The Greater Good Means Too Bad For The Children

Senator Lieberman tried yet again to save D.C.’s school children and it fell on the deaf progressive ears of President Obama. Why does President Obama hate children? Why does he treat his own girls one way and act with willful indifference to needy minority kids going to the same school as them?

Read this and be outraged:

Right now, today, some 1,900 Washington children are sitting in calm, safe, orderly classrooms in neighborhoods other than their own, because of this program. The cost, in the scheme of things, is laughably small.

Yet congressional Democrats and Obama are killing it. This week, Lieberman’s colleagues voted down his attempt to attach a voucher-saving amendment to a larger piece of legislation.
It is a scandal. That the children already enrolled in the scheme will be able to finish 12th grade with the scholarship is small comfort; why only them? Why not their younger brothers and sisters, who will not have the same chance? Why leave these children behind?

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Only-some-children-left-behind-88189257.html#ixzz0iXHrtiBQ

When you hear liberals talk about loving the little children, keep in mind that, as usual, they only love some children–mostly their own.

That’s what happens when decisions are made for the greater good. The ruling class gets one set of health care, education, tax break, government deal, home, car, etc. and then the regular folks get what the “greater good” gets–which is usually nothing.

Posted in Education, Racism | 2 Comments »

Podcast: Andrew Malcolm and I Talk About Meg Whitman, More Chicago Politics and Health Care

Andrew and Melissa talk about the “belly of the beast” Chicago, what’s up with Meg Whitman, and much more.

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• Video: Whitman’s bizarre press conference (hotair.com)

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Podcast: Not Hot For Teacher With Jimmie Bise And Tabitha Hale

Jimmie Bise of Sundries Shack and Tabitha Hale of Pink Elephant Pundit join me to discuss the spork incident which morphed into discussing socialism and central educational planning which morphed into talking the Nobel Peace prize. Believe it or not, it all relates.

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Posted in America, Isms, Mind | No Comments »

Reforming A Spork-Wielding Six Year Old

Think the public schools are just fine? I beg to differ. Have you heard about this via Boing Boing:

Zachary Christie is a six-year old student in Newark, Delaware who is facing 45 days in reform school because he brought his new Cub Scout eating utensil to school for lunch. The utensil includes a knife, and this violates the school’s brainlessly, robotically enforced zero-tolerance policy on “weapons on school property.”

Jimmie Bise and Tabitha Hale join me to discuss this stupidity. You might be surprised at their ideas. We also talk about how this relates to socialism….because it does.

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Listen and get hooked. Best stuff on podcasts!

Posted in Corrupted Culture, Political Animals | 4 Comments »

Podcast: The President, Little People, The Press, Levi’s Palin Penis Johnson

Stephen Green joins me to discuss the Obama-Education talk controversy. He takes on AllahPundit with wit and style. [I would have asked AllahPundit to be on the show had I thought the man would come out of hiding.] We talk about Obama’s cult of personality. We also discuss The Moment President Obama’s presidency went off the rails.

Brandon Vidrine also joins me to discuss the evolution of news online and the new tools to keep people informed.

Finally, Levi Johnson’s …johnson. Sorry, couldn’t help it. I talk about the press’s Levi-erotica. It ain’t pretty. And then, there’s the Cougars. Growl….

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When Melissa isn’t on the radio, you can find her at melissaclouthier.com and on Twitter. Her username is MelissaTweets.

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Posted in America, Corrupted Culture, Political Animals | 1 Comment »

About Obama’s September 8th Ground Breaking Speech….To The Children

Some thoughts on President Obama’s teachable moment [more at Bookworm and Michelle Malkin]:

The best predictor of human behavior is past behavior.

Obama will be:

1. Glib
2. Boring
3. Professorish

He will say:

4. One or two outrageous things
5. Mixed in with bland banalities

Teachers will dutifully talk about the glories of diversity. The wonderfulness of the president. The hopefulness of his plans.

Children will want to “help the President” and be “good stewards” and “save electricity” and “save the children” and “study hard”. Well, the last one not-so-much.

The message won’t matter. The fact that the President is speaking to them, unfiltered, with no parent is what I object to.

And I live in the most conservative of conservative school districts. Many teachers don’t even know when they are passing bullshit pap along.

My kids came home from school worried about global warming and the world ending.

Our mind numb society didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Anyway, not everyone agrees with my take–they want to give the President the benefit of the doubt. But I can only predict his future actions on past performances. He has done very well at gracefully talking around a controversial subject and making all who hear it believe he’s agreeing with their take.

