Bill Honig's Back!

Anthony Pignataro:

That’s right, folks: Governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown has appointed one Louis “Bill” Honig to the California State Board of Education. Honig, for those of you not old enough to remember 1993, spent a decade as state Superintendent of Public Instruction until getting convicted of four “felony” conflict of interest charges. Though the charges were reduced to misdemeanors in 1996, Honig throughout his trial insisted that he didn’t know his actions — illegally diverting public money to an education firm run by his wife — were illegal.

Recent California superintendents have been a colorful lot, to say the least. Jack O’Connell somehow managed to have an entire stretch of highway named after him, even though he was still alive and still in office. But that’s nothing, compared to Delaine Eastin…

“Honig gave way to Delaine Eastin, a Bay Area assemblywoman and defender of the status quo,” my Pacific Research Institute colleague K. Lloyd Billingsley has written. “Eastin made life difficult for charter schools and families who choose to homeschool their children. On her watch, the [Department of Education] was handing out millions of dollars to ‘Community Based Organizations’ (CBOs) headed by corrupt bosses and left-wing militants.

“When auditors uncovered the problem, superintendent Eastin did not go after the fraud. Rather, she punished the whistleblowers and kept money flowing to the corrupt organizations. When the abused whistleblowers sought justice through the courts, the CDE spent millions defending those who had demoted them.”

Given the Honig appointment, is an Eastin job coming soon as well?

JAN. 5, 2011