Foster leaves Department of Education for Beaufort

The Island Packet reported the news yesterday that Jim Foster, the veteran public information officer for the state Department of Education, will become the new director of school and community services for Beaufort County's school system.

Two reactions crowd the mind.

First, this is great news for Beaufort County's schools, children and parents, and especially for Superintendent Valerie Truesdale. Foster brings a long and respected awareness of the inside game of the state's news media, the legislature, and particularly of public education. However large and broad is the network of education experts in South Carolina, Foster has kept himself at the center of it, keeping on speed dial the most knowledgeable minds in the field.

As he told the newspaper that announced his move, "Everything that's come out of this agency in terms of news for the past 19 years has been on my watch." Which means that he served superintendents Barbara Nielsen, Inez Tenenbaum and Jim Rex, three chief executives of very different political stripes, capably and well.

Second, what a terrible waste on the part of Mick Zais. And if Foster was, indeed, purged from his position at the state department for a lack of political purity, for holding or defending principled positions in support of the department's mission, or -- worst -- as retribution from the partisan political hack that occupies the position of, rather than serves as, a deputy superintendent, then Zais is guilty of far more than poor judgment.

Foster is emblematic in one of two ways: If he chose freely to leave the Department, it suggests that the atmosphere that Zais and Ragley are creating is a toxic environment, and many others are suffering too. If he was purged, then no one who has served South Carolina's public schoolchildren for any length of time from the Rutledge Building is safe.

Sure, it's possible that Foster has long yearned to relocate to Beaufort, to abandon the hustle and bustle of Columbia and to get back to the ground floor of public information work in the Low Country. If that's the case, good for him, and congratulations to him. His commitment to serve the demands of great leaders kept him trapped in the capital long enough, and he's earned his reward at Mink Point Boulevard in Beaufort.

I just don't see it.

The Beaufort County School District has hired a veteran of the S.C. Department of Education as its new director of school and community services.

For nearly two decades, Jim Foster has directed department communications, supervised the release of standardized test scores and answered questions from newspaper reporters.
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District superintendent Valerie Truesdale said that when Foster starts in August, he will bring deep experience in education policy.

"He'll have to learn Beaufort, and he'll have to learn our local issues, but his job knowledge is strong," she said.

Foster is a South Carolina native and was an editor at The (Columbia) State newspaper before joining the Education Department.

In Beaufort County, he will manage both internal and external communication for the district and will work to help taxpayers and residents understand the difficulties facing educators, Truesdale said.

"How does one convey complex issues such as school closures?" Truesdale asked. "How do we help folks understand the challenges of raising student achievement in the era of diminished resources?"

Foster said that after many years of working in education policy in Columbia, he's excited to be moving closer to teachers and students.

"That's one of the aspects of this opportunity that intrigues me the most, is working more closely with educators in their day-to-day jobs," he said.

The test of my suspicion will be proven when Zais and Ragley announce Foster's successor at the department -- if they announce one. Will Foster be succeeded by someone with long ties to public education in the state, a deep knowledge of the field and its experts, or experience as a district public information officer?

Or will they install another partisan political operative to serve their ideological interests?

Let's wait and see.

Haley contradicts herself on education superintendency

Remember this date: July 22, 2011.

On this date, The State newspaper published this statement by Governor Nikki Haley:

"Anything that empowers the voters, I’m always going to support,” said Haley, speaking to reporters after announcing a $14 million business investment in Bamberg County. “At the end of the day, it’s the people we want to be satisfied with who they had.”

To be clear, let's examine her quote again. Though her statement is inartfully composed, Haley declares affirmatively that she is "always going to support" "anything that empowers the voters."

I would like to take the governor at her word, but history warns against it. On this very topic, she has stated aloud and represented in print her position on voter empowerment many, many times, and the quote she offered on July 22 contradicts every single instance of her earlier statements and positions.

In South Carolina, voters since 1868 have had, and have been able to elect in a general election, a state superintendent of education. To restate the point: For 142 years, South Carolina voters have been empowered by their state constitution to elect the person who would oversee the operations of our state public school system and would be the chief advocate for South Carolina's public schoolchildren.

