Hibbard straps on his getaway parachute, Gahan annexes the school corporation -- wait, who's that OTHER guy?

Get ready to choose between Dear Leader and the Terminator.

It's possible to laugh out loud, but only with copious stashes of gin close by.

Hibbard may be leaving NA-FC schools, by Aprile Rickert (All Abbey Road on the River, All of the Time)

Superintendent eyes same role in Franklin Township schools

NEW ALBANY — The New Albany-Floyd County School Corp. may soon be in search of a new leader.

Current superintendent Bruce Hibbard, who's been at NA-FC for seven years, appears on the verge of being hired by the Franklin Township Community School Corp. at Indianapolis, where he would serve as superintendent.

Posted on the Franklin Township website this morning was a proposed contract with Hibbard, showing he would received a base salary of $180,000 on a contract beginning July 1. The Franklin school board is expected to vote on the contract June 13. A public hearing has been called for Monday, when the board will gather opinion on the contract and proposed hire.

Waxing self-congratulatory, the 'Bama newspaper's Susan Duncan lauds her government watchdog, which never seems to bark here in New Albany.

The News and Tribune's new editor took time this weekend to praise her team's heroic performance, and it sent me scurrying to the thesaurus to find synonyms for "delusional."

Among them: deception, fantasy, hallucination, illusion, and pipe dream.

Unfortunately, we don't see much of Duncan's imagined watchdog here in Floyd County, especially in New Albany. Furthermore, we recall the entire year that passed without a reporter in New Albany to ask questions like these.

Duncan's words merely reinforce the perennially Clark-centric performance of Bill Hanson's advertising vehicle. We're left to surmise that it's all about the money, so allow me to extend my smudgy alms cup to Duncan as she passes on the street:

"Excuse me, ma'am, but mightn't we get just a few farthings of your fierce watchdog commitment for the starving New Albanians?"

DUNCAN: Clark County Council shuffle deals residents a bad hand

... Our forefathers, wary of government overreach and oppression, also noted the importance of a freely functioning press in the First Amendment. As your local newspaper, we embrace that responsibility first among all others.

The story that appeared at the top of Friday's News and Tribune is a prime example of our commitment — and why it's important.

Tony Bennett cannot — at this time — serve on the Clark County Council, despite being tapped by a GOP caucus Wednesday to complete the unexpired District 2 term vacated by Brian Lenfert.

Bennett is ineligible; he doesn't meet the residency requirements outlined in state statute. The law says officeholders must have lived in the district they represent for at least six months and within the county for at least a year. Bennett falls short on both counts. He's only lived in Clark County since early September, something he readily admitted when the newspaper asked him the question.

Had we not fulfilled our role as a watchdog over government by educating ourselves on the legality of Bennett's appointment and inquiring as to his residency, I suspect Bennett would still be a councilman.

Tony Bennett: A Lysenko for our times ... and corrupt, to boot.

Every single time Tony Bennett's name comes up, I think back to Trofim Lysenko.

Howey, Bennett, Lysenko and Daniels.

I'll make this point a final time: Tony Bennett is one hell of a crooner, but he didn't invent the strategy of cooking the numbers to suit ideological imperatives. It isn't for nothing that I've been comparing amok Bennettism with the crazed genetics theories of Soviet half-scientist Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenkoism is a synonym for "scientific quackery."

Lysenkoism

Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko's methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin's death.

In the Courier-Journal, via TheStatehouseFile.com, John Krull hammers a few more coffin nails. As for Bennett's future, I wonder if they're hiring greeters at Wal-Mart?

Bennett, a train wreck in slow motion

 ... It turns out that, if the inspector general's investigators are to be believed, there was a great deal of evidence that Bennett and his team used state time, state employees, state equipment and state money to help him run his doomed re-election campaign. Among the highlights, it appears Bennett routinely used state computers to store his campaign databases, traveled to campaign and political events using state vehicles and state drivers and made campaign fundraising phone calls on state time ...

... Despite the fact that Indiana's education leadership structure is in shambles and the evidence that he bent or broke both rules and the law willy-nilly is piled high enough to reach skyscraper proportions, Bennett and the members of his dwindling amen corner still insist he did nothing wrong.

Strangely, Bennett and his partisans actually seem to believe what they're saying.

And the fact that they can't see just how wrong they were may explain how they made such a mess of the state's education system and got themselves into so much trouble.

Howey, Bennett, Lysenko and Daniels.

I'll make this point a final time: Tony Bennett is one hell of a crooner, but he didn't invent the strategy of cooking the numbers to suit ideological imperatives. It isn't for nothing that I've been comparing amok Bennettism with the crazed genetics theories of Soviet half-scientist Trofim Lysenko.

