UF, only five received the “unsatisfactory” designation — grounds for termination.

In his August 2023 State of the University address, Sasse described the problem of “quiet retirement” among tenured faculty — in which professors take on the workload (or lack thereof) of a retired professor without actually formalizing their status as retired. Sasse aimed to tackle this problem, saying, “[We need] to look at some of the institutional review obligations, which is a function that almost all universities that are our peers have. We don’t really have institutional review.”

As former Provost J. Scott Angle said in a Faculty Senate Special Meeting in June, many faculty retired or quit of their own volition before their post-tenure review was conducted or completed (data that confirm Sasse’s “quiet retirement” thesis). Thirty-one professors “either retired, entered retirement agreements or resigned during the review period” — i.e., 12 percent of the faculty up for review left the job of their own volition.

With regard to the five deemed “unsatisfactory,” Angle said,

I can tell you that those that were defined as ‘unsatisfactory’ really were not good teachers, they were not good researchers, and they weren’t doing any service. I found them to be quite easy and quite obvious. The other categories were harder to define, and that’s where you really have to dig into the cases for each one.

While only five professors received a notice of termination, 89 received the score of “exceeds expectations” — a denomination that includes a financial reward.

In short, Sasse and his administration took post-tenure review seriously, confronted the problem of “quiet retirement,” and rewarded 89 faculty for their excellent work. While it would have been simpler to follow the example of Florida State University — which claimed that every single FSU tenured faculty member met or exceeded expectations — UF approached tenure with the weight and consequence befitting the status.

 

Why Teachers aren’t paid more!

Our K-12 teachers deserve more compensation. Their unions are shrill in their condemnation of society’s failure to honor teachers with higher wages. I agree they should be paid more, IF—-that compensation was based on the pay structure of accountability for results.

Teachers resist any competition in the form of sectarian, charter schools,  home schooling, etc. Yet, our results as measured by PISA scores have been falling for decades. Having been a businessperson for 35 years and on the board of a dual-enrollment trade school I see the result of kids in high school not having the necessary skills to perform in today’s job market. Yet, the establishment continues to promote to the next grade.

Teachers resist measurement of the progress children make in their classes; they resist testing to an acceptable standard, SAT scores have fallen where K-12 is not up to par. The educations aristocracy decided to not require SAT/ACT for college entry and many colleges jumped on board. This short term decision has already proven to be an issue.

Lastly we are finally emerging from a 50 year bias against trade/technical schools in favor of four year colleges. I know the CEO of one of the top ten General Contractors and he laments regularly that finding workers in the trades is a critical path issue.

OK, is this just a rant? Somewhat, but New York Governor Hochel just signed a bill repealing student performance requirements in teacher performance reviews; thus poorly performing teachers with seniority will keep their jobs and kids will be deprived of a decent education. The unions triumph again for their members at the expense of students.

No wonder almost half the country has now expanded charter and other alternatives to the government run K-12 system. I contribute to that effort and hope to see current power structure cave in on itself and a Phoenix rise from the ashers to provide our kids with the education they deserve.

Teachers would be paid more if they joined the movement to measure results, and teach those who are struggling. Most do, for sure. Leadership is the problem.

K through 12 education competition

I recently was involved in a conversation at my church about K-12 education and its’ lack of positive results over the last few decades as measured by the PISA scores and lack of knowledge and skills of high school graduates. My solution is competition, allowing parents to control where their tax dollars are spent for K-12 education.  My talking points are below.

K-12 Education Funding, More parental control of where to use taxpayer funds  February, 2024

I am an engineer by education, a former military pilot and over thirty years as a businessperson. Objective measurement of performance, data and continuous improvement have been my operating values in all these endeavors.

Let’s talk about some data. Our country and society owe the rising generation an effective education, so they are prepared to participate in their economic future and be responsible citizens. In 2022 80% of children attended traditional public schools, 6% charter public schools, 9% private schools, 3% home and 2% parochial. So 14% of parents paid taxes for public schools as well as tuition for other types of schools. All of these schools have to be certified by the state as providing appropriate minimum levels of instruction.

