Now that he’s got his $300k+ in salary, screw the kids, right?

This isn’t about whether you think vouchers are a good idea or not.  This is about a highly paid leftist union tool telling poor families that he’d rather they suffer the indignities of a substandard education than have alternatives to the government schools to which they are zoned.  And of course, the predictable “throw more money at it” reply got regurgitated.

Painting herself as a “constitutional conservative” Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann told Sen. Jim DeMint’s forum Monday that if elected president she would look to get rid of the Department of Education, among other things.

“Because the Constitution does not specifically enumerate nor does it give to the federal government the role and duty to superintend over education that historically has been held by the parents and by local communities and by state governments,” she said, responding to a question by DeMint, a popular figure among the tea party movement.

Now I’ll admit that Bachmann is not my first, second, or even third choice among GOP prez hopefuls.  That said, why would it be crazy to shiite-can the Dept. of Education?

First of all, there is no question that “one size fits all” when it comes to education is patently absurd.  There is no way that D.C. can better manage schools than local and state governments can do.

Secondly, how did the republic survive before the Dept. of Ed was founded in 1980?

Thirdly, our nation’s test scores have dropped precipitously ever since D.C. created the behemoth.  If you want to dismiss any cause-and-effect here, be my guest.  But I won’t.

Finally, it’s clear that our Founding Fathers never intended for the federal government to meddle in educational affairs of cities, counties, and states.  Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to educate your children or mine.  Judging by how poorly educated our kids are in matters related to civics, I’d say that D.C. needs to butt out of molding our kids’ minds and let parents and local governments do our jobs.  Everything D.C. touches turns to crap, anyway.

Well, leave it to one student bright enough to recognize the hypocrisy of these ivory-tower cocooned know-nothings.  From FNC (with video clip):

A California college student is conducting a social experiment where he’s trying to get his peers to sign a petition in favor of distributing grade point averages to show how the federal government distributes wealth.

Oliver Darcy, a recent college graduate, proposes that students with good grades contribute their GPA to their academically sluggish friends. He argues that this is how the federal government takes wealth from the country’s high wage earners and distributes it to the low income earners.

“They all earn their GPA,” said Darcy in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” “So we asked them if they’d be interested in redistributing the GPA points that they earned to students who may be having trouble getting a high GPA.”

Darcy, who films his encounters with teachers and fellow students, doesn’t have much luck selling this theory.

He said many students on college campuses support high taxes on the rich, but when put into relative terms, cringed at the thought of spreading around their academic wealth.

In a video posted on Exposingleftists.com, one student said, “If I do give GPA points to students that don’t deserve it, it isn’t fair, I work for what I have.”

Watch the video.  It’s funny (yet sad) to see these naive rose-colored-glasses-wearing moonbats protest that “That’s different!”, yet when pressed as to how it’s different to spread around the earned monetary wealth vs. earned academic wealth, their response is basically “Because shut up, that’s how!”

Wait until they get into the real world.  Reality will hit them harder than a Barney Frank chair fart.

When it come to excellence in education, red states rule—at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Tina Brown’s Newsweek.

Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rate to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.

The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: The very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states.

Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas—the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools.

Well, this is just one study, a blip on the radar.

Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results.

Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well.

Or not.

Who’s up for a game of “gratuitous New England badmouthing”?

There’s something else interesting about the two lists: On both lists, only one of the top ten public schools was located in a blue state. (Definition alert: On this blog, a blue state is one that voted for John Kerry in 2004; red states cast their electoral votes for Bush.)

There were no top ten schools on either list from blue New England states like Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. Nor were there any in the top 25. By contrast, Alabama made both the Newsweek and the Washington Post top ten. Only two public schools from these states made the Washpost top fifty list; zero made it into Newsweek‘s elite.

150 years after the Civil War, South Carolina is kicking New England’s rear end when it comes to producing great public schools.

Ouch!  That’s gotta hurt.

What about Vermont, that crazy state that produced Howard Dean and the Senate’s only open socialist (Bernie Sanders)?

