Many thanks to John Seiler at the Orange County Register and CalWatchdog.com for trying to get the LA Unified School District to clearly explain their finances to the taxpayers who pay for their dysfunctional system.
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
Uh‐oh: Here Comes Edu‐Goliath!
The hard‐nosed, content‐at‐all‐cost folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have been warned, and warned, and warned some more: Get the national curriculum standards you think are so incredibly important, and they will almost certainly be captured by the pedagogical progressives who have dominated education for decades — and whose notions you disdain. Well, if what’s being reported by Common Core’s Lynne Munson – and reiterated in this lamentation for Massachusetts by the Pioneer Institute’s Jim Stergios — is accurate, that is already happening. (Actually, some prominent analysts have long said that the national standards — created by the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association — are already nothing the Fordhamites should embrace.) Writes Munson:
This is strange. P21 is being subsumed into CCSSO. There’s nothing to be read about this on either CCSSO’s or P21′s websites. But according to Fritzwire the two organizations have formed a “strategic management relationship” that will commence December 1.
So what is P21 — the group cozying up with the standards‐writing CCSSO — you ask? Let the Fordham Institute tell you:
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K‑12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like–and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War. Its swell‐sounding yet damaging notions have been plenty influential–but the unmasking and truth‐telling have begun, thanks in large part to a valiant little organization named Common Core. And new research validates this and other skeptics’ criticisms. Today the contest resembles David vs. Goliath–but remember who ultimately prevailed in that one.
Uh‐oh. It might be time to end the biblical references — it looks more and more like Goliath is going to win.
Related Tags
Colombia vs Venezuela on Crime
The New York Times highlights today the increasing plight of violence that besets Venezuela. The headline couldn’t be blunter: “More Killings in Venezuela than Iraq.” It’s a gruesome reminder of what Hugo Chávez’s “Socialism of the 21st Century” has delivered to the Venezuelan people.
Some Venezuelan officials deny that there is a rise in crime altogether claiming it is part of a media campaign to discredit the government (they have coined the expression “media pornography” to refer to crime coverage, thus setting the semantic stage for censoring it). However, among the most plausible causes behind the national spike in crime, some government advisers point to an overall increase in violence in the region. According to this theory, not only Venezuela is suffering from a wave of bloodshed, but also other Latin American nations like Mexico and the Central American countries.
Still, when Venezuela is compared to neighboring Colombia, it becomes clear that there’s no such regional increase in crime. Just the opposite. Colombia, until recently one of the most violent countries in the world, more than halved its rate of murders in the last 8 years. Former president Álvaro Uribe and his policy of “democratic security” deserve due credit for such an accomplishment. On the other hand, Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution has delivered Venezuelans a jump of almost 50% in the murder rate in the last 10 years:
Sources: Sistema de Gestión y Segumiento a las Metas del Gobierno de Colombia (www.sigob.gov.co) and Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas Penales y Criminalísticas de Venezuela (www.cicpc.gov.ve).
It seems that after Hugo Chávez, Venezuelans will need a president like Álvaro Uribe to clean the house.
Federal Bailout of GM Still Horribly Wrong
Our friends at The Economist magazine usually talk good sense about free trade and free markets, which makes their retrospective endorsement of the government bailout of General Motors all the more disappointing.
In a leader in the current issue, the editors write that critics of the bailout (count Cato scholars among them) owe President Obama an apology. “His takeover of GM could have gone horribly wrong, but it has not,” they opine.
The Economist argues that, in contrast to state coddling of industries in, say, France, President Obama has driven a hard bargain by requiring GM to fire top management, cut jobs, close plants, and reduce its brand names. The magazine grants that the president’s labor‐union allies won special concessions that came at the expense of bondholders, but “by and large Mr. Obama has not used his stakes in GM and Chrysler for political ends.”
First, it’s a pretty low bar to say an intervention was right because it did not go horribly wrong. The editors then too quickly brush over the horrible injustice of stiffing the taxpayers of Indiana and others who bought GM bonds and should have been in line ahead of the more politically connected United Auto Workers union.
To curry favor with organized labor, President Obama put $50 billion of taxpayer resources at risk. A post‐bankruptcy GM turned a profit last quarter, along with most other automakers, but it is doubtful its anticipated IPO in the next few months will raise anything like the $80 billion or more needed to return the “investment” to taxpayers.
