Two items from today's WNJ prove John Adams' point. First, we find that when Governor Markell wants something, the niceties of existing regulation or the traditional independence of regulators is not to be allowed to stand in his way. Governor Markell wants an Alabama corporation to build a rehabilitation hospital in Middletown.   This may or may not be a good thing, a needed thing--I simply do not know.  But what I do know is that the administration's approach should be setting off alarms all over the place. First, he replaced Delaware Health Resources Board members who did not share his views in the middle of the process of considering the certificate review for the hospital.  Much of the rest of the board resigned in protest. Then, the Governor prevailed upon pet legislator Quinn Johnson of Middletown to introduce legislation specifically exempting ONLY "rehabilitation hospitals" from certification review. There are two takeaways here: 1.  This beha...

In today's WNJ.

I've been thinking about this for awhile now, but Donald Gephardt's well-intentioned op-ed piece in today's WNJ has crystallized my thinking. There's this, which is right on point: We give no control of what goes on in the schools to the teachers, yet we give millions of public dollars to groups of people – many of whom have no educational credentials – to begin new charter schools, most of which are not doing any better than the public schools   we already have.  Unfortunately (at least from my perspective), his solution is rather ... academic ... instead of robust: The core of the problem is that K-12 teaching has never been a profession. Teachers have no say in choosing and evaluating their colleagues. There is no incentive to “share the good stuff” between them. Perhaps it would motivate good teachers to stay – and to continually improve – if they were given more professional responsibility in their workplace. As anemic as I find his solution, I am forc...

That's the conclusion you could reasonably draw from Paul Herdman's op-ed piece in today's WNJ. In his latest new "Five Step" program for improving education, Herdman effectively says that Delaware education has failed to live up to Vision 2015's lofty goals because the teachers we have are not good enough. Step One--according to Herdman--is "recruiting the best" teachers.  In Herdman's view this obviously means that the teachers we currently have are not good enough to do the job, and should be replaced with unlicensed temporary help from Teach for America, Vision 2015 devotees from the Delaware Leadership Project, and .. . " scouring the country to find top teachers and leaders to serve in our highest-need schools."  In other words, if you are already teaching at Highlands, or Warner, or Richardson Park, or Bancroft, you are a loser that we plan to get rid of just as soon as we can find somebody better.  (Hear that, Mike Matthews?...

Four steps is all it would take to end Delaware's drug war: 1.  Fix the medical marijuana bill.  This is already being contemplated, I understand.  A medical marijuana bill without an actual delivery method is worse than useless because it is mere tantalizing to those in chronic paid.  This is a simple fix, except for the propensity of the Drug Enforcement Agency to get involved with ignoring state laws about drugs that DEA doesn't like.  So as a specific legislative flourish, this revision should include language that requires the Delaware Attorney General to defend any legitimate distributor of medical marijuana or any patient legally using it from all Federal charges. 2.  Decriminalize personal use of marijuana.  As an interim step toward legalization, decriminalization would replace the possibility of jail time and a permanent record with small civil fines.  This would, frankly, also discourage intense enforcement.  It would also rend...

In a rare burst of candor about the Obama administration, the WNJ editorial page discovers that the administration's claim that Obamacare is driving down medical costs is false: “The  idea  that we have licked the problem of health care cost increases is no more probable today than it was in the past,” Drew Altman and Larry Levitt, Kaiser’s president and vice president, said. “Our nation has made no fundamental change in how health care is paid for or delivered.”   This means the claims that the  Affordable  Care Act, or Obamacare, was slowing the cost increases even before it went into effect just are not true.   Likewise, according to the Kaiser report, when  prices  start going up over the next couple of years, Obamacare will not be the cause either. So far so good. But then the editorial writer takes a bit of a detour: This expected return to increasing costs means the debate about Medicare and Medicaid will have to continue. One ...

I don't often blog about issues that directly affect Delaware State University, and before I begin I need to make the point that the opinions expressed here are mine alone, and not those of either DSU or the American Association of University Professors. That said ... Senate Bill 51 [to which I would link if it were up on bill tracking yet] is an absolutely ridiculous extension of state power at the behest of Governor Jack Markell to waste time and money solving a problem that simply does not exist. Here's the lead-in from today's WNJ : Aspiring public school teachers in Delaware will face new academic challenges if legislation proposed Thursday is successful.   The bill is meant to improve the quality of educators in the state’s school system. It would set higher standards for being admitted to teacher-education programs within Delaware and introduce tests that graduates  must pass to prove they are ready to teach.   The changes would, for the first time, se...