Final tallies: Science wins in Kansas

Repost­ed from the old TfK, where it was picked up by the Dai­lykos, MSNBC, and many others.

For the Board of Ed:

Waugh won re-elec­tion. There’s no Repub­li­can chal­lenge, so that seat remains safe. 

Cauble appears to have beat Mor­ris! Only 68% of the precincts have report­ed (with sev­er­al urban cen­ters that will back Cauble expe­ri­enc­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems), but the trend seems to be hold­ing. If so (keyne­hore) a light­ning rod on the con­ser­v­a­tive side got burned. Appar­ent­ly it does­n’t cut it to bad­mouth your col­leagues and use gov­ern­ment mon­ey to fund a Flori­da vaca­tion. Tim Cruz will still duke it out, but I expect that west­ern Kansas will be a stretch for a Demo­c­rat, espe­cial­ly giv­en that Ms. Cauble has a back­ground in edu­ca­tion. The debate will be fun to watch, but the fire­works will be elsewhere.

Shaver beat Patzer. I wish her a rest­ful few days off before return­ing to what should be a great race against Kent Run­yan. Run­yan is a great guy with tons of expe­ri­ence and I’ll be fol­low­ing that race close­ly. It’ll be nice to see a seri­ous race fought on the basis of sub­stance, not wedge issues. 

Willard beat Vio­la. Vio­la tried hard and came close. Jack Wempe is a great guy, and I hope he puts up a web page one of these days.

And in the most heart­break­ing race of the night, Har­ry McDon­ald lost to John Bacon. McDon­ald is the for­mer Pres­i­dent of Kansas Cit­i­zens for Sci­ence, a for­mer school teacher and a real­ly, real­ly great guy. He seemed tru­ly deject­ed when we spoke last. He raised the most mon­ey of any­one in any of the races, he put togeth­er a great orga­ni­za­tion and had lots of help from the pro-sci­ence PACs. It just was­n’t enough to bend the con­ser­v­a­tives in John­son Coun­ty. He’s pledged his sup­port to Don Weiss, who is also a great guy. Heck, he reads TfK, how can he be bad?

The Board is back in mod­er­ate hands no mat­ter what. The night is, on bal­ance, a vic­to­ry. It’d be nice to fur­ther mar­gin­al­ize the extrem­ists by win­ning the remain­ing races in Novem­ber, but we’ve got a major­i­ty that will imple­ment the sci­ence stan­dards rec­om­mend­ed by the sci­en­tists, edu­ca­tors and par­ents of the sci­ence stan­dards com­mit­tee. The Board can focus on big­ger issues. They can dig into ways to address the spe­cial chal­lenges of rur­al dis­tricts, and to find solu­tions to the prob­lems faced by the stu­dents in poor­er urban dis­tricts. Real chal­lenges, not fake con­tro­ver­sy. Help­ing kids, not fight­ing cul­ture wars.

That’s what tonight was about, and the kids won. This was­n’t Dover reject­ing a few munic­i­pal offi­cials. It’s a whole state turn­ing against the divi­sive­ness of the IDol­a­tors. Con­grat­u­la­tions, Kansas!