What’s crackin’, people. It’s been too long. I’m Smarick. I used to be an inveterate blogger and tweeter. I disappeared for a couple years, but now I’m back. Kind of like Bobby Ewing or Kristin Cavallari.
To paraphrase Hitch, Rotherham is gone on a week’s vacation, and he left the keys to Eduwonk. So I’m just going to take it for a little spin.
Read his post at Eduwonk, especially for the teaser that touches why he left the lofty environs of Riverview Plaza in Trenton:
A sage in our movement recently commented that an axiom of policy-making is that government decision-makers tend to trust the levels and branches of government that they have the least experience with.
I’ve found this to be absolutely true in practice. It’s easy to see the limitations and dysfunctions of the public entity in whose belly you sit, and you naturally assume that others must be high functioning by comparison. The grass is always greener; they have Adidas and you have Zips.
Local leaders, tangled in municipal politics, want the powerful feds to solve their problems. Legislative staffers, fully aware of the unappetizing sausage making of the legislative process, just want the executive branch to make things work. And so on.
But here’s the thick of the plot. I can no longer bring myself to take part in this ostensibly sensible buck-passing.