Not a laughing matter

I haven’t been motivated to do a lot of serious blogging for the past couple days but NPR had a good summary of No Child Left Behind that answered some questions I’ve been wrestling with since it went into effect the last couple of years of my former school board term.

In fact, there are a lot of things I feel like blogging about not the least being the News Trib story about the 3rd District school board race. Claudia read it and proclaimed it fair and balanced. I agree….but I have some thoughts about the race and the candidates. Some echo concerns I mentioned in the last post while other’s would be directed at the comments from the two candidates. In particular, the historian in me objects to Attorney Sandstad’s comment that we should stop looking back.

I’ll be passing out flyers for Charles Obije and Alanna Oswald most of the day so I may wait until tonight to come back to the blog by which time I may be too tired to think and type at the same time. I was up till eleven last night. I’d gotten a call from an ally who said he’d followed a truck that was picking up “orange” lawnsigns. Since Alanna Oswald has orange lawnsigns I reported this to the police. I then drove out to the neighborhood in question and was relieved that most of the lawnsigns I’d put up for Alanna over several days seemed to still be standing.

I don’t usually conclude that someone’s out to get my lawnsigns in local campaigns. Every candidate’s signs seem to be taking hits pretty equally this year. Win lose or draw I plan to wake up early the day after the election and pull down all the signs of my three candidates and put them away for future use or to junk them.

But the real focus of this post should be the NPR story I linked to at the beginning. What it described as quicksand was very important. So was what it reported about schools that had been in NCLB quicksand for five years. I think there is an important lesson in this for Duluth’s schools. But understanding history is probably the only way it can be taken in. Historical blinders are not helpful, especially when they hide the fact that the Red Plan took ten million classroom dollars annually and committed them to pay off bank loans to finance the building of pretty new schools.

I sure hope that, if elected, the candidate (candidates) encouraging us to look to the future will finally meet with me. I’ve been tested for distemper. Had I not been there is no way I would have put on a dress.

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