Presumably for the same period of time, we've had an office of lieutenant governor that is elected separately from the office of the governor.

These facts represent two rights of voter empowerment that Haley has sought, in her public addresses and in print, to take away from voters. To read on July 22 that she now is "always going to support" "anything that empowers the voters" means one of two things: Haley has reversed her position on one of the pillars of her platform to restructure state government, or she is lying to achieve a political goal.

I wonder what John Rainey would say she's doing.

There is a second part to Haley's July 22 quote:

“At the end of the day, it’s the people we want to be satisfied with who they had.”

Her sentiment reflects perfectly the power that voters enjoy today, as voters are able to elect both an education superintendent and a lieutenant governor.

But in every case when these topics have been raised, Haley has sought to take away that power from voters. Consider this news report from February 2011:

When South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley steps before the House Constitutional Laws Subcommittee Tuesday afternoon, she is expected to testify in favor of three bills that would dramatically change the structure of the state's government and consolidate her power.

Subcommittee member Rep. Derham Cole, R-Spartanburg, said he anticipated Haley would speak in support of the bills and hopes "that getting these out early in the session will mean favorable passage in the Senate."

The three bills are:

H. 3066, The S.C. Restructuring Act of 2011, that would create the Department of Administration that Haley and her predecessor, Gov. Mark Sanford, have pushed for.
H. 3152. Which would have the governor and lieutenant governor run together on the same ticket.
H. 3070, which would remove the education superintendent from the list of elected state officers and make it a position appointed by the governor.
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Unlike the bill to create a Department of Administration, the legislation consolidating the governor and lieutenant governor to one ticket and making the education superintendent an appointed office require S.C. voters to approve an amendment to the state constitution in 2012.

Haley said the state should have the governor and lieutenant governor on the same ballot, as H. 3152 proposes. "It simply does not make sense to have two people with two different agendas at the top of our executive branch," she said in the State of the State address.

Haley also said education receives 40 percent of the budget and that it is crucial the governor and the education superintendent work together. If voters approved, the superintendent would have a Cabinet position.

And when her mission to take power away from voters was thwarted and not achieved in the state Senate this year, she responded with speed and venom, issuing an executive order to bring lawmakers back to Columbia to give her what she wanted.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell has asked the South Carolina Supreme Court for emergency guidance–claiming the governor’s order is unconstitutional. His question to the court: Can a governor force the legislature back into session to take up bills that were not included in the Sine Die resolution?

We’re coming back next week, what’s the rush? One week, and we now run the risk of all these constitutional questions, but that hasn’t been said.

However, Governor Haley says due to the Sine Die resolution, the Senate cannot take up the bill.

The governor answers McConnell’s question: “What’s the rush?”

I’ll tell you exactly why. Every day that we don’t restructure our government, every day is costing us money. We are wasting dollars by the hours and it’s ridiculous. They have kicked this can down the road literally for years, saying they don’t want to do this.

McConnell says he understands the governor’s frustrations in unfinished business, but that’s no need to mull over the state Constitution.

The governor has the power under the Constitution to call us back for extraordinary occurrences. There’s nothing extraordinary about bills not making it, hundreds of them (don’t) every year. The most ordinary thing in the world is bills don’t make it and it’s a good thing because it keeps us from having too much government.

McConnell says he does support the bills that Haley wants to take up, which would create a Department of Administration, put the lieutenant governor and governor on the same ticket, and make the superintendent of education an appointed, not elected, position.

What is the purpose of making of the education superintendent an appointed position, and eliminating the separate election of a lieutenant governor? It takes power away from voters and consolidates that power in the hands of, first, gubernatorial candidates in the case of the lieutenant governor-as-running mate, and second, the hands of the governor, who would then control the Department of Education.

If Haley is granted this concession by the legislature, the changes will be put on the ballot for South Carolina's voters to approve or disapprove because they require changes to the state Constitution.

At present, the office of South Carolina's governor is one of the weakest in the nation, as our state's leaders have long preferred leaving power in the hands of the legislature, closest to the voters.