On average, the U.S. spends $15,908 per pupil on secondary education. The U.S. spends the fifth-highest amount per pupil compared to the 37 other OECD countries, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, and Norway. Our PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores placed us 20th.

Senator Tuberville recently said half of high school graduates can’t read their high school diploma Politifact, a political fact checking organization, put out a statement contradicting those facts  by offering the following data.

  • 50% of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth-grade level book.
  • 46% of U.S. adults can’t understand labels on prescriptions.
  • 66% of American 12th graders are rated “basic” or “below basic” in reading achievement.
  • Only 37% of 12th graders reached or exceeded the academic preparedness benchmarks for both math and reading that would qualify them for entry-level college courses.

The irony is Tuberville overstated the facts, but the data supports the thrust of his comments. Looking objectively at these results has led me to investigate what we need to do to improve our results.

There is a strong movement for parents to gain control of the tax dollars and use them where they feel their child will get the most appropriate education. This movement has been growing over the last decade or so and crystallized when Terry McAuliffe said parents shouldn’t influence what schools teach in a Virginia governor race debate and when covid hit. Parents were thrust into the education process and were not happy with what they saw. Almost all parents want an effective education for their kids.

Some of the issues driving the demand for more parental control of where that money is spent are:

  1. 100,000 kids attend 206 schools in Alabama that are rated as “D or F”, 2022 data.
  2. USA PISA scores have been “average” as compared to OECD competitor countries for decades.
  3. Diplomas issued without objective evaluation of skills and knowledge.
  4. Social promotions
  5. Too much focus on “Going to an academic College” versus other types of post-secondary education, or the military.
  6. Court ordered elimination of religious themes.
  7. Teacher Tenure in K-12 schools means firing someone for being a poor teacher is very difficult. Alabama teacher compensation is based on time in grade and academic degree and is disconnected from student achievement. Other states do have a component of compensation based on achievement.

Some of the reasons we haven’t done much to improve the results are:

  1. Political partisanship, hardening of positions.
  2. Those with performing schools are fearful of their schools being affected.
  3. Teacher and administrator resistance to changing the status quo.
  4. Interest groups advocating for their particular mindset, both conservative and progressive.

 

A recent Stanford University study that detailed the above average performance of charter schools was featured in the February 3d edition of the Economist in both the opinion as well as the US section. It also highlighted the ferocious opposition of the education industry and unions to any competition.

It appears to me that the choice of where to spend our taxpayer funding should be established in K-12 education. We all know kids have different education needs and adapting the government run bureaucracy to accommodate those needs is near to impossible. Many parents want their kids to have an element of religious education along with traditional subjects. My own experience with Vestavia schools is there were a few teachers who should have been retired and no longer teach.

Our system is choice-based once graduating from high school, why should it not be the same for K-12. International ranking systems continue to show US universities occupy 13 of the top 20 rankings, competition forces continuous improvement. Once students enter the workforce they are evaluated on performance, output, not on inputs which it seems is the way we measure our return on investment in education. Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, we need to try different approaches that the education industry and teacher unions seem to oppose.  Results are what matters. Choice will cause turmoil for a few years, but as with the rest of life, but choice will produce students better prepared for life and citizenship.

Bi partisanship is the answer, each side will have to give in on something. We try something, evaluate and change again until our results improve.

Sept 18, 21 “Free College”

Free College.

What an idea!  First off if something is of no charge it has been proven beyond any doubt that people do not value it. There is no question many jobs today require education beyond secondary school. The question is how to fund.

Thankfully one of the best things about our system today is that education is not government provided, people can choose from multiple private and public offerings to meet their goals. Our current secondary, government education has failed the most needy of children as documented by the results based on testing.  OK,OK let’s not teach to a test but lets’ be sure the kids with a high school diploma can perform to the expectations of an employer. Those results have been sliding for decades. If Congress does put a funding plan in place for further education, it WILL begin to governmentalize those who provide it, thus repeating a failing system that we see today in secondary education.