Children want to believe authorities. They DO believe authorities. Depending on the child’s developmental level, he cannot discern that a President would mislead. Heck, many adults have been baffled by Obama’s b.s. They are shocked, shocked! I tell you, at how President Obama has presided.

But let’s assume the substance is benign. I still don’t like it. The President being beamed directly to children is unprecedented. It has never happened and for good reason. The authority in a child’s life is his parent. A teacher has a teaching role but it is subservient to the parent.

When I think of leaders going around parents to talk to children, I think of Elian Gonzalez. Over at TheRealCuba blog here’s what it says:

Poor Elian!

For the last six years, after he was forced to return to Cuba to become another slave, Elian Gonzalez had to celebrate his birthday with his real father, Fidel Castro. But now, the Cuban dictator is half dead and unable to attend his young slave’s birthday party.
However, that doesn’t mean that Elian would be able to celebrate his birthday as a normal child. Not in Castro’s Cuba!

Elian, who today became a teenager, still had to “celebrate” his birthday party in the presence of two “viejos cagalitrosos,” the new dictator-in-chief and Ricardo “Watermellon Head” Alarcon.
Can you imagine? A teenager having to salute these two sinister characters on his birthday, after having been forced to do the same with Cuba’s mass murderer for the last six years?
Poor Elian! I wonder if Janet Reno remembered to send him a birthday card.

I don’t want an entire generation of Americans getting a universal message from ANY leader or politician. I want a generation of children to be inspired by big dreams–like going to the moon or exploring Mars. A free country can do big things. A free country, lead by a visionary, can demonstrate greatness. The leader doesn’t have to use empty words.

Let President Obama’s personal example of education, hard work and achievement speak for themselves. It is enough…and it’s very American.

Posted in America, Corrupted Culture, Mind, Political Animals | 11 Comments »

Suing Colleges Because Job Prospects Stink

I think this is a fabulous idea, actually. This woman is upset because her $70K education is netting her a big, fat, donut. So, sue ‘em!

1. Many people accepted to college are dumb as stumps and shouldn’t be there to begin with because they don’t have the chops for the schooling or if they do, don’t have the chops for a job after college.

2. Anyone in the humanities departments should be paid to go to school for all the job offers they’re going to get.

3. Colleges have no incentives to make sure they create a good product.

Do I think that the woman is inane–considering that the economy stinks and no one is having good luck with jobs? Of course she is. But hey, she could be the start of a trend. Stupid, expensive education is a problem even in good economies. In a good economy, though, even idiots get a job, falsely giving the impression that the college education is actually worth something.

Mostly, a college education proves a person can endure for four six years. It’s also like an extended Grade 13 because public school education emphasizes all the wrong things.

Anyway, this lawsuit brings up the whole notion of accountability. Do colleges have to show any evidence that their educations produce a good product? Not really. Maybe they should.

UPDATED:

Lawyer says it’s frivolous.

Posted in America, Corrupted Culture | 9 Comments »

Aggressive Schooling

There have been all sorts of articles written about Helicopter Parents and now, there’s a new trend called “slow parenting“. Slow parenting is just as the name implies–yank your kids out of activities and slow down. There is competing evidence, like came from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers that kids do better with more activities and need at least ten years of consistent, hard work to achieve mastery. And then, there was his extolling of the schools that go year around and for eight hours a day, including Saturday.

Slow parenting might be a new trend, though I’m dubious. Aggressive, strung-out parenting seems to be the norm. Kids have their extra-curricular activities and then they come home…where they are the victims of aggressive schooling.

All the parents complain about aggressive schooling and then, they comply. Their kids come home with projects beyond their ability and the parents are forced to “help” or else the child will be consigned to B+ status.

There is a method to the schooling madness. By making every piece of homework a little too difficult and a must-check and sign by parents, teachers off-load responsibility. If the kid is uneducated, it’s not the teacher’s fault, the parents just don’t care enough and aren’t involved.

Beyond the state’s control of the individual’s behavior, is there any evidence that front-loading education accomplishes anything besides making kids tired and frustrated with school?

And while kids seem to know more minutiae do they have the context to put this information in?

My concern is practical–kids are tired, worn-out and have less time to just play. My concern is also scientific. It seems that there should be evidence that these methods actually work. Children are scheduled heavily and working evenings and weekends when the time could be spent doing other things. Does this work pay off? What are the outcomes to this approach?