On top of that, the bailout of GM went far beyond any valid power granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution, and it blatantly favored two companies over a multitude of others in the very competitive automobile market.
Remind me again who owes whom an apology?
Public Schools Are Modern Monuments to Profligacy
It’s the hot new public‐sector trend; massively expensive K‑12 school buildings.
Christina Hoag of the AP writes that LA takes the prize for conspicuous public consumption with the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools:
With an eye‐popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever. The K‑12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million‐plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
Gone are the days when great emperors gave expression to love and grief in spires and domes of white marble. No longer do poor parishioners and wealthy kings construct cathedrals of awe and glory.
Today, we build monuments to government schooling; vast money‐pit monstrosities made of matte aluminum flashing and a bureaucrat‐chic modern aesthetic.
“Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning,” says Joe Agron, editor‐in‐chief of American School & University, a school construction journal.
Indeed, an impressively expensive environment that is completely unrelated to student achievement. Students only need good lighting, ventilation and protection from the elements to learn. Now we have massive buildings and mini Olympic villages with aquatic centers and professional‐grade sports fields. It’s no wonder LA budgeted close to $30,000 per student in 2008.
All of this overbuilding has upfront and long‐term costs. Big, expensive and complicated facilities cost more to run and maintain, and the bonds that fund much of this spending leave taxpayers strapped with an increasingly heavy debt burden.
These modern Taj Mahal Schools seem to be a nation‐wide phenomenon. National Center for Education Statistics data show that spending on facilities and construction has been increasing at a much faster pace than it has for classroom instruction.
From 1989 to 2008 spending on facilities acquisition and construction has increased a stunning 445% while instructional spending increased 198 percent. The number of students, meanwhile, increased just 7 percent.
Not only is government education spending out of control, much of the increase is being sunk into hugely expensive and unnecessary building projects.
We need to put more money in the hands of parents and taxpayers. We need to invest more effectively and efficiently with education tax credits.
Related Tags
TSA on the Prowl for Embezzlers
The TSA is exceeding its authority.
At what point does an airport search step over the line?
How about when they start going through your checks, and the police call your husband, suspicious you were clearing out the bank account?
This kind of thing was supposed to stop after the TSA revised its policies a year ago. The revision came in the wake of the unconstitutional seizure of Campaign for Liberty staffer Steven Bierfeldt for carrying cash donations (prompting a lawsuit from the ACLU). A federal judge had already determined that fake passports found on an airline passenger were inadmissible in court.
The TSA is not a law enforcement agency. TSA screeners aren’t supposed to search for anything beyond weapons and explosives. Or, as TSA policy currently reads, “Screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security.”
Kathy Parker, a business support manager for a large bank, was flying with a deposit slip and several checks made out to her and her husband. TSA screeners suspected she was skipping town in the midst of a “divorce situation.”
Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.
“It’s an indication you’ve embezzled these checks,” she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn’t before that moment, she says.
She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. “That’s my money,” she remembers saying. The officer’s reply? “It’s not your money.”
Glad to see that we’re in good hands, and that no one has lost focus on the aviation security mission at TSA. Read the whole thing.
The Public Isn’t Buying
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Angry Left Obama’s bête noir?
My response:
Would the president help himself by making a clearer ideological declaration — as many on the “professional left” are asking him to do? Hardly. POLITICO tells us this morning that those “professionals” lament “the president’s reluctance to be a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan, who spoke without apology about his vaulting ideological ambitions.” One of those professionals, Robert Reich, urges Obama to present “a clear and convincing narrative into which all the various initiatives neatly fit, so that the public can make sense of everything that’s done.”
The public is quite capable of making sense of everything that’s been done. It’s doing it, and it doesn’t like what it sees. Reagan spoke boldly about his vision because it arose directly from fundamental American principles — individual liberty, free markets, and limited constitutional government. Obama avoids presenting “a clear and convincing narrative” because if he stated his vision more clearly it would be even less convincing than it already is.
Thus, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was right to complain about the criticism’s coming from members of the professional left, who spend their lives cloistered in academia, the mainstream media, and other such redoubts, talking to each other. But Gibbs’s problem is deeper: It’s the product, not the pitch.