The name's Oliver, Dr. Brad Oliver. I'll have my SBOE stirred, not shaken.

After hearing Dr. Brad Oliver speak about his views on the current state of education in Indiana and the hot educational policies of the day, my faith in the Republican party has been restored. I had always wanted to side with the Conservatives, but the way recent ones have treated education in Indiana (Does Tony Bennett ring a bell?) have left me siding with the Democrats. Now, Dr. Brad Oliver is my kind of politician. He believes in things like faith, life, and smaller government, but also believes that the education system needs to be set up in such a way that our students actually benefit from it.

One of the most interesting things he mentioned was that there are so many people on the State Board of Education who have a strong background in education. I also found it quite interesting when he mentioned that the SBOE has never actually had "set meeting procedures" until very recently. I was shocked to find out that one of the major governing bodies involved with creating educational policies didn't even have a set way to run their meetings! Alas, it was good to find out that the new meeting procedures were actually enormously helpful and the SBOE tackled a cornucopia of issues after they approved the new procedures.

I find it amazing how the media portrays different things happening in the political world, in that it often portrays those things inaccurately. Dr. Oliver mentioned a example of this, when he was merely pointing at a document on Glenda Ritz's desk, but the press took a picture of that and took it out of context so that it seemed he was getting heated with her! Educational polices are important in today's world, but it seems that maybe we should focus on polices that deal with false journalism.