More Superintendent News

The puff piece on Gregg Underheim (the bad guy) is here (following Burmaster's profile yesterday). Things I did not know about Underheim before:

• The teaching job he quit was at the high school my wife graduated from
  
• After he found he couldn't hack it as a teacher, he found he couldn't hack it as a national Republican operative
  
• He was a world-class foosball player
  
• Despite chairing the Assembly health committee for a decade, he's done nothing to control skyrocketing health care costs in Wisconsin (okay, that one I knew already)
  
• One of my least favorite people in the world, Ken Cole of the state Association of School Boards, said of Underheim, "I don't think he's very knowledgeable at all" on education issues.

It's that last that I keep worrying about. Last week, when I reviewed his "platform," there seemed to be a bit of dissonance between what he envisioned as possible and what economic and pedagogical reality would allow. Whether it's his apparent misunderstanding of the QEO or his belief that good teachers will want to sit on their behinds all day babysitting students at laptops, he just doesn't have a handle on what's really going on.

In other news, Monday marked a reporting deadline for fundraising in the race, and Burmaster leads the way, rather unsurprisingly. If I didn't have TiVo, I'd probably have seen their commercials by now . . .