The latest example of disrespect for the legislative process and public education to drop from the Governor’s office was the announcement that a teacher evaluation process would be implemented in the face of legislative disapproval. Let’s face it, the Secretary-designate and the Governor have nothing to lose and nothing to fear. So what if the legislature fails to take up the unqualified Secretary of Education candidate’s appointment to office? Skandera, nonetheless, remains the Secretary-designate and has the power to pursue her relentless ALEC agenda to destroy public education with the ambitious governor’s full support. The legislature has, it believes, made itself blameless in not taking up the appointment but in reality they have enabled the Governor’s war against the legislators themselves, teachers, students and public education. This is what I call the Pontius Pilate delusion – my hands are clean! Oh yeah….
In a seemingly unrelated but not necessarily so revelation, Independent Source PAC has published news about an application by the so-called Rio Grande Foundation, a far right-wing front organization funded by, among others, Wal-Mart, to establish and run charter schools in New Mexico. The application for the New Mexico Connections Academy lists Paul Gessing as the applicant on behalf of the schools. I have previously exposed Mr. Gessing’s relationship to many far-right organizations including ALEC as well as his so-called foundation’s sources of funding. One of Gessing’s listed “advisors” in this enterprise (and it is an enterprise before it is anything else) is also the vice-president and co-founder of Connections Academy; Mickey Revenaugh was formerly co-chair of the ALEC Education Task Force. ALEC is the Washington DC body funded by multi-national corporations that created the education bills submitted, without disclosure of their provenance, to the New Mexico legislature this past January.
It looks like the Secretary-designate’s unremitting agenda to ALECify New Mexico schools now has it’s follow-on team on tap. Here comes the ALEC cavalry, Connections Academy, ready to fill the breech Ms. Skandera’s public policies are creating. “It’s going to happen,” she told a Santa Fe New Mexican Reporter correspondent, New Mexico will have a new teacher evaluation system in place “by the end of summer.” Bernice Garcia-Baca who is a counselor at the Aspen Community Magnet School and who also serves as the Santa Fe representative to the NEA characterized the teacher evaluation as “pretty ludicrous”. Sorry to say, I think, it far from ludicrous. On the contrary it is well planned, deliberate and will probably succeed in its long-term goals unless the public and teachers combine their efforts to rescue public schools from this unrelenting attack.
It isn’t hard to imagine the ambitions of the local political operatives like Skandera and Gessing fantasizing about a Republican sweep in the upcoming November elections and their own all but inevitable apotheosis to national positions appointed by a grateful victorious president. They would thus be rewarded for the privatization of public education in New Mexico. Ambition beyond the dreams of mere mortals – elevation to divine status as actors on the national stage! Privatize – Privatize – let no other ambition evade your eyes! Dream Baby, Dream!
Schools and Society 