Friday, February 15, 2013

#424: Cheri Yecke


Cheri Yecke is a batshit insane conservative politician and creationist. She used to serve on the Virginia State Board of Education, which is where she came to notice, and later as Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Education and Secretary of Education, before assuming the role of Director of Teacher Quality and Public School Choice at the U.S. Department of Education for the Bush administration, during which time she was detailed to the White House as a senior advisor for USA Freedom Corps. She ended up as Commissioner of Education for the State of Minnesota under Pawlenty (a position later awarded to the barely less despicable Karen Klinzing), then as Chancellor of K-12 Education in Florida, and finally as dean ofgraduate programs for Harding University, Arkansas. She has, in other words, attempted to wreak havoc a lot of places. For the record we’ll also indict her Minnesotan cronies, in particular DaveEaton and Bill Wenmark.

During her reign as Education Commissioner she advocated the deliberately Intelligent Design-friendly Teach The Controversy policy in science curricula, citing the infamous creationist Santorum Amendment (though the version that was circulated among the public did not include these revisions). Her efforts at promoting creationism are duly documented here.

During her Florida time she was most famous for her attempts to groom her reputation online by hiring the Internet accuracy-watchdog service ReputationDefender to do the job. They subsequently contacted  high-profile biologist Wesley R. Elsberry and requested that he remove a quote from Yecke on the issue of teaching creationism and intelligent design, which was not a particularly strategically wise idea for boosting Yecke’s reputation.

Diagnosis: A complete hack with self-awareness like a rock. A truly dangerous, demonstrably reality-challenged person.

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