The alternative is to first take loans away from the Feds, put back in the private sector with controls, but give funds for deserving kids who may not qualify for a loan. Second, forgiving student debt provides an out and takes away responsibility from the person committing to a loan. Typical of the progressive attitude, create a problem then bail out those it affects. Student loan debt under Obama skyrocketed, graduations did not go up, now Biden wants to bail out those folks. College cost followed along, more money chasing slow increases in capacity. OF course the overwhelmingly progressive faculty are in support. Insane.

AEI has a a great article on the issue. https://www.aei.org/podcast/how-student-loans-became-a-national-catastrophe/?mkt_tok=NDc1LVBCUS05NzEAAAF_Y9MY06sCnU7EXt89hRisVU02wIrqTfvobftH5rJc9sLI2HsE0qjUoLtNA1Xvic9u0N4kwpZnp-MfzmvDzTbhflCm88w4JAMyjsPY9HMt-KA

Why can’t we look at the data before enacting a policy. This is like India, throw money away to get votes.

Peace

An Education Horror Show

The title is from a July 8, 2109 WSJ Opinion piece.

The NEA held its’ annual meeting recently with Democrat Presidential hopefuls parading, promising more money, more, more–except results. Money has gone up lots in 30 years and results have gone down. Did the NEA say, what is working, are we spending our money in such ways that the kids are improving? Nope.

They also didn’t talk about Providence, R.I., a bastion of progressive thinking in a state that leans progressive. A 93 page review by Johns Hopkins was brutal. “Very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited-most especially in the middle and high schools.” Policies discourage discipline. Grossly incompetent teachers stay on. Evergreen contracts. $18,000 per student in spending.

“This is government failure, underwritten by union power.”

The kids, our future are the victims.

We must create competition to government schools!

Paying Bad Teachers NOT TO WORK

The title is from the WSJ, it talks about teachers in NYC who have been rejected by all the schools they applied to after being moved out of their job, for whatever reasons. They are in the Absent Teacher Reserve, what a euphemism!  NYC spends $150 million, $150,000,000, a year for those 850 teachers to not work because no one will hire them (2016-17 school year data).

The two school unions spent tens of millions dollars in the last presidential election, over 90% to democrats. Let me think about this. Politicians set salaries and other funding, the teachers then spend money on those politicians’ elections. Sounds just great. I think that all politicians should solicit funds from those companies they regulate. NO WAIT! That is a conflict of interests, the democrats say. No kidding!

A solution. Teacher unions are forbidden by law to contribute to political campaigns. Public corporations are now allowed to contribute to political campaigns and the left has gone nuts saying how this will destroy democracy. They have just been allowed to do what unions, both public and private, have always been allowed to do. The difference in my mind is our tax dollars fund the teacher unions through tax funded wages. USSteel, among others, just got Trump to impose duties on metals.  Lobbying is part of our system, but that money didn’t come from my tax dollars.

This same logic applies the the unions for government employees. No political campaign funding.  Or, it must be fifty-fifty.

Alabama has failing schools, just like all states, especially blue states. Yet, the union has spend tens of millions of dollars resisting charter schools. NUTS! STUPID! If a public school is failing, close it, put it our for bid to an accredited charter organization and then reopen in the same building next school year. Then when a teacher is lousy, fire them! Look what it took to fire VA officials who have been caught in negligence, yet the union forced the VA to rehire.

Our kids are the future. Yet, we have been falling down the scale of competency when compared to our economic competitors for three decades. Our current system has to change. The power lies with those refusing to admit failure in results, at the expense of our kids.

Senator Warren. In favor of school vouchers. 2003

In “Notable & Quotable” from 2/6/17 WSJ. “The Two-Income Trap: Why are Middle-Class Parent Are (Still) Going Broke,” a book by Elizabeth Warren and Anielia Tyagi.

“A well designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly. A taxpayer funded voucher that paid the entire cost of education a child would open a range of opportunities to all children…Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.”

Hmmmm, I guess the senator has evolved her thinking some.  Betsy DeVos is proposing vouchers as one of her primary policy offerings in the next four years. Senator Warren voted against Ms. DeVos.

