When State Department of Education Director Jason Glass and Governor Terry Branstad’s senior education adviser Linda Fandel rolled out an education reform blueprint last month, I had a feeling the proposals wouldn’t sit well with many Republicans. A new “report card” for a conservative advocacy organization gives the reform plan a barely passing grade.

Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass and Governor Terry Branstad’s senior education adviser Linda Fandel rolled out a blueprint for reforming Iowa schools yesterday. The plan didn’t include any big ideas not mentioned by Glass and Fandel a few weeks ago. It also didn’t estimate how much state government and/or school districts would need to spend to make the blueprint a reality.

New Iowa teachers would no longer receive automatic raises based on years of experience or post-graduate degrees under an education reform proposal to be revealed in the coming weeks. Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass and Governor Terry Branstad’s special adviser on education, Linda Fandel, shared the outlines of the proposed changes with journalists yesterday.

Governor Terry Branstad won’t push for major changes in the state’s universal voluntary preschool program for four-year-olds during the next two years, according to Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass. While taping Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program on July 28, Glass said the governor had decided “to move past this debate” on whether preschool should be universal or targeted to needy families. Branstad’s communications director Tim Albrecht confirmed to Mike Wiser the same day,

“Now that preschool funding is in place, Gov. Branstad does not believe a preschool funding debate should overshadow a meaningful debate on how to again make Iowa’s schools the best in the country,” Albrecht wrote in a follow-up email. “Now that Gov. Branstad has allocated funding for preschool over the next two years, he does not desire this settled issue to get in the way of our education reform goals.”

That is the smartest thing Branstad has done all week.