If SAT scores mean anything, education has declined, not improved. From the Wall Street Journal:

High-school students’ performance on SAT college-entrance exams stalled, and the gap widened between low-scoring minority groups and the overall population, raising questions about the quality of teaching in U.S. schools.

There should be evidence that broad academic front-loading is helpful and effective. If not, kids need to be cut a break. They have their whole lives to learn taxonomy, but there are only a few years to play.

Posted in Corrupted Culture, Mind | 1 Comment »

“We Need To Redefine Merit”…Because Standardized Testing Is Racist

I watched this video yesterday and got sick to my stomach. You can watch the whole thing, too, to get an idea of what is being taught at say, Harvard University. Professor Lani Guinier, at the State of the Black Union jams so many false premises and wrong-headed thinking in 10 minutes that it’s impressive. Here are a couple highlights:

“We need to redefine merit. Within each ethnic group talent is equally distributed among all people. All people have merit.”

“Diversity in problem solving groups trumps individual ability.”

Professor Guinier recommends that rather than hiring smart people, employers should look at hiring people who are dumb but answered the questions the smart people got wrong.

Since some people can’t “make the grade” the solution, then, is to make grades have no meaning. Since some people are stupid, then the goal is to find the few times they are actually smart and endure them the rest of the time–because every once in a while, they might have a novel solution.

This ten minute video encapsulates liberal philosophy. While the Professor talks about the importance of critical thinking skills, she displays an astonishing lack of them herself. Ken Blackwell says:

Guinier goes on to insult hard working students and diminish their academic success in explaining her rationale, saying, “the reason that I’m calling it racism is because it is a state of mind that is indifferent to the fact that these tests, whatever you think about them, are having a disparate impact on different populations and violating that first principal that talent is equally distributed among all groups.”

The audacity in this assertion is exceeded only in its staggering absurdity. Different people perform differently on standardized tests because people are, well, different. I may score high on tests involving history or language, but fear my expertise in higher mathematics is woefully lacking. The same holds true for those in vocational fields. An aptitude for auto mechanics doesn’t automatically translate into great skill in dental hygiene, welding, or any other trade. The facts are simple; talent is not, never has been and never will be “equally distributed among all groups,” as Guinier preposterously claims.

I had to laugh at one point. Professor Guinier disparages Barack Obama’s A+’s (assuming he got any, but whatever) saying that a person’s grades don’t guarantee how he’s going to lawyer. Well, that’s true, indeed.

What Professor Guinier aims to do is to remove all forms of defining achievement so that everyone is an achiever. She’s like Syndrome from the movie The Incredibles:

“Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I’ll give them heroics. I’ll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone’s super–
[chuckles evilly] –no one will be.”

Success in America will be when everyone is defined as successful…then no one will be successful.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

Posted in America, Corrupted Culture | 6 Comments »

Predatory Women Teachers

So, last week Drudge puts up a link to a story about two different women teachers having sex with a 13 year old boy student unbeknown to one another. Nice. Why can’t crazy women just be strippers and prostitutes? Now, they’re foisting their antisocial behavior on children.

A couple thoughts:

1. Yes, society is degrading. What used to be unthinkable has become rather common place.
2. Critics of home schooling, due to the fact that the kids may be in a “dangerous environment”, need to put a cork in it.
3. Critics of the Catholic Church need to be morally consistent. Where is the outrage over this abuse? All indicators point to a systemic failure for the education system to keep children safe. This is a little addendum at the end of the article:

Recent cases
Since 2007, at least 10 other Utah teachers or school employees have been charged with engaging in sexual acts with students. Among recent cases:
In November 2007, Frank Laine Hall, 37, was sentenced to prison for molesting 11 of his first-grade students at Rosamond Elementary School in Riverton.
Also in 2007, former West High School guidance counselor Marco R. Herrera, 53, received three consecutive one-to-15 year prison terms for engaging in sexual acts with a 14-year-old girl at least 10 times. An honors teacher at the same school was charged in 2008 with multiple counts of having sex with the same girl; his case is pending.

This is just in Utah. There are stories like this every day. Here’s one from Houston. But when I did a search, multiple cases came up. Here’s a complete list. And this is just the women.

Where is the Teacher’s Union? Where are the huge settlements from school systems for providing unsafe environments? Why are schools given an exemption from the expectation that children should be safe?

Evidently, there is a taboo bigger than sexual abuse and assault: Thou Shalt Not Put Teachers In A Bad Light.

Cross-posted at RightWingNews

Posted in Corrupted Culture | 7 Comments »