Yale, Calhoun College

Yale has renamed Calhoun College Grace Hopper College. Mr. Calhoun was a white “supremacist” according to Peter Salovey, president of the University. Mr. Calhoun owned slaves.

According the WSJ article, “Yale’s Inconsistency Name-Dropping” by Roger Kimball, other colleges namesakes did also. Timothy Dwight, Benjamin Silliman, Ezra Stiles, John Davenport, Johnathon Edwards all owned slaves, all have colleges names after them.

Now the big one, Elihu Yale, who gave 800 pounds to help start the college also owned slaves, and according to history accounts treated them poorly, hung a stable boy for stealing a horse,  and was fired from a post in India for corruption. The same history books tell of Calhoun’s kind treatment.

None of us are without sin. I hope one day a grandchild of mine gets into Yale, and my wife and I are providing the funds, and we convince our kids to tell Yale to stuff it. What a waste of time and money, $46,000 a year in just tuition, ouch.

Cory Booker, this is amazing!

From “Notables and Quotable” in the WSJ.

2012. Cory Booker speaking to a conference of American Federation for Children, the organization Betsy DeVos ran.

“I cannot ever stand up and stand against a parent having options, because I benefited from my parents having options. And when people tell me they’re against school choice whether its’ the Opportunity Scholarship Act, or CHARTER (my emphasis) schools, I look at them and say:”As soon as you’re telling me you’re willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city, or in Camden or Trenton, then Ill be with you.”

“I’m going to out there fighting for my president, but he does not send his kids to DC schools.  I got a governor in the statehouse, he does not send his kids to public schools. I could all the way down to city council people in Newark, that do not send their kids–so what have we created? A system that if you’re connected, elected, have wealth and privilege you get freedom in the county? And now you want to deny to my community? No. I am  going to fight for the freedom and the liberty and the choice and the options of my  people, in the same way you will defend that right for yourself.”

When the chairperson of the organization he gave that speech to came up for a vote as Education Secretary Senator Booker voted against, AGAINST (my emphasis) her.

I guess, as the progressives say, he has evolved in his views. Like former president Obama on gay marriage, or Clinton on everything. A conservative, let’s say President Trump changes his views on an issue, say abortion. He is ________ you fill in the blanks.  He certainly hasn’t evolved per our media.

 

Cory Booker, a Hypocrite, and Potential Democrat Candidate

The article below from National Review online says it all about the hoopla over Betsy DeVos.  All of you folks who have to put up with lousy schools remember this when he runs for president in 2020.

School choice, competition will help.

 

