Friday, Feb. 13, 2009

Six years later . . .

Roy Barnes must be either spitting nails or chuckling into his bourbon.

The former governor is rumored by some, among them columnist Bill Shipp, to be considering the possibility of a triumphant return to the office Sonny Perdue ousted him from in what was considered a political upset just over six years ago. If Barnes decides to go for it, here’s an idea for a campaign that would at least be entertaining, if not necessarily victorious:

He should hammer on Perdue’s heavy-handed approach to public education, and assure voters that the governor’s Republican would-be successor — whether it’s Casey Cagle, John Oxendine, Karen Handel or, God help us all, Glenn Richardson — shares Perdue’s top-down approach.

Because it was largely on the basis of Barnes’ education policy that Perdue beat him in 2002. Barnes had run, and won, as an education governor — a Democrat who would not only be a worthy successor to Zell Miller and his lottery-funded HOPE and prekindergarten programs, but would also be an education innovator in the tradition of Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Barnes’ mistake in office was in a “no excuses” approach to the challenges of teachers that educators found easy to interpret as a threat and political opponents found easy to exploit.

He put together an able and well-meaning panel of business leaders — the Breakthrough Coalition — to advise him on skill sets that business needed and, by implication, that schools weren’t teaching. The idea that Roy Barnes was going to let business people dictate from corporate suites how schools in Columbus and Valdosta and Ringgold did their jobs might have been a gross distortion, but it was one the Barnes team was surprisingly ineffective in dispelling.

Enter underdog challenger Perdue, whose campaign shrewdly preached that Barnes’ was a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education; that local schools knew better than a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats in Atlanta how to teach your kids; and that “local control” was the key to making public schools work.

Enter Governor Perdue, who now wants to vest more power over local school boards with … the governor.

A bill Perdue is pushing would give the governor power to remove school board members, and to limit the number of members a local school board can have.

So much for “local control.”

There’s no secret about what prompted this. The Clayton County school system became such a train wreck in recent years that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools pulled its accreditation. The SACS report put most of the blame, no doubt rightly, on a “dysfunctional” and “fatally flawed” school board.

So the solution, we’re now told, is to let the governor trump not only local voters, but also local authority to decide the makeup of a board that best suits local needs.

I’m no apologist for the inherent wisdom of school boards (see Twain, Mark), and some of the elected boards in the Chattahoochee Valley over the years have been enough to make you rethink representative government.

But watching the same politician who trashed Roy Barnes over education policy now advocate this kind of centralized control is beyond bizarre.