In a column on reform--not just reform, but the lovely 2005 urban slang Reform 2.0 favored by those hep cats in Kurt Zellers's caucus--Steve Drazkowski notes:
America is changing. Minnesota is changing - and it's clear we aren't keeping up. We're in the middle of the pack when it comes to student reading test scores. Our current state education model came about before we put a man on the moon.
Yes indeedie. This is powerful rhetorical stuff.
Bluestem wonders if The Draz is willing to apply this reasoning to other areas. It's clear that Minnesota isn't keeping up with Iowa, for instance.
Our current marriage model came about before we put a man on the moon. Those folks in Iowa have had same sex marriage for a couple of years now. We hope to see Draz urging voters to reject the marriage inequality amendment Draz and his friends so rashly placed on the November's ballot.
Is Draz proposing that we make 1969 the cut-off year for models for everthing, or is education somehow special? Bluestem also pauses to reflect that people educated under that pre-moon landing model somehow managed to get a man on the moon, but perhaps there's no relationship between book larnin' and rocket science.
Or perhaps mere chronology is simply no substitute for arguing a system or proposal on its merits. Or that fluffing the same-old, same-old ALEC model bills with a shiny new name (dated as the construction might be) only changes the branding of said proposals, not the debate about them.
Pretending that the "hearings" where Draz and his ace boonies presented these ideas once again were actually forums designed to gather citizen-generated proposals is the pure product of a Potemkin advance team, as we noted late last August in The Draz Traveling ALEC Reform 2.0 Medicine Show hits Kenyon, Goodview and beyond.
If the educational model is bad for being pre-man-on-the-moon, how about a Constitution that came out before talk radio was invented?
Posted by: Charlie Quimby | Jan 24, 2012 at 09:55 AM