If voters were to approve the Constitutional changes, they would make Haley one of the most powerful chief executives, with a hand-picked lieutenant governor presiding over the state Senate, and a hand-picked education superintendent doing her bidding at the Department of Education. Her influence over our children would be astonishing and have permanent impacts. And all of this would come at the expense of voter empowerment.

What do our neighbors do? Both North Carolina and Georgia elect their state superintendents of education, and elect their lieutenant governor separately from their governor. It appears that both North Carolina and Georgia are content to leave power in the hands of voters rather than to establish a monarch-governor.

Of course, Haley's Star Chamber will say that she was speaking to a very narrow issue on July 22 -- the issue of giving voters the power to recall lawmakers -- and that applying her quote to other matters is not appropriate. But Haley herself made her statement as broad as the South Carolina sky. It's hard to misunderstand your governor's intent when she says, "Anything that empowers the voters, I’m always going to support," and "At the end of the day, it’s the people we want to be satisfied with who they had."

Purge of DOE employees recalls Ferguson doctrine

Very few people today may recall Homer L. Ferguson of Waynesville, North Carolina, but Ferguson was once a big wheel on the right end of America's political spectrum.

A few more people are familiar with Howard Phillips, who founded Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing group that organized and trained college students in the 1960s.

Ferguson and Phillips, though they were not contemporaries, are linked in a way that sheds a bit of light on news of the purge under way at the state Department of Education.

Ferguson, though born in Waynesville, North Carolina, made his name and his fortune in shipbuilding in major American port cities. While in the U.S. Navy, he served as Assistant Naval Constructor during a year at the Columbian Iron Works in Baltimore; three years at the Navy Yard at Portland, Oregon; and a year at the Navy Yard of Bremerton, Washington. He rose to Superintending Naval Constructor during two years at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, and continued in that capacity for two years at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company at Newport News, Virginia, and finally made his way to a year-long assignment in Washington, D.C., with the Bureau of Construction and Repair.

All of this training and experience was accomplished by 1905, when Ferguson resigned from the Navy and became Assistant Superintendent of Construction for Newport News Shipbuilding, one of the largest -- if not the largest -- contractors in Newport News, adjacent to the major port at Norfolk, building warships for the federal government. He remained in the Tidewater region of Virginia for the rest of his life.

It was here, in a region and industry flooded with federal defense dollars, that Ferguson matched his training and experience with his developing political philosophy. And it served him well: He became president of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in 1915, and remained so until his retirement in 1946.

So Ferguson was a major industrialist by the time he became president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1919, serving a one-year term. He maintained his ties with that organization long past his presidency. In November 1928, the month that Herbert Hoover was elected president, Ferguson published an article in the form of an interview in the Chamber's magazine, "Nation's Business." In it, he lamented "if government was ever staffed with talented people, it might be able to build its own warships, and [Ferguson] would be out of business."

Ferguson wrote,

The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service in corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays, the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast -- a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world -- the black plague is a housepet by comparison.

Author Thomas Frank, who uncovered Ferguson's old article, interpreted his words this way:

In short, business needs a lousy government so that no one will consider giving it more and greater responsibility; business itself can manage responsibility, and make a profit from those who have need of it.

Frank also found a reader's response to Ferguson's text, published in a later edition:

If public officials are and remain inefficient, the public will sicken of incompetence and rely exclusively on corporate enterprise. That means less competition and more profits.

The Hoover administration certainly approved of Ferguson's philosophy. But by the time Hoover was replaced by Franklin Roosevelt in January 1933, America was well into its Great Depression, and Roosevelt sought to staff his administration with precisely the sort of "thoroughly first-rate" people Ferguson feared, including one James F. Byrnes of South Carolina.

