The Providence Journal, R.I., Bob Kerr column [The Providence Journal, R.I.]

May 26--A friend at The Journal once decided he wanted to make money, so he took his writing skills off to a large insurance company to convert the words of company executives into understandable English. People whose professional lives were all about actuarial tables had serious problems when it came to the complete sentence. There was a career in the corporate shadows for the wordsmith.

It's understandable. Some jobs just don't lend themselves to rich, daily usage of the language. Words can get lost in numbers. Insurance executives, computer techs, professional basketball players -- all can become hard of English and need the help of someone who has held on to the ancient craft of putting nouns, verbs and adjectives together.

But a commissioner of education? Isn't that the very epitome of the well-used word? If the commissioner can tap someone else to put her thoughts into words, might it not tell the hard- working high school senior that outsourcing a term paper to the genius down the street is OK?

At a time when school reform is breaking out all over and the Race To The Top is inspiring intense daily workouts, it seems amusing and revealing that the top educator in the state can't find the words to tell the story.

When it was learned last week that Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist had dropped 10 grand to have somebody else write a speech she was to give to the General Assembly, it brought back memories of that goofy commencement speech at Woonsocket High School that then-Mayor Susan Menard gave three years ago. It turned out that the inspiring words to graduating seniors were partially lifted from a speech by the lieutenant governor of Alaska.

The graduates didn't know that second-hand thoughts were coming their way. And the General Assembly presumably didn't know that Gist's speech on April 7 came to them by way of The Big Apple. A company called Gotham Ghostwriters shipped deep thoughts on education up the coast.

All right, so Gist didn't lift a chunk of someone else's speech. She did what a lot of executives do. She paid someone to write a speech that she would present as her own. She turned to New York instead of the staff down the hall.

And she paid $10,000 for a speech at a time when everyone in Rhode Island public schools is being pushed to do more with less. She paid for someone else to do the writing at a time when students are under increasing pressure to do such things on their own -- and do them well.

And she paid for those high-priced words to communicate with people who have never been particularly demanding in the words they're fed. Dropping that kind of cash to impress the Rhode Island General Assembly is like sending a Grey Goose martini to a white port drinker.

This is not the kind of example that is needed right now. It seems detached. Looking to New York to explain something uniquely Rhode Island is just another sign that this school-reform business doesn't always draw on what's close to home.

Still, Gist put a nifty spin on it all. When it was revealed that the tab for the speech had been picked up by Angus Davis, a member of the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education, she deftly turned a tale of embarrassing excess into one of fiscal responsibility.

"We didn't think it was appropriate in these economic times, or perhaps ever, but certainly not now, to use funding out of our budget to do that," she said.

Ya think?

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