Hillary and Education - Naw, doesn't make sense to me either

I know that up until the last couple of days I’ve spent a lot of time writing about education, specifically school vouchers – and while I do want to cover a broad range of topics, I ran across some education information today that I found quite interesting.

I am currently reading Rewriting History by Dick Morris. For those of you who don’t know him, Mr. Morris was a political strategist for the Clintons, from Bill’s first campaign for Governor of Arkansas right through his second term at President. Rewriting History is his response to Hillary’s autobiography Living History. Since Morris was there, he has a unique perspective on what Hillary says in her book, and what REALLY happened.

Clinton was elected Governor in 1978, and during his first term Hillary began her career at The Rose Law Firm. Clinton lost his bid for reelection in 1980, but regained the Governors Mansion in 1982. During his second term, Hillary decided that she needed to move into the public policy arena, and she decided education would be the arena she moved into. Actually, it wasn’t so much that SHE decided on education, but one of the first things that greeted Gov. Clinton was a State Supreme Court decision declaring the states entire education-financing system unconstitutional. Of course Hillary fails to mention the court order as a motivation in her book.

Anyhow, Bill was left with a choice: Cut aid to wealthy neighborhoods, or raise taxes to fund the poor ones. Since Bill lost reelection after his first term due to a tax increase, he was understandably gun shy. However, polling found out that the people of Arkansas would accept a full one cent increase in the state sales tax IF it truly led to improved education. At the time Arkansas ranked 49 out of 50 states, behind only Mississippi.

So Hillary led an education reform in Arkansas. Here reform was based on several ideals: Raising both test performance AND teacher pay, giving schools “report cards” based on student performance, getting additional help to the schools that did not meet standards and, if they continued to not meets standards, the school would be decertified and closed. In other words, Hillary implemented “No Child Left Behind”, almost word for word.

The benchmark of her program was to test all teachers, to offer training to those on the fence, and to get rid of the worst of the worst. After all, this is a state that had a teacher teaching her students about the horrific World War Eleven – That is how she read World War II.

When the teacher scores came in, Bill and Hillary were shocked. The teachers of Arkansas had failed miserably, and if the Clintons stuck to their guns – and their plan – they would have to fire greater than 50 percent of the teachers. And minority teachers took an even bigger hit. So true to form, the Clintons did what they do best – they took a poll. They polled the citizens of Arkansas to see what percentage of the teachers they would feel comfortable losing. Of course the REAL answer should have been any that didn’t meet the minimum standards. Their answer was 10%.

So true to form, the Clintons fired the bottom 10%. Hey, give them credit for at least doing that, but once again we have an example of Hillary (and Bill) “drawing a line in the sand”, and then changing the line based on a poll. The good news is thanks to Bill and Hillary’s “No Hillbilly Left Behind” strategy, Arkansas soared from 49th in the nation to 48th in only eight years.

The better news is that under eleven years of Republican Governor Mike Huckabee, Arkansas now ranks 32nd in the Nation.

And this is the women that so many people want to run our country. I just don’t get it.