Ferguson never served in government, but he maintained a presence in business and industry. In 1929, TIME magazine found him railing against organized workers at a symposium at the University of Virginia. The TIME article is edifying

Repugnant — unfair — rotten — archaic — unjust — unacceptable — deplorable —

With such adjectives educated Southerners, gathered last week at the University of Virginia's Institute of Public Affairs, denounced the South's labor conditions. Southern industrialists were excoriated for working women and children long hours, were criticized for opposing unionization, were advised to take warning from upheavals in the textile mills in the Carolinas and Tennessee (TIME, April 15 et seq.). Chief critics were West Virginia's W. Jett Lauck, chairman of the Bureau of Applied Economics, and Virginia's Bruce Crawford, Norton publisher. Declared Publisher Crawford:

"Southern industrial leaders are still clinging to the discarded and discredited wage theories and working conditions of the pre-War period. It is still believed and practiced that low rates of pay are synonymous with low labor costs. . . . The labor union has not been accepted as a permanent and inevitable institution in modern industrial life."

Up in defense of Southern industrialists rose Homer Lenoir Ferguson, president of Newport News (Va.) Shipbuilding Co., onetime (1919-20) president of U. S. Chamber of Commerce, employer of 7,000 non-union men, stockholder in four textile mills. Mr. Ferguson's company is one of the South's great industrial concerns. It reconditioned the Leviathan after the War, built the turbo-electric Panama-Pacific liners Virginia, California, and Pennsylvania, as well as many a vessel for the Navy. Strongwilled, strong-spoken, Mr. Ferguson declared:

"Industrialism in the South . . . is undergoing a series of growing pains.

. . . The condition of the Southern cotton mill worker is very much better than it was a generation ago when he had no work at all. . . . When they talk about $12 a week, they do not tell you about the free homes, the good country food, water and light for nothing and the palaces they live in compared with the mountain homes from which they came. . . . You are dealing with a backward people who had to learn industry from the ground up. . . . Perhaps children do work, but in juvenile vagrancy North Carolina is so far ahead of Ohio there is no comparison. . . . The hours may be long and the pay small but [the textile industry] is a most highly competitive industry. There must be a profit in any industry or it will cease to exist. . . . Unionization is not the universal and complete panacea the American Federation of Labor would have you believe. Anyway, the unions aren't as strong as they used to be. . . . If the Southern textile owners and operators tie up with the labor unions, then they will see the textile industry move elsewhere, as it already moved once. . . ."

Ferguson died in 1952, but his philosophy lived after him and influenced a young man named Howard Phillips. Phillips founded an organization called Young Americans for Freedom to organize and train conservative college students in support of Sen. Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign of 1964. Goldwater lost, but Phillips remained an influential organizer and earned sufficient regard among his party leaders that President Richard Nixon appointed him Acting Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in February 1973.

Again, author Thomas Frank has described the purpose of the OEO. It had been established by President Lyndon Johnson to administer his "War on Poverty" programs. Johnson had intended it to be a muscular, useful agency, focused on serving the needs of America's poor. To demonstrate its importance, he had appointed Sargent Shriver -- brother-in-law of President John Kennedy, and founder of the Peace Corps -- to head the office. Frank writes that the OEO included legal aid for the poor, which led to lawsuits against landlords, banks and employers.

But Nixon appointed Phillips "acting director" of the agency. Once in the position, Phillips put Ferguson's philosophy to work in a hurry. In one month, Frank writes, Phillips "purged the office" and replaced its employees with "friends from the Young Americans for Freedom, paying them a hundred dollars a day."

He withheld budgeted funding from the office's programming, specifically those that benefited minorities and the poor. He issued termination notices to OEO employees around the country and closed legal aid offices in small cities and towns. He drafted a memo -- which was leaked -- in which he explained that if he and his aides acted quickly enough, they could dismantle the agency altogether before its supporters could stop him.

Community Action Associations and the union representing OEO employees had to sue to block Phillips's dismantling of the office. In April -- Phillips's third month on the job -- a federal judge granted an injunction against Phillips's actions, and one month later ruled that Phillips could no longer serve as acting director because he'd never been confirmed by the Senate.

Of course, Phillips was a hero to his followers: He had demonstrated what could be done using Homer Ferguson's philosophy to dismantle and eliminate a government agency from within. Two months after being ousted from his position, Phillips spoke to the Young Americans for Freedom at its national convention in Washington, saying, "I consider myself a very fortunate man. Relatively few Americans have the chance to participate significantly in the shaping of their nation's history."

The assault on OEO was an important landmark in the continuing struggle for individual rights against unaccountable bureaucratic power.

