Paige slams Blackwell's Ohio schools plan

Even Rod Paige and Chester Finn say Ken Blackwell's bait-and-switch idea to strip money from public schools is a bad idea, and they ought to know - Paige served as the Bush Administration's education secretary for four years, and Finn worked in Ronald Reagan's Department of Education, one of the men behind "A Nation at Risk."

This 65% deception is Blackwell's ONLY big idea for improving schools in Ohio, so I don't know how he can untie himself from it.

(To anyone outside the public schools, Blackwell's plan LOOKS like it guarantees more money for public schools, but it really strips all non-classroom expenditures out of the definition of "education." That means guidance counselors, food services, school buses and everything else that falls outside the classroom gets cut. Thanks, Ken, on behalf of all the non-teacher school employees who might lose their jobs if this lame-brained idea gets adopted. Wonder how little Jenny gets to school when there's no school bus or driver to pick her up, how she gets lunch if there's no one there to run the lunchroom, how she reads if there are no library books and how she's treated for a playground scrape if there's no nurse. Nice work.)

But no, Blackwell isn't trying to disconnect from the 65% deception and his pals who are pushing it. Instead, he's digging the hole deeper.

On Tuesday in a New York Times op-ed, Rod Paige called the Blackwell's idea "one of the worst ideas in education." Ouch. But how did Blackwell respond? He sent Carlo Loparo, his spokesman, to slap back at Paige. "If Rod Paige had all the answers, he would have left the Department of Education in better shape," Loparo told the Columbia Dispatch yesterday. Sweet.

Blackwell only felt obliged to answer Paige, though. He didn't send Loparo to say anything about Finn's assertion that the 65% deception was a "gimmick."

Both the Columbia Dispatch and www.realeducationsolutions.com have sidebars that explain who's behind Blackwell's cockamamie plan and why. It looks like there's a political motive (surprise!) rather than anything else; the big supporters of the 65% deception sent around a memo to Blackwell and others saying would be a great political wedge to split educators and make Blackwell and company look more credible on education issue.

As if. When Reagan and Bush's own education guys say the worst idea in education comes from their own nominee for GOVERNOR of OHIO, for crying out loud, it sounds like Blackwell needs some basic remediation.

Check it out. "School plan favored by Blackwell called gimmick" in the June 29 Dispatch at http://www.dispatch.com/... and Paige's op-ed in the Times from Tuesday is here: http://www.nytimes.com/...