Education's Sleight of Hand

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or No Child Left Behind, is flawed; however, its purpose was to make educational policies and practices more transparent and to make educators accountable to taxpayers for their performance.  There’s the rub.  The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are aghast at the prospect of transparency.  Apparently, they have much to fear if taxpayers learn what they are getting for their money.  As for accountability, they cower like Dracula threatened with a cross at the very thought of it.  Don’t even mention standards or competition.

NCLB was up for re-authorization when Theftocrats controlled the House, Senate, and the White house.  They did nothing, and the flaws in it remain uncorrected, despite objections from Democrats.  This article in The Christian Science Monitor reveals that Arne Duncan, head of the federal Department of Indoctrination, plans to take matters into his own hands by issuing waivers to it.  Of paramount concern to Arne and the Educrats is that NCLB requires 

all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, among other things. 

As that deadline approaches with no sign of the benchmark being met – and as more and more schools are labeled as failing as a result – many states and districts have been clamoring for relief from the sanctions imposed by NCLB for schools that fail to meet their targets.

Duncan advocates accountability—for the term to be meaningful, it must require comparison to a standard—then, he advocates flexibility in meeting those standards.  This fraud is equivalent to Bill Clinton’s flexible ethics.  The atomic weight of gold is a standard; maybe, sort of, and nearly are weaseling.

Author Amanda Paulson speculates that one part of NCLB that Duncan is almost certain to waive is the requirement that failing schools offer school choice options to students.  What a shock; he opposes provisions that would lessen educrats’ stranglehold on education by forcing competition with private education opportunities.

Duncan claimed that 80% of schools will be judged failures if the NCLB standard remains in effect; therefore, he wants to hide the measuring stick.  His desperation to bury the problem reveals that education is a mess.  In “Different Decisions,” Thomas Sowell compares public and private sector methods and results of producing products for consumers.

Sowell points out that when banks foreclose on property, they sell it for whatever they can manage and get out from under it quickly.  They do this because their expertise is banking, not real estate.  Public schools offer a stark contrast.  The author ponders why schools are using their time to indoctrinate kindergartners and fourth graders with politically correct attitudes about sex. 

Anyone familiar with the low standards and mushy notions in the schools and departments of education that turn out our public school teachers might think that these teachers would have all they can do to make American children competent in reading, writing and math.  Anyone familiar with how our children stack up with children from other countries in basic education would be painfully aware that American children lag behind children in countries that spend far less per pupil than we do.  In other words, teachers and schools that are failing to provide the basics of education are branching out into all sorts of other areas, where they have even less competence.

If bankers lose money by dabbling in areas outside their expertise, stockholders fire them.  Teachers do not face commensurate consequences in return for ineptitude.  Only Florida and Alaska have meaningful performance appraisals for teachers.

Schools are just one government institution that takes on tasks for which they have no expertise or even competence.  Congress is the most egregious example.  Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care.

Government schools operate in the model of the former Soviet Union, and like the USSR, it is a failed experiment whose effectiveness has ended. 

May your gods be with you.     

I'm from the Government, and I'm here to Help

O-buma and the Congressional Theftocrats have sold Americans a bill of goods, and far too few of us recognize the shafting that we are getting from their WelfareHealthCare.  This is living proof of their intentions to keep low income single mothers permanently relegated to the federal welfare plantation.


Notice that these nefarious social engineers have created another marriage tax that acts as an economic disincentive for marriage.  The mommy staters argue in favor of punishing married people by claiming that two can live together on less that it takes for them to live separately.  Understand the reasoning here.  First, government should supply each of us according to need.  From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs...didn't someone named Marx say this?


Second and most important, they have acted to ensure that those of us who have behaved responsibly and prudently have our earnings confiscated to subsidize those who behave irresponsibly and imprudently.  There is something seriously amiss with this system of federally subsidized fecklessness.  We offer economic incentives for breeding TANF recipients, and we punish those who plan intelligently and live within their means.

Slackers pay nothing and get a lot; worker bees pay a lot and get the green weenie.  The bees have it right.  When their food supply dwindles to such low levels that the colony is threatened, they stop feeding the drones.  One can gain sobering insights from observing the natural world.


That we are a socialist nation hardly bears repeating, but that we are also totalitarian is most often revealed anecdotally so that the nationwide pattern is obscured.  Political liberty is unavailable in nations wherein citizens are prosecuted and persecuted for thoughtcrime.

The Head Hypocrite and his minions Feckless Barney Frank, Red Harry Reid, and Pelosi the Pinko are heaping criticism on the Wall Street crowd.  It is that same crowd that has been lining the pockets of Theftocrats for years.  People who bite the hand that feeds them are genuinely shameless.  Just take a look at what the government unions have done to New Jersey.

The same dim bulbs who invented Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act that collapsed our economy have profited handsomely from those agencies.  The heavy hand of government is expensive when it regulates and taxes  free trade.

At first glance, giving government the privilege of stripping Americans of their citizenship for committing acts of terrorism may sound good; however, who defines an act as terroristic?  How long will it be before the likes of someone such as Eric Holder, the head of the department of injustice, defines it such that it means those who support the Second Amendment?

Do you like to use the Web?  Enjoy it while you are still able to do it.  Does anyone remember hearing the old lie that "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help," just before it hit the fan?  If you believe that the government's motivation is "ensuring fair competition and preserving a free and open Internet," let me sell you some hurricane proof real estate in Key West.  The way that they ensure competition is exemplified by SEIU and the Postal Service.

May your gods be with you.