Me? Hey, I never doubted that Lysenko sincerely believed it to be sheer coincidence that his genetic theories jibed with those of Joe Stalin. And the Astros are on track for a Series win next year.

Bennett's down; good riddance, except that Mitch Daniels, his enabler survives to slur Howard Zinn. That's a higher injustice, don't you think?

HOWEY: The hollow facade of Tony Bennett, by Brian Howey (N and T)

... These past eight months, after one of the most rapid rises in Indiana politics and education, we’ve watched the precipitous fall of Supt. Tony Bennett, culminating with his stunning upset loss to little-known Democrat Glenda Ritz last November, and as of Thursday, his resignation as Florida’s education superintendent.

Bennett’s ultimate Sunshine State downfall had its roots in Indiana, where emails obtained by the Associated Press’s Tom LoBianco revealed Bennett’s willingness to take liberties with the A through F numbers of Christel House, a charter school founded by Indiana philanthropist Christel DeHaan. It looked even worse when it was reported that DeHaan had contributed $130,000 to Bennett’s reelection campaign.

Tony Bennett and Trofim Lysenko: Separated at birth?

To refresh your memory as to Lysenko, Wikipedia's fine.

The biggest loser in the Tony Bennett resignation, by Valerie Strauss (Washington Post)

... What Bennett did in Indiana and the Board of Education did in Florida show how little the rules matter to some school reformers who wrap themselves in the mantle of “accountability for all” but try to escape it themselves. In both Indiana and Florida, the Bush-inspired A-F school grading system had to be changed to keep corporate-influenced school reform from collapsing under the weight of its own illogic, revealing the reform model as bankrupt.

Dave Matthews just hates that Glenda Ritz won.

As always, setting a fine example for our school children.

Laughing out loud.

NEWS AND TRIBUNE LETTERS — For Dec. 11: GOP head wants campaigning out of schools, by Dave Matthews, chairman, Floyd County Republican Party

A huge percentage of parents are tired of the antics of the ISTA and a small number of bad teachers. We feel this kind of “education” has no place in schools that our taxes are paying for.

How sweet it is: Sour grapes and fluffery from St. Daniels.

I never doubted that Barack Obama would win, but at no time did I ever foresee the sheer entertainment value afforded us during the weeks since.

Tony Bennett had wheelbarrows of out-of-state cash, and yet lost his re-election bid to an under-funded opponent whose advisors evidently read "Moneyball" and profited from the lessons therein.

Thus, these crazed sour grapes from the departing Colossus of the Prairie, uttered at a circle jerk of a symposium devoted to Republicans giving screw-the-people awards to each other. Attendees listened as Mitch Daniels began babbling about reaction, never realizing he was looking in the mirror of the men's room, reminding us that when it comes to fluffing, it's all about location, location, location.

Bennett lost neither because teachers used school time to undermine him, nor owing to voters suddenly becoming dispassionate analysts of impenetrable school "reform" information. He lost because of his day in, day out demeanor. Bennett cannot read a lawnmower instruction manual aloud without coming across as pompous, arrogant and a good deal snarky, rather in the fashion of his fellow GOP loser, Richard Mourdock, although Mourdock always seemed less arrogant than entirely detached from daily reality, like that guy at the end of the bar who's off his prescriptions but firmly on the gin.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels claims teachers used illegal tactics in election (Courier-Journal)

“Despite the great progress that's been made in states like ours, the forces of reaction never quit,” Daniels said. “The last twitch of the dinosaur's tail can still kill you and that's what happened.”

PowerPoint Putrid: Rest assured, it's TB -- not TR.

Bennett campaign for school changes not done

Our children is learning alright. It's what Bennett is teaching that's the problem.

As NAC and Morton Marcus pointed out earlier in the week, much of the state level "reform" being foisted on Hoosiers by officials in Indianapolis is nothing more than a centralized power grab by those who implausibly claim to support reduced government intrusion.

That's certainly true in the realm of education. As the Tribune reports, Indiana Public School Superintendent Tony Bennett is traveling the state stumping for Republican candidates in order to gain control of the Indiana House hoping that same-party representatives will just roll when he and Saint Daniels make their pitch, the details of which they refuse to reveal until after the elections.

When Bennett was superintendent of Greater Clark Schools and not busy campaigning for higher office, he negotiated a contract for himself at over $130K per year, championed a $99 million building project, and assured parents that each part of the project would go on even in the face of cost overruns. All the while, the school system for which he was responsible failed to make adequate yearly progress according to standardized tests.

Since the source of his paycheck has changed, Bennett now says that public school employees have too much negotiating power, we spend too much on school buildings, and that administrative salaries should be tied to yearly progress benchmarks.

If Bennett is the type of hypocritical nitwit you want making decisions for schools in New Albany and statewide, then send Ed Clere back to the state house so he can help them get it done.