"The Best I Can Do," by Marvin Pomerantz

Marvin Pomerantz, a prominent Des Moines businessman who advised Republican governors and presidential candidates for the past 40 years, died Thursday at the University of Iowa Hospitals in Iowa City.

Pomerantz, one of only six Iowans inducted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, played an influential role in Iowa education. In addition to serving two terms as president of the Iowa state Board of Regents, Pomerantz donated millions of dollars to the University of Iowa.

“The University of Iowa joins our entire state in mourning the loss of Marvin Pomerantz,” UI President Sally Mason said in a statement Thursday. “Mr. Pomerantz was a true friend to the UI and to higher education throughout Iowa. His leadership, his insight, his advice and his generosity have been crucial to our success and our excellence for decades.”

Pomerantz died of complications stemming from a heart attack he suffered in June.

Born in Des Moines on Aug. 6, 1930, Pomerantz was one of nine children whose parents immigrated from Poland in 1912. In his recently penned autobiography, “The Best I Can Do,” published in 2006, Pomerantz credits his humble upbringing for helping shape his philanthropic efforts:

Looking back on my life, it would be hard to find anyone with a more humble beginning than mine. Growing up in Des Moines, there was barely enough food to feed the family, but we always shared what little we had. We didn’t think we were poor, we knew we were poor …

Pomerantz’s interest in education did not stop in 1952 when he graduated from the UI with a bachelor of science degree in commerce. He led the regents from 1987-93 and 1995-96 and recently served as head of the Institute for Tomorrow’s Workforce, a group that studied Iowa’s education system.

Last fall, Pomerantz was honored for his contributions to a scholarship for minority students at Des Moines University.

“Marvin’s commitment to education and the children of Iowa was remarkable,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said in a statement. “He was a premiere philanthropist, who invested his own dollars in making our state a better place to live.”

Despite recent health concerns, Pomerantz remained politically active in Iowa. During the Republican presidential campaign, he served as Iowa co-chair of former Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

“Marvin is the epitome of the American dream, and his support is going to be enormously helpful to my campaign,” Romney said in an April statement. “He shares my vision of a strong and vibrant economy, one that is able to successfully compete with extraordinary economic challenges from abroad. To do so, Marvin and I share the same belief that we must have a rigorous educational system preparing our children for the future.”

Pomerantz was also active in shaping Iowa’s educational policy. He co-chaired the Institute for Tomorrow’s Workforce (ITW), a nonprofit educational foundation created by the Legislature in 2005 to provide lawmakers with recommendations ensuring that all Iowa learners are rigorously challenged and adequately prepared for the 21st century.

Last fall, Pomerantz stepped down from his post after accusing Gov. Chet Culver of failing to support the institute’s recommendations. Upon his resignation, Pomerantz threatened to file a lawsuit if Culver didn’t follow through with the ITW’s recommendations and followed through with his threat this spring, financing a lawsuit that asks Iowa to adopt measures such as creating a state-wide, mandatory curriculum to ensure equal opportunities for all students. The suit is still pending.

Pomerantz also made news last summer when he resigned his position as head of UI College of Public Health’s capital-raising committee. After procuring a $15 million naming gift from the Wellmark Foundation, Pomerantz voiced his displeasure with the college dean’s rejection of the gift. “I think the College of Public Health dean embarrassed me and embarrassed the university,” Pomerantz said in statement. “It is a terrible insult to the university what Dean Merchant has done.”

The gift was intended to be used for the proposed $45 million building for the College of Public Health, but was ultimately rejected by the teaching faculty, which cited concerns about naming public institutions after private businesses.

Pomerantz was tough, but he also was innovative and creative and gave of his time, energy and money, Regent Michael Gartner of Des Moines told the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

“As head of the board of regents he accomplished immense gains and made the universities better when he left office than they were when he came into office,” Gartner said.

Their plan? To create a new layer of top-down bureaucracy and a batch of unfunded mandates that would inevitably throw local control of public education under the bus.Last month, the Senate approved Senate File 2216, which would require the Iowa Department of Education (DoE) to develop a model core curriculum and state standards. The bill “ensures that all Iowa students have access to a rigorous curriculum that prepares them for success in postsecondary education and the emerging global economy,” Sen. Brian Schoenjahn, D-Arlington, chair of the Senate Education Committee, told the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Regarding funding, all districts would be required to measure students in accordance to the standards developed by the DoE, and pay for the latter by using funds from its state school foundation aid.

In short, no additional funds for district compliance will be allocated, thus creating yet another unfunded education mandate.

Haven’t lawmakers learned anything from the perils of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which primarily focuses on the implementation of yearly testing, while simultaneously putting the financial squeeze on school districts?

Apparently not, and now they are lining up to sacrifice local control of education by creating a one-size-fits-all measurement that further removes the decision-making process from local districts and classroom teachers. Iowa has a long tradition of fighting for the preservation of local control in the public schools arena, and now, feeling the peer pressure from other states, Iowa lawmakers are ready to cave under the tepid rationale, “Everyone else is doing it.”