As you go down the list, the numbers get a little more balanced. Fifty of the top 100 Newsweek schools are red, fifty blue—though according to the Washington Post, the split is sixty-one red, thirty-nine blue. But the results are shocking enough: The People’s Republic of Vermont has achieved parity with Mississippi: neither state has a single school on the Newsweek list of 500.

Exit gloating:

Defenders of the high tax, high regulation, highly unionized model of state governance that characterizes the blue states like to point to their higher quality of government services as justification for the taxes they pay and the regulations they accept.

Let those crackers and hillbillies in the red states wallow in their filth and their ignorance, say proud upholders of the blue state model. We blue staters believe in things like quality education—and that costs money.

In theory, perhaps, but in practice the extraordinary achievement of so many red state schools strongly supports the idea that blue state governance is no friend to excellence in education.

Heh.

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.

What disastrous consequences have occurred?

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.

Why, it’s as if the government worker unions were wrong in their dire predictions or something!

Exit question: Why do Wisconsin unions hate school children?

Sometimes, words aren’t even necessary…so the video will do:

Story:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WANE/WSBT) – An embarrassing billboard spelling error on a sign meant to tout South Bend schools has been pulled.

The billboard is a digital one near the intersection of State Road 23 and Ironwood in South Bend. It went up on Thursday and was pulled Monday morning.

The billboard encouraged people to go to “southbendon.com” to check out the “15 best things about our PUBIC schools.” Obviously it was supposed to say “public“, but the “l” was left out.

Edyookashun iz kool! 

Snark aside, and in fairness to the school…

The president of a company called “the Blue Waters Group” told WSBT-TV the mistake was not made by the city or the schools.  He said the ad was proofed by 4 people and the typo got by all of them.

These four proofreaders will be glad to know that they have promising careers waiting for them at CBS News.

Here’s the latest clip, embedded below.  It’s 9:30 long, so if that’s too long for you (what, you got ADHD or something?), watch the first 1:55 and the last couple of minutes for the juiciest parts.

Rumor has it that in honor of the president, the students will not actually have to accomplish anything in their coursework, but will instead only need to demonstrate the ability to speak flowery rhetoric and in glittering generalities.  Bonus points if they are “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect”…right, Harry?

In other words, over the last 40 years, spending per pupil from K-12 has increased 400% in inflation-adjusted dollars…yet educational performance hasn’t even budged!

The money has been going to fund the bloated, wasteful, useless educational bureaucracy (teachers unions and their pet causes), and most certainly not to the kids.  I doubt kids are stupider or that they’re being bombarded with more information to learn that they can’t keep up.  No, our money is being stolen by government at the behest of their NEA allies for stuff like this:

Former Niles Township school superintendent Neil Codell is projected to receive $26,661,604 in retirement checks from the Illinois teacher pension plan.

Whee.

He also gets free health care, term life insurance, and a $500-a-month stipend for an automobile.  (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? – Ed.)

In all, 100 school administrators will split $887,925,790 in pension checks in their retirement years.

The pension fund is only 60% funded — with an unfunded liability — debt — of $30 billion.

Nice work, if you can get it.  By the way, any guesses as to where the $30 billion will come from?  Answer (that you already knew): You and me.

But borough teacher Rita Wilson, a Kearny resident, argued that if she were paid $3 an hour for the 30 children in her class, she’d be earning $83,000, and she makes nothing near that.

“You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits,” Christie interrupted.

When Wilson, who has a master’s degree, said she was not being compensated for her education and experience, Christie said:

“Well, you know then that you don’t have to do it.” Some in the audience applauded…

“Your union said that is the greatest assault on public education in the history of the state,” Christie said. “That’s why the union has no credibility, stupid statements like that.”

Did I mention that I luvs me some Chris Christie? 

If I don’t like my career or job, I’m free to pursue one I do like.  We all are.

Teachers do what they do because of a love for the profession, a commitment to developing students, and various other reasons (the vast majority of them worthwhile).  They get into the profession knowing that they will likely never be well-compensated.  We can talk all day long whether they should be better paid, but that’s not the point at all.  The point is that they know they aren’t going to be rolling in the dough.