Its creation represented a culmination of forces which began, to a large degree, with the New Deal. Its intended demise was at the heart of Richard Nixon's plan to fulfill the mandate of the 1972 election and carry forward the historic turnabout which could mark him as the century's greatest force on the institutional trends of the American polity.

In November 1996, Phillips said in an interview with National Review, "At OEO, I was confronted with evil, pure and simple. I was not there very long when I discovered that OEO was the war room for those that were trying to overturn what had once been America."

Does this week's news of the purge of 50 staff members at the state Department of Education represent another example of the Ferguson doctrine being applied here in South Carolina? It's hard to tell. Superintendent Mick Zais, through his spokesperson, said the "reduction in force" was accomplished through "voluntary resignations and retirements."

But purging 50 staff members at one swipe -- 13 percent of the department's workforce, excluding the department's transportation workers across the state -- is a red flag to South Carolinians who want a strong, effective system of public schools administered by advocates for public education. Zais is clearly not such an advocate; nothing in his history suggested he would be. And Zais has installed by his side a deputy superintendent with no experience in education whatsoever, one whose resume includes being executive director of his political party.

We certainly know what's next on the agenda: "Zais and Gov. Nikki Haley are considering privatizing school bus operations. That could affect the Education Department's 456 transportation workers."

Is it possible that Haley and Zais will preside over the active, public dismantling of our state Department of Education? Haley already wants the constitutional authority to appoint the education superintendent, and the legislature seems poised to give her that opportunity.

With this governor in control of the state's public schools system, appointing a superintendent to follow in Zais's footsteps, with no functioning Department of Education, and no advocates working within government to rebuild it, do our children have a chance to succeed?

Zais purges 50 from the Department of Education

Google the word "purge" and you may find a definition that looks like this: "In history and political science, to purge is to remove people considered by the group in power to be 'undesirable' from a government, political party, a profession, or from community or society as a whole, often by violent means. Restoration of people from a purge is known as rehabilitation."

Ask for examples of purges throughout history and you may dig up a summary like this one:

Rome
In the era of Republican Rome, Gaius Marius proscribed Sullan supporters after he and Cinna ousted Gnaeus Octavius; Sulla followed with even more brutal proscriptions against Marian supporters when he came into the dictatorship. The Second Triumvirate instituted more proscriptions some forty years afterward after taking control of Rome from Caesar's murderers.

England
The earliest use of the term itself was the English Civil War's Pride's Purge. In 1648, the moderate members of the English Long Parliament were purged by the army. Parliament would suffer subsequent purges under the Commonwealth including the purge of the entire House of Lords. Counter-revolutionaries such as royalists were purged as well as more radical revolutionaries such as the Levellers. After the Restoration, obstinate republicans were purged while some fled to New England.

France
The French Revolution saw revolutionary factions purging each other. The most famous purge was Robespierre's Terror which ended with him being purged as well. After the fall of Napoleon, all those associated with revolutionary activity were purged.

Soviet Union
Purges are often associated with the Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Those who were purged (among them artists, scientists, teachers, people in the military, but also many long-time communists who dared to disagree with the party leadership) were sent to labor camps or executed. The most notorious of CPSU purges was the Great Purge initiated by Joseph Stalin during the 1930s. Deng Xiaoping was known for the distinction of returning to power multiple times after surviving multiple purges.

Germany
The Nazis also engaged in purges, most notably in the Night of the Long Knives (1934) and the mass reprisals against Adolf Hitler's opponents following the July Plot (1944).

France
After France's liberation by the Allies in 1944, purges were processed by the Free French and mostly the French Resistance against former collaborationnists, the so called vichystes, its legal phase was known as épuration légale.

Japan
Under the instructions by the American Occupation Force as part of its directions to democratize Japan, the Japanese government purged over 200,000 individuals, including former military leaders, members of the parliament, high-ranking bureaucrats, regional politicical leaders, labor union leaders, business leaders, educators, journalists, and spiritual leaders, who had been associated with the nation’s efforts to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The purge was carried out in one year period as of February 1, 1946, and most of those who were designated as war-sympathizers were banned from holding public offices until the end of occupation on April 28, 1952.

