You say the wheels of government grind slowly? Consider the case of Josephine Finn, a Sullivan County village judge who met with state lawmakers on Monday about joining the Board of Regents, and was elected Tuesday to a five-year term.
Twenty-four hours might seem like an insufficient span of time to vet one of the 17 people responsible for overseeing New York's education system, which burns through tens of billions of dollars in state and local support every year. Finn will represent the Third Judicial District, which runs southwest from the Capital Region to the Pennsylvania border.
The Assembly set aside its initial Jan. 31 deadline to receive applications and decided to consider Finn late last week after Democratic members expressed dissatisfaction with the other candidates, including incumbent James Jackson, whose career in the North Colonie school district as a teacher and principal ran for four decades.
Jackson lost the faith of many lawmakers, and was designated as the sacrificial goat for the Regents' botched implementation of the Common Core education standards. Seeing the writing on the chalkboard, Jackson announced his imminent resignation on Monday, just after Finn took questions from lawmakers.
In that 90-minute session, Finn revealed an astonishing lack of opinions about the most pressing education issues of the day. Beyond vaguely expressed concerns about too much standardized testing for students and not enough prep time for teachers, Finn repeatedly said that she'd need to be a Regent in order to offer fuller answers.
"I have to get involved and see what needs to happen," she said.
She was, however, an expert at listening as legislators expressed their unhappiness with the Common Core rollout. When these speeches ended in broad questions, Finn assured them that she would be responsive, a hard worker, an independent voice — once she's better acquainted with the issues at hand, that is.
Based on her resume, Finn seems like a caring and accomplished individual: She has taught as an associate professor at Sullivan County Community College and led BOCES and summer camp educational programs. She earned a law degree from the University at Buffalo and served in county government.
She also runs a spiritual weight-loss program and an accompanying blog that veers from affirmations about positive self-image to Finn's belief that she has been the conduit for divine communication. In one blog post, she recalls how while addressing a group of rural women, "I invited the Holy Spirit to come into the middle of the circle and to guide my every word. What happened after that prayer was nothing short of a miracle. Truly God was in our midst."
While the Board of Regents can certainly use that kind of help, Finn owes her election to a more earthly principality: the Assembly Democratic majority, which comprises almost half of the 213 members of the Legislature who select the Regents, and thus controls the process.
Lawmakers I spoke to in the days after the vote responded to questions about their ayes for Finn, whose selection was back by her assemblywoman, Aileen Gunther, with the slightly sorrowful but resigned tone one might use after returning from Tijuana with a face tattoo.
Veterans said this was the way the process works, and that the Regents always had a few wild cards. One noted that the panelists' power ultimately devolves to the person who controls their selection: "If I want Josephine Finn to do something, I'll call Shelly Silver."
Finn isn't the first relatively blank slate to be selected for an influential position by the state Legislature in history, or in 2014. Nor is she the first person to tell people what they want to hear in a job interview.
I hope she'll spend the next weeks and months applying herself to study of the Common Core, state testing, the challenges of building a fair but rigorous evaluation system for teachers, and more.
With hard work and time, she could make a real difference in a sprawling system.
But the idea that she was one of the best candidates in the Third Judicial District to sit on the Board of Regents is laughable, and the velocity of the process that put her there should frighten you.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619