A group that says it staunchly believes in local control of education has an odd view of what this means in practice.
Members of the Knox County Republican Committee were allowed to use a classroom at the King Middle School in Portland to prepare for the party’s annual convention. The rifled through boxes of papers and when they left, according to news reports they took with them a poster they found objectionable — re-placing it with a pro-Republican bumper sticker — and one left a note to the teacher about propagandizing students. Others later called the school’s principal to complain about what they viewed as objectionable materials on classroom walls.
Could it be that the people of Portland approve of how King Middle School is run? Isn’t this what local control is about — letting local residents, not a group of visitors, decide what should be taught and how?
Aren’t nasty notes from visitors and angry phone calls from non-residents the antithesis of local control?
“We need to get back to local control in education,” Steven Dyer, a member of the Knox County Committee and one of the authors of a controversial new platform adopted at the Republican convention last weekend, told Village Soup.
Although Republican Party leaders issued an apology for what happened at King Middle School, which the GOP members were allowed to use for free, only one candidate for governor has pointed out the hypocrisy of the incident.
“It seems a group of knuckleheads associated with the Republican Convention decided that they know better how to decorate a classroom than the teacher whose room they used to ‘caucus,’” Republican Matt Jacobson wrote on his blog Thursday.
“Apparently, this group forgot that local control of schools means that Portland, or Calais, or Rockland or Thomaston all have the right to pick curriculum, administrators and ultimately teachers in their local schools. These vandals would not tolerate similar behavior in their towns. But yet, they decided it was okay for them to behave this way in Portland.”
“This behavior confirms the worst stereotypes our opponents hurl at us,” he added. “We are better than this. Ours is a party of solutions, of tolerance of people who disagree with us, of respect for law and our fellow men. We believe in civil discourse and spirited disagreement. We are not thugs. We do not behave like the mobs at G-8 Summits. I am embarrassed.”
Mr. Jacobson is right. Although such behavior was an aberration, it unfairly paints Republicans as thugs who only want things done their way.
That is not local control, and it should not be what the GOP stands for.