In a way, Schoenjahn told the Gazette, Iowa is playing catch-up. Last year, it was the last state to implement voluntary state standards, and he wants to build on those standards by adopting a statewide curriculum. “By raising standards and increasing accountability, we help our students succeed in school and beyond,” the former teacher said. In adopting the curriculum standards, the Legislature is “listening to Iowa’s business community, recognizing that our economy can prosper only if students learn the skills to take on high-wage, high-skill jobs,” Schoenjahn said.

BINGO!

Lawmakers are listening to Iowa’s business leaders, yet haven’t listened to what classroom teachers have to say, nor have they asked. When it comes to measuring progress, or lack thereof, in the theater of war in Iraq, politicians are willing to listen to the military commanders on the ground. But when it comes to public education, this same courtesy is not extended to the teachers in the trenches. This analogy, however, is implicitly faulty since the war in Iraq has no clearly identified objectives or explicit means of measuring growth, let alone success.

Last year, Marvin Pomerantz, who resigned as co-chairman of the educational think tank Institute for Tomorrow’s Workforce, citing a lack of support from the Democratic governor for money or its recommendations, threatened to sue the state of Iowa. The lawsuit, prepared by Pomerantz and his lawyer Doug Gross, challenged the disparity in education across the state, claiming rural districts had less opportunities and course offerings that would adequately prepare students to meet the rigors in the post-secondary world.

Pomerantz may be right about the curriculum inequities from district to district, but this only serves to highlight the funding inequities and how rural districts are disproportionately funded when property taxes are used to supplement state funding.

Culver, who during his 2006 gubernatorial bid promised to protect local control of education, capitulated to Pomerantz’s demands and now supports the same plan proposed by his Republican rival, Jim Nussle. During the campaign, former Iowa Rep. Nussle of Manchester promised to help make Iowa a world-class “education destination” and denied Culver’s contention that his plan would force school consolidation. Moreover, Nussle wanted to “speed up implementation of statewide standards with more rigor and emphasis on core courses and greater teacher accountability.”

Sound familiar?

“I ran for governor to build ‘One Iowa,’ and give every child in the state an equal opportunity to succeed as an adult,” Culver said in a statement last October. “It is critical we ensure all students in Iowa are given the opportunity to learn the skills we know they will need after graduation, whether they go on to college or straight to the work force. It is important to begin the discussion on adoption of this core curriculum statewide to reach our goal of aligning our expectations for student instruction to the state core standards.”

Because the current bill is so vaguely written, lawmakers should ask the tough questions before passing it into law. Once the DoE develops the state standards, how much will it cost to develop a new standardized test that accurately measures these standards? How much will it cost to implement these tests on a yearly basis? What impact will it have on smaller districts? How will schools and districts be held accountable if they fail to meet the standards?

During my first year of teaching in Oregon in 1998, I saw firsthand how a state-mandated curriculum and standards affected school districts and individual classrooms. Feeling pressure from Oregon businesses who claimed high school graduates were ill-prepared to meet the basic demands of the work force, the state passed mandated benchmarks. The standards were developed by the state’s education department, and districts were required to adopt the curriculum standards, implement a district plan on how the standards would be achieved and test students accordingly.

The tests did have a high-stakes element attached to them, in that students who met the standards were awarded a Certificate of Advanced Mastery, which showed up on their transcripts. This way, future employers could discern whether an applicant possessed what they deemed essential skills needed for success.

I taught high school English at Illinois Valley High School in Cave Junction, which was a part of the Three Rivers School District, one of the poorest districts in the state. Because the mandate had limited funding, teachers experienced the trickle-down effects of the mandate’s short-sighted objectives.

The district plan required that I, using the state’s writing rubric, score five samples of writing for each ninth-grade student. Mind you, this was in addition to grading the papers on my rubric and providing written feedback. Moreover, I was supposed to record all of these scores on a graph and submit that graph to the district by year’s end. I had over 150 ninth-graders, which meant I was scoring more than 750 writing samples. The larger districts, who benefited from a larger property tax base, hired scorers to complete this daunting task.

Consequently, I read the writing on the wall and moved back to Iowa, where I took a $5,000 pay cut to teach in a state that fostered a climate of local control. Last year, the Oregon Legislature voted to phase out the CIM and CAM in 2008, replacing them with a compromised combination of state and local-drive assessments.

I’ve been teaching at West High School since my return and now, 10 years later, the handwriting on the wall has resurfaced.

Lawmakers have yet to explicitly state how districts will be held accountable for the new standards; the stakes are a bit fuzzy. If you read between the lines, however, there are certain stakeholders who stand to benefit from the mandated standards. The obvious winners are the testing companies, while the less-than-obvious benefactors are proponents of school consolidation, vouchers and merit-based pay.

During his visit to Iowa City, education activist Jonathan Kozol, author of “Savage Inequalities” and “The Shame of the Nation,” theorized that NCLB was created as a public shaming ritual, opening the back door for vouchers.

The same holds true for the core curriculum standards, but I’m sure Gov. Culver already knew this. After all, he is the only sitting governor to have taught in the classroom during the past 20 years — an accomplishment he reminded Iowa voters of during every debate during his gubernatorial bid.