LOCAL ISSUE WARNING: This is about something directly relating to South Carolina, but it is part of an ongoing debate going on all over the country and at the federal level.
In an artical published in The State, Tenenbaum, challenges governor to stop ads has the SC Superintendent of Education, Inez Tenenbaum, criticizing Governor Mark Sanford for ads being run critical of the state of education in South Carolina. The ads do paint a very bleak picture. The sad thing is that there is nothing in the ad that is not true. We are the worst in SAT scores, 49th in ACT and our drop-out rate is abysmal.
To date, the only accomplishments I can see in Ms. Tenenbaum's tenure (now in her second term) is her "No Administrator Left Behind" policy (not an official name, just an observation) where given the choice between retaining teachers or administrators, the admins win. No one is criticizing school children, they are criticizing a system that pays lip-service to recruiting and retaining teachers while protecting unnecessary administrators
Now Ms. Tenenbaum wants the governor to call the ads to be pulled. Now here is an interesting side bar. The SCEA (the SC ventriloquist's doll for the NEA) is running ads that mock the governor, Ms. Tenenbaum is strangely silent (okay it is not so strange as she is also a vent's doll for the NEA) about those ads. Inez, it's called political process. You launch an attack, you get one back. Now your people could have used fact-based attacks, but chose to go ad homenem. It is too late to cry, "foul!"
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