Unless, maybe, you’re Rita Wilson, the teacher complaining to Gov. Christie who says she “makes nothing near” $83k.  Really?  “Nothing near that”, huh?From Red State:

There’s just one problem. There is one Rita Wilson working for the Rutherford School District. Assuming the teacher confronting Governor Christie is the same lady, she has no freaking clue what she makes.

Public records from the school district show her making $86,000+.

So yes Governor, you should support this lady being paid $3.00 per child and save some money.

As Erick says in his post title, I sure hope she isn’t a math teacher.

Obviously, she was not talking about herself…which means she was misrepresenting herself.  Dick Blumenthal just called from CT to say he doesn’t see anything wrong with that.

Yesterday, Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed Senate Bill 6, which was a bill aimed at merit pay for teachers.  The bill was massively popular among Republicans, massively unpopular among Democrats, and I am led to believe most teachers, regardless of their political affiliations, were vehemently opposed to the language of the bill.  (Sidebar: I know teachers who are conservative, and many of them had grave reservations about the bill’s text, not the intent.)  Anywho, this isn’t a post about the merits of SB6, so allow me to continue…

Crist has been getting pummeled by Marco Rubio in the FL GOP Senate primary polls.  Crist went from being +30% last year to -30% now.  He has said repeatedly that he wasn’t going to become an independent, preferring to tough it out in the Republican primary.  But there are indications that he may pull a Joe Lieberman and switch anyway.

First, it was speculated that by vetoing a bill that he himself had great input in crafting, Crist would essentially be ending his career in the GOP.  He did indeed veto the bill.  After all, if you are desperately craving Independent street cred, how better to get some of it than to screw one of your party’s top pet projects?

Secondly, a Quinnipiac poll (not exactly the most reliable polling history in the world) yesterday showed Crist with a statistically insignificant lead over Rubio and Meek in a three-way race in November.  Granted, it is a single poll and taken as a snapshot in time, but given Crist’s implosion and no relief in sight, any glimmer of hope will be embraced by him.

Finally, and possibly most significant, the massively popular former governor Jeb Bush has piled on Crist for his veto…

I am disappointed by the veto of Senate Bill 6. By taking this action, Governor Crist has jeopardized the ability of Florida to build on the progress of the last decade, which includes raising student achievement across the board, narrowing the achievement gap for poor and minority students, and improving graduation rates. Florida’s sustained improvement is the result of bold reforms that were challenging, controversial and sometimes even unpopular. Reform is hard work but without a commitment to change, Florida would not be 8th in the nation today.

…and former Senator Connie Mack, who had been chairing Crist’s Senate campaign, resigned after the veto:

Gov. Charlie Crist’s political mentor, former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack, resigned Thursday as Crist’s campaign chairman in his race for the U.S. Senate.

Mack wrote a terse, two-paragraph letter to his one-time protege that said Crist was wrong to veto a bill (SB 6) that would have made it easier to fire teachers and tie their pay to student test scores.

“As you know, I strongly disagree with your veto,” Mack wrote his fellow Republican. “Your veto I believe undermines our education system in Florida and the principles for which I have always stood.”

Mack went on to say that Crist’s decision to veto the bill was “unsupportable and wrong.”

“As you can understand, I can no longer serve as chairman for your campaign for the United States Senate,” Mack wrote.

A source for an Orlando Fox affiliate says that Crist will announce his party abandonment today:

Thursday, Governor Crist vetoed the controversial teacher merit pay bill, breaking with conservative ranks. Then the head of the Republican U.S. Senate Re-election Committee issued a warning to Crist telling him his career is over if he tries to run outside the GOP.

Dr. Foglesong said, “A person I know in the Charlie Crist campaign has told me Charlie Crist would veto the merit pay bill, and he did. Further, he said he would announce tomorrow, that’s Friday, that he would run as an independent.”