IAN TUTTLE February 8, 2017 4:43 PM @IPTUTTLE

Booker has suddenly discovered that he’s against school choice after a career spent promoting it. Cory Booker should think about consulting a physician. He seems to be suffering a severe case of amnesia. Last month, Booker became the first senator in history to testify against a colleague in a Cabinet confirmation hearing — in this case, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general. When he was not holding back righteous tears, Booker warned that Sessions would fail to “aggressively pursue the congressional mandate of civil rights, equal rights, and justice for all,” and that he would not “bring hope and healing to our country.” Besides being a novel assessment of the duties of an attorney general, Booker’s testimony was somewhat undermined by his own comments from eleven months earlier, when he declared himself “blessed and honored to have partnered with Senator Sessions” to award the Congressional Gold Medal to participants in the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. This week, Senator Booker apparently had another memory lapse. On Tuesday, New Jersey’s junior senator cast his vote against education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. “I’m frustrated and deeply saddened” by DeVos’s confirmation, Booker wrote on Facebook, continuing mournfully: Somewhere in America, right now, there is a child who is wondering if this country stands up for them. They are probably enduring some things I never had to endure. They are probably worried about their safety. They are probably being put in a situation where they are questioning their worth. They probably feel alone and isolated. . . .  To all those worried about their civil rights, about having equal access and opportunity to an education, please know: even if Betsy DeVos doesn’t see it as her role as a federal leader to work for your rights, equality or freedom from bullying or harassment, know that I and many others will always fight for you. Booker’s concerns about DeVos are odd — considering that he’s spent much of his career as an ardent school-choice advocate, and a supporter of . . . Betsy DeVos. In 2006, Booker was elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city and home to its largest school system, which currently serves more than 35,000 students. In July 1995, the state had taken control of Newark’s public schools, citing gross malpractice. State officials published a 1,700-page report detailing questionable expenditures, collapsing facilities, dismal student performance, and more — in short, a long chronicle of corruption and mismanagement. Ten years on, the situation had improved little, if at all. Booker saw an opportunity in the school-choice movement. He encouraged using taxpayer funds to establish and strengthen already-existing public charter schools, as well as private and religious schools, and traveled the country soliciting help. He was a powerful advocate. In early 2009, Oprah Winfrey gave more than $1.5 million to five local nonprofits, among them a public charter school and a Catholic school; a year and a half later, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave the school system an extraordinary $100 million gift. Republican governor Chris Christie, finding in Booker’s education policy much to like, permitted the mayor more control over Newark’s school system than the state had permitted his predecessors. Although Booker’s efforts met with aggressive resistance from certain quarters, many Newark residents seized on the opportunity to exit the city’s traditional public schools. Currently, 14,000 students are enrolled in the city’s 20 charter schools, and enrollment has tripled in the last five years. According to a report from the Newark Education Success Board (a nine-member panel created by Christie and current Newark mayor Ras Baraka), published in August, 42 percent of Newark families selected a charter school as their first choice. A 2013 poll of 500 Newark residents found that 71 percent favored expanding the city’s charter-school system. Predictably, all of this incensed — and continues to rankle — the Newark Teachers Union, which during Booker’s 2010 reelection bid backed his unsuccessful opponent. (They have found a friendlier ear in Baraka, a fierce charter-school opponent.) Commenting on Booker’s vote against DeVos, union president John Abeignon said he was “kind of surprised,” adding: “He’s a strong advocate for school choice,” Abeigon said. “We never saw him much as a supporter of traditional public schools and don’t see him as one now.” Until this week, Booker might have described himself similarly. In fact, he was unequivocal about his position during his second mayoral term: I cannot ever stand up and stand against a parent having options, because I benefited from my parents having options. And when people tell me they’re against school choice, whether it’s the Opportunity Scholarship Act or charter schools, I look at them and say: “As soon as you’re telling me you’re willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city, or in Camden or Trenton, then I’ll be with you.” . . . I am going to fight for the freedom and the liberty and the choice and the options of my people, in the same way you will defend that right for yourself. As it happens, those remarks were delivered in 2012, at a conference of the American Federation for Children — the school-reform group founded, and at the time chaired, by Betsy DeVos. That was not Booker’s only association with the group. He spoke to AFC’s Policy Summit just last year. The senator is planning a run for the presidency in 2020, and he needs to make nice with the teachers’ unions. How it is that the woman Cory Booker viewed as an ally less than a year ago is now a threat to children’s “safety” is no particular mystery. The senator is planning a run for the presidency in 2020, and he needs to make nice with the teachers’ unions, whose outsized influence in the Democratic party is the only plausible explanation for the unprecedented anathema heaped on DeVos since her nomination was announced. (Indeed, even two union-reliant Republicans — Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins — bowed to the unions’ demands.) That his opposition to DeVos was out of keeping with his own education-policy vision Booker rationalized away by repairing to that all-purpose excuse, “civil rights.” In fact, school choice is disproportionately popular among minority groups. AFC surveyed 1,100 likely voters in January 2016: 70 percent supported school choice, defined as “giv[ing] parents the right to use the tax dollars associated with their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which better serves their needs.” Among African Americans and Latinos, the number was 76 percent. A poll commissioned last year by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools showed similar levels of support. Having concerned himself with these issues for some time, Booker is no doubt aware of these facts, and he didn’t forget them on Tuesday. He ignored them, and many of his constituents, and his principles. Booker’s lamentations in the wake of the vote are so much theater. What he did this week, he didn’t do for the kids. — Ian Tuttle is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444738/cory-booker-betsy-devos-statement-hypocritical-school-choice-teachers-union-education?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-02-08&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives