Passing the Trash

When school district or state school administrators screw up, they don't end up on the bread line starving half to death. Instead, they are moved around from job to job, from district to district, from state to state.

Indiana's gain is Florida's loss:

The Florida Board of Education chose their new leader Wednesday at the Tampa Airport Marriott; Indiana Schools superintendent Tony Bennett is expected to start his new job sometime next month after contract negotiations with the board have finished. After the decision was made Bennett said he is looking forward to continuing Florida’s education reform track record and called himself an unabashed advocate for school choice.

“Florida has a rich history of serving students in a way that I don’t believe any other state has replicated until Indiana came along in the last four years. I have made the comment many times that if I wasn’t the state chief in Indiana, the place that I always thought that you could make the biggest difference for children – not only in the state, but in the national context – is in Florida because I think this state is so vitally important to the national education discussion.”

Voters in conservative Indiana rejected Bennett’s bid for re-election for the top spot in the state’s public school system even though he’s a Republican. Bennett’s loss to a pro-union Democrat comes after he pushed teacher evaluation and merit pay policies similar to what Florida has already enacted. Education board members, including St. Pete’s Akshay Desai, hired him based on his passion for those policies and his plan to bring some naysayers to his side.

He will fail there as well. Once a failure, always a failure.