He don’t need no education

It's an unseasonably warm November Tuesday in Topeka. Reporters from across the globe have crammed into the normally empty boardroom to witness the Kansas Board of Education officially insert criticism of evolution into the state's public-school science standards. Cameras surround the horseshoe-shaped table where the state school board's ten members are seated. This is a board so politicized that its members openly identify themselves as either "moderates" or "conservatives" (no "liberals" here). In the center, next to Chairman Steve Abrams, sits Bob Corkins, the newly hired education commissioner of Kansas.

While the board members battle over science standards (the moderates, outnumbered six to four, eventually lose), Corkins seems unfazed. It's only his second month on the job, and Corkins himself has become the latest Kansas state school board controversy.

Hired by the board on October 4, Corkins has never been a teacher, principal, superintendent or dean. The most experience he has had running any organization is a few years spent heading up a pair of one-man think tanks. Now he is in charge of the state's department of education.

A casual observer of news accounts documenting Corkins' rise to state education commissioner might conclude that his hiring was simply another ridiculous move by an elected body of half-wits.

But the casual observer would be wrong. Given Corkins' lack of experience, and given that this is Kansas, there's only one possible explanation for his hiring: politics.

In fact, Corkins' ascension to education commissioner was a calculated move by the board's six conservative members — Abrams, John Bacon, Kathy Martin, Connie Morris, Iris Van Meter and Ken Willard.

"There's very little that we do that isn't a political move," Bacon tells the Pitch."There's not any part of anything we do that isn't politically motivated, because we're all trying in one way or another to mold our culture, I guess."

For years, Corkins has quietly operated within the far-right wing of Kansas' Republican Party, providing philosophical direction, position papers and talking points to the state's most conservative senators and representatives.

Earlier this year, before he was a candidate for education commissioner, Corkins was one of the state's most vocal critics of spending money on public schools.

Now he's in charge of them.

That's no accident. It's by design.

Corkins will tell you that he's a product of public schools, having grown up the son of a salesman in Hutchinson, Kansas.He says his family lived in a three-bedroom house on, he says, the "wrong side of the railroad tracks." In 1979, he graduated from Hutchinson High School; he later married Nancy Caldwell, a girl he had met in the high school band. He'll also tell you that his two sons, 13-year-old Sam and 15-year-old Jon, attend public school in Lawrence.

In high school, Corkins was a hell of a debater. His skills earned him a scholarship to Emporia State University; later, he transferred to the University of Northern Iowa and graduated in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in speech and a minor in journalism. He attended law school at the University of Kansas and graduated in 1989.

After college, Corkins spent nearly a decade — from 1989 to 1998 — working as a lobbyist for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He was the director of taxation and small-business development, lobbying the state Legislature on behalf of clients such as Target, Sears, the J.C. Penney Company, General Motors and Boeing. His specialties were tax and fiscal-policy issues.

"That put me at the middle of the debate here in Kansas when we overhauled the school finance formula in 1992," Corkins tells the Pitch. In 1992, several school districts sued the state, claiming that they weren't getting an equal share of school money from the Legislature. Lawmakers eventually agreed to a new formula that distributed money on a per-pupil basis. "I was really in the trenches when that whole debate was going on. So I've come to know the school finance formula better than most," Corkins says.

But other debates were what some lawmakers remembered when Corkins' name surfaced as a candidate for state education commissioner. On October 17, the Lawrence Journal-World recalled that Sen. Audrey Langworthy had banned him from her office in the late '90s — the only person she had ever banned in more than 15 years in the state Senate. "Bob was definitely working with the ultraconservatives in the House," Langworthy, the former chairwoman of the Senate Tax Committee and a moderate Republican from Prairie Village, told the Journal-World. (She did not return calls from the Pitch.) In the Journal-Worldarticle, Corkins claimed that he'd had several pleasant conversations with Langworthy, who told the paper she didn't recall the conversations.

Norman "Bud" Grant, a retired lobbyist for the chamber who worked closely with Corkins, tells the Pitch that the dust-up between Corkins and Langworthy was a misunderstanding. Corkins was trying to serve as a liaison between Langworthy's committee and Tim Shallenburger, who was then speaker of the house, Grant explains. "I don't think Senator Langworthy wanted him bringing the message from the speaker. I think she wanted the speaker to bring the message himself," he says.

Grant says Corkins had a hard time not arguing with people because he felt so strongly about his position and knew it well. Sometimes, Grant says, he would have to corral Corkins and tell him, "When a legislator says you're through, you're through. You don't debate any further with them.