United States
In the United States, the events that took place during the period of McCarthyism in the (1950s) were anti-communist purges. A valid argument can be made that the United States engaged in the systematic purging of Native American people. Evidence for government participation in Indian removal can be found in many official state and historical documents.

That's only a sampling of large purges. Another, more recent example, is found in the final months of the Bush administration in 2008, when agency heads purged dozens of employees in the federal government, people known as whistleblowers, people suspected of disloyalty.

Patricia Caperton Parent, writing in "Texas Politics Today," explains how a purge works:

In the plural executive and at the board and commission level, aggressive agency directors can employ 'reduction in force' campaigns. This tool, developed to streamline and get rid of waste in state agencies, requires employees to re-apply for their positions and can be used by adroit supervisors to purge entire departments of political undesirables. Once the old workers are gone, new sympathetic workers can be installed at various levels. New workers can easily be recruited from party and personal networks.

This week brings news of a new purge, right here in South Carolina.

State Education Superintendent Mick Zais is restructuring the department's administrative offices in an effort to improve efficiency and it has involved the elimination of about 50 positions since May.

Twenty-three of the job reductions came from voluntary resignations or retirements, but 27 others were reductions in force. Local school leaders may have different contacts at the state level, but the services and programs in schools shouldn't be affected, said Jay W. Ragley, the department's deputy superintendent for legislative and public affairs.

What I know of "voluntary resignations or retirements" is that they are rarely "voluntary." Give someone the choice of resigning -- with the possibility of getting a cordial letter of recommendation for future reference -- or being fired and having a gaping hole shot through your employment history, and most victims will opt to resign. Similarly, target an employee who's eligible to retire and threaten to demote or re-assign them to your department's Outer Egypt branch, and they'll likely take retirement. "Voluntary resignations and retirements" don't fool anyone.

And it's not over, according to Zais's minister of propaganda. "The reorganization happening now will help the state fulfill its budget mandate, and Ragley said more changes are to come."

Apparently, the dear leader has been studying closely those in his charge, and making two lists: "Zais has been studying the department's operations since he came into office in November, so these decisions weren't hasty, Ragley said. He didn't know how many more positions would be cut or how much Zais hoped to save, but Ragley said Zais planned to exceed the required amount of cuts."

And the purge isn't a piecemeal affair. It isn't as if each department or program was asked to make cuts themselves. Zais's master plan involves wholesale closing and consolidation of "main" Department of Education functions.

Two of the department's five main divisions -- Standards and Learning was one and Innovation and Support was the other -- will be consolidated, and those employees' duties will be shifted to other areas. The names of the new divisions haven't been decided, but services in those divisions included: Developing requirements for what students must learn, charter schools, school buses, youth services, and facilities.
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Ragley said the changes should help the department focus more on effective teaching, accountability for schools and the department, and technology.

Having departments called "Standards and Learning" and "Innovation and Support" might have helped the department focus more on effective teaching, accountability for schools and the department, and technology. Purging the Department of Education of 50 out of 393 department staff probably doesn't. Cutting jobs and whole departments merely helps those remaining staff members focus harder on saying the right words to keep their jobs until they're eligible to retire and leave.

Does anyone know the names of the victims?

Cheraw Primary promotes summer reading among youngsters

What a great idea. Is it possible to replicate this program for all of South Carolina's first- and second-graders? The Cheraw Chronicle explains:

Cheraw Primary participated in the Summer Reading Project sponsored by the South Carolina Department of Education May 23-24. As part of the program, all students in first and second grade were able to choose twelve books from a selection of over sixty titles of children’s literature to read.

Classrooms were set up similar to a book store where students could browse and select the books they wished to read. These books will become part of their home libraries.

Over the course of the summer, the children will read the books provided by the project, and with the help of parents, record their total reading times on calendars and discuss the books with each other.

When school begins in the fall, there will be a special program at the school to discuss the positive experiences related to the project, and to talk about research relating to children and reading.

Cheraw Primary School is excited the program which helps to maintain and improve reading skills in students, when given access to books throughout the summer.