Republican gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson delivered a “school reform” plan today. Not much new. To someone who asked how he could support meaningful standards at the same time he is fighting for preservation of a rural high school that hasn’t been teaching all required courses, the answer is that he’d let the availability of courses by TV suffice for such places. He’s for charter schools, of course, despite an absence of evidence for the notion that charter schools must be better than public schools because, well, just because.
We note that Hutchinson just happened to talk about smarter spending of school dollars the same day that Walton University’s Walton Endowed Professor of Teacher Union Busting and Lower Taxes for Schools, Jay Greene, landed an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (natch) on runaway public school spending in Arkansas and nationwide. Ya think he might take a look at percentage increases in tuition at Walton U.while he’s on the subject of runaway inflation?
See the jump for the text of Asa’s full news release. (If campaign events run to form, Mike Beebe, his Democratic opponent, will shortly declare that he and Asa are on the same page.)