Tribune Editorial: Governor earns teachers' respect. Lawmakers flee from it.

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Well. This is awkward.

On Wednesday, the very day that the state's Republican governor won the endorsement of the state's leading association of public school teachers, the top two Republican leaders of the state Legislature made an appeal for funds to make sure that same association doesn't take control of the state school board.

And Thursday, the state released the newest grades given to state schools by the Legislature's ranking system. A system that seems to have been deliberately manipulated to make public schools look bad so that some lawmakers can score points by undermining the very system of education that their own governor likes to talk up.

It might surprise some that the Utah Education Association would give its backing to any Republican, given the national reputation teachers have for being in the pockets of the Democratic Party. Or vice versa.

But, being good teachers, UEA leaders can read. And add. They know that, in this Republican state, Herbert is highly likely to win re-election and they see no reason to make an enemy of him.

They also quite correctly see that, by Utah standards, Herbert is a friend of public education. He isn't willing to raise taxes for schools (or anything else) as Democratic candidate Mike Weinholtz is. Which means that Utah will remain at the bottom of the nation in terms of per-pupil spending.

But Herbert has a history of making public education the centerpiece of his budgets and programs, moving to put every spare dime into public schools and the state's system of higher education. It is part and parcel of his philosophy that the state's role is to facilitate economic growth, and that providing a good system of education is key to that effort.

It might also surprise some that Senate President Wayne Niederhauser and House Speaker Greg Hughes are worried that any government body might be controlled by a "supermajority" of any sort, given that their power flows from the supermajority control their party has long held over both houses of the Legislature.

Lawmakers have every right to campaign for any cause they believe in. And a mix of backgrounds and views on the state board would be just as useful as, say, more balance in the Legislature.

But by making the groundless claim that having teachers — rather than businessmen or tech entrepreneurs — on a school board means that reform, innovation and local control will be undermined, Niederhauser and Hughes only exacerbate the widespread feeling among educators, and parents, that the powers that be neither value their profession nor understand it.