Is Rift Developing Over NCLB?
Rep. Steve Urquhart has taken off the gloves in a blog posting suggesting that Tim Bridgewater is the wrong man for the job of education deputy in the Huntsman administration. Urquhart, who is House majority whip and one of Utah’s more outspoken legislators, throws some hard punches at Bridgewater over federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, the expected focus of the upcoming special legislative session April 19-20.
In a Tribune story Tuesday, Bridgewater was critical of Rep. Margaret Dayton, the lead legislator on NCLB, and Urquhart struck back in his blog. Urquhart even questioned whether Gov. Huntsman will put NCLB on the special session agenda.
Unless a significant breakthrough occurs in negotiations with the feds, I would be very surprised if NCLB wasn’t on the agenda. That issue has been touted as the main reason for holding the session. The governor convinced the Legislature to hold off on passing legislation challenging NCLB in the session earlier this year to provide enough time to negotiate with the federal Education Department. While some concessions have been made, some state legislators and other Utah education leaders don’t think they go far enough. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was expected to be in Utah later this week for further discussions.
This is a high-stakes issue on all sides. It would be embarrassing for the Bush administration if Utah, among the reddest of red states, defies it on NCLB. Bush has invested a lot of personal political capital in the initiative and the national news media and the national education community are watching closely to see what Utah does.
The Huntsman administration needs positive relationships with the Bush administration on a number of fronts, particularly in the fight to keep high level nuclear waste out of Utah. On the other hand, many legislators are adamant that this is a states’ rights issue and the federal government has no business dictating how Utah runs its schools.
Perhaps Urquhart’s blog will help bring things to a head and get everyone talking before a train wreck occurs.
Who is Utah’s Most-Exposed Politician?
Politicians like to get their name in the paper, obviously (at least if the publicity is positive). So which Utah politician gets the most ink in the newspaper? If you guessed the governor, you’d be right. That’s how it has been for many years in Utah. By the nature of the job, the governor gets his or her name in the paper far more often than any other major politician.
There’s a simple way to measure which politician is mentioned most often in the Deseret Morning News. The paper provides an easy archives search function that allows archives subscribers to search for names and see the number of times they are mentioned.
To measure the frequency of names mentioned in the paper, Jenni Davis, a junior high school student who spent a day job shadowing at the Exoro Group last week, did a search on 12 Utah politicians using the same methodology for each.
We searched the years 2004 and 2005, putting each name in quotes (“Orrin Hatch”) so the computer would search for exact matches. While some of the results were predictable, there were some surprises. By a small margin, Olene Walker, who was governor in 2004, beat Jon Huntsman, who was running for office in 2004 and has been governor since the first of the year. Some of the Huntsman mentions could have been his father, but probably not a lot.
Nancy Workman had 499 mentions (most of it negative), more than all the members of the congressional delegation except Orrin Hatch (580). Jon Valentine had more mentions than Rob Bishop. Even though Bob Bennett was in a re-election campaign, he had only 388 mentions. Considering Utah’s legislature is only in session for 45 days, the Speaker and Senate President didn’t do too badly.
Here are the number of mentions for each politician:
Olene Walker, 1,059
Jon Huntsman, 1,019
Orrin Hatch, 580
Nancy Workman, 499
Jim Matheson, 392
Bob Bennett, 388
Chris Cannon, 348
Mark Shurtleff, 314
Peter Corroon, 230
John Valentine, 213
Rob Bishop, 206
Greg Curtis, 199
New Planning Blog
Wilf Sommerkorn has started a new blog focused on planning-related issues in Utah. You can find it here. It is meant to be a resource for city planners and local government officials. “So much of what we do in planning and zoning IS local politics – a lot of local government officials estimate that at least half of what they do is planning and zoning,” said Sommerkorn.
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