CURMUDGUCATION: OK: Another Rich Amateur Assault On Education.

CURMUDGUCATION: OK: Another Rich Amateur Assault On Education.

OK: Another Rich Amateur Assault On Education.

Hechinger Report elevated my blood pressure with a story that is a near-perfect microcosm of the state of public education and, really, democracy in 2018.

Looks like a fun guy.

Paul Campbell is a successful business guy. He put in over a decade with Rolls-Royce in Indiana, rising to the level of VP of customer business. He put in a few yers with Capstone, a manufacturer of micro-turbines. Then he jumped to Enviro Systems, a "supplier of environmental controls for some of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world." Enviro was founded in 1979, and its parent company is Zodiac Aerospace, a French company with roots back ton 1896 (they started out with hydrogen balloons). Zodiac is huge-- 100 sites and 35,000 employees. Zodiac acquired Enviro in early 2015; in June of 2015, Campbell took over as President and CEO of Enviro. Enviro boasts 170 non-unionemployees.

Enviro is located in Seminole, Oklahoma, a town that ballooned to 25k people during an oil boom a century ago, but by 2000 had shrunk to under 7,000 people. It has since bounced back a bit, but it's a small town about an hour away from Oklahoma City; it's in those suburbs where Campbell actually made his new home-- not Seminole.

Campbell hadn't been at the company a year before he was complaining about the local schools-- specifically, that he couldn't recruit or retain good people for Enviro: "We can't get people to work here. The main reason we found is because of the local education system."

Seminole's schools, like all of Oklahoma's schools, suffer from a state government that is hostile to public education. But Campbell, who also became involved in the Chamber of Oklahoma, didn't start CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OK: Another Rich Amateur Assault On Education.