Fox 35′s Tracy Jacim asked, “Where is this supposed to happen?” Dr. Foglesong said, “South Florida.” Jacim asks, “Miami?” Foglesong said, “Yes.” Jacim asks, “How reliable is this source?” Foglesong replied, “I trust the source.”

Fox 35 contacted the Crist campaign staff by e-mail, and they would neither confirm nor deny this claim, and expressed surprise we were asking.

Florida law puts a deadline on when a candidate can announce for a Senate bid, and my understanding is that the deadline was in about two weeks.  Ergo, it was “now or never” for Gov. Oompa Loompa to jump ship.  But if Crist thinks the teachers union who is trumpeting his praises today will rally behind him as an independent instead of backing Democrat Kendrick Meek, then the tanning bed has fried his gourd more than I thought.

In my view (and only time will tell if this holds true), Crist is basically another Arlen Specter: a RINO who thought it would be good for his own ambitions and career to jump ship, only to find out that the ship he jumped onto…was the Titanic.

Exit question:  Wouldn’t this have been a little easier to handle if he had just gone to the school where the kids were singing “Mmmm, mmmmm, mmmmmm“?

A video showing elementary school students learning songs praising Barack Obama for his “great accomplishments” and efforts to “make this country’s economy No. 1 again” is generating anger from conservatives today.

In the video at left, students at New Jersey’s B. Bernice Young Elementary School are shown singing about the president, in one case to the tune of “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” according to Fox News. …

Excerpt of the hymnal song:

Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama
He said all should lend a hand to make the country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be fair today, equal work means equal pay.

I mean, sure, a bunch of kids who know nothing about politics are singing songs that are reminiscent of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” to The One (sidebar: Hey, Andrew, how’s that “Obama as Messiah myth” looking to you now?).  And yeah, there’s that whole “praising the socialist president in a way that was never done to his predecessor” thing.  And sure, the government school system has been more than accomodating when it comes to pushing pro-B.O. propaganda.  But if you can just get past all that, there’s really nothing to see here.

For those of you on the left, the prior paragraph was sarcasm.

Exit question: Could someone please tell me the rule on using the president’s middle name?  I mean, a talk radio host in Cincinnati (Bill Cunningham) was poor-mouthed by, among others, Juan McAmnesty last year during the campaign for saying “Barack Hussein Obama”.  Is it somehow more acceptable when it comes from the mouths of singing children?

I know, early on he planned on asking the kids to “help the president” and support him, and that wound up getting yanked from the script…as well it should.  But if the message is delivered just as the script says, then overall, I don’t have a problem with it.

Of course, it would have been nice if he didn’t refer to himself exactly three times as often as he refers to education.  Otherwise, people might get this crazy idea that the guy is an egocentric mega-narcissist who is all about self-promotion.  But baby steps, people.  Baby steps.

In 2007, only 17 percent of eighth graders tested at or above grade level in reading in Chicago Public Schools – the school system administered by Arne Duncan since 2001.

President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday tapped Duncan to become secretary of education in the upcoming administration.

Duncan, hailed by Obama as a reformer, said he would like to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington. “I’m also eager to apply some of the lessons we have learned here in Chicago to help school districts all across our country,” Duncan said after Obama formally named him to the job in Chicago.

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report for 2007, Chicago public schools have consistently performed below the national average during Duncan’s tenure.

What do you do with a guy who presided over that kind of dismal failure in one friggin’ city?  You promote him to preside over the entire nation’s education system, naturally.  Duh.  I mean, literally…”duh!”

Barack Obama’s newly selected education secretary may need to visit a grammarian before he takes on the American education system. During his introductory remarks in Chicago today, Arne Duncan, the outgoing Chicago public schools chief, mixed up his personal pronouns. His elementary school teacher is cringing somewhere.

Find the error: “I want to thank our mutual friend John Rogers who has been a mentor and friend to me since I was ten years old. He gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school in the South side of Chicago…”

Answer: He should have said ”my sister and me” instead of “my sister and I.”

Edyookashun iz a gud thang!

OK, well at least Duncan can do for America’s schools what he did for Chicago’s schools, and that’s a good thing.  Or not.

God help us.