We Have To Destroy This School Board In Order To Save It for the Governor and Our Union

Eric Luedtke at FSP is in full favor of changing a near 100 year old law in order to sack Nancy Grasmick.

Governor O'Malley, Speaker Busch, and Senate President Miller are continuing their calls on Nancy Grasmick to resign for her allegiance to the Bush administration's flawed education policy and her willingness to be an Ehrlich surrogate in the last election (see the State Circle interviews the Sun has up with their general assembly coverage).

So the Post asks Grasmick what she thinks of this. Her response? "Grasmick said Maryland has a long history of 'insulating schools from partisan politics.'" And where did she say this? At the Republicans pre-General Assembly session strategy meeting.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And Dr. Grasmick apparently believes that she's being non-partisan while schmoozing with her Republican allies in the legislature. Hypocrisy is alive and well.

Umm Grasmick is a Democrat, she has worked under Willy Don, Glendenning, Ehrlich, and now O'Malley. Grasmick refused Ehrlich's invitation to join him on the ticket. Grasmick's attempt to take over the failing Baltimore schools was an attempt to help the student's O'Malley and the corrupt Baltimore machine was and still is failing. Grasmick's sin in this case is to work with O'Malley's political adversary to fix a problem O'Malley was too inept for fix himself as Mayor of Baltimore. We are still looking for those millions of dollars missing from the Baltimore City Public School System.

O'Malley has a history of petty vendettas against those who dared to defy him. Just ask Ed Norris and Allison Asti.

Luedtke is a member of the Board of the Directors of the Montgomery County Education Association and coordinator for the Maryland Teachers Association. So it is no big secret as to why he wants Grasmick out. Grasmick does not toe the teachers union line. His rationale is:

Although the issue isn't putting the Superintendent under the direct control of the governor, but giving the Governor's appointees on the state Board of Education more direct control over the superintendent. I think Grasmick has demonstrated why a Superintendent shouldn't be quite as insulated from elected and appointed policy-makers as they have been in the past. She has led Maryland down a path that has over-emphasized punitive testing and done serious damage to public schools in the process. She needs to be more immediately accountable to the Board, no matter who appointed how many its members.

This begs the question, would Luedtke, under the new situation that he O'Malley, Miller and Busch favor, support the firing of a superintendent that was more in line with his policy prescriptions should a governor want to fire that superintendent. I doubt it.

Apparently, Luedtke missed today's news that Maryland public schools, under Grasmick's leadership ranked third in the nation. I guess in Luedtke's case ignorance really is strength.