Bloodthirsty Liberal

Wow

California has the second highest tax rate in the nation, next to NY, making them the poster child for why high taxes and liberal programs fail.

Angry students at the Davis, California, branch of the University of California refused to vacate the school’s administration building Thursday evening in a show of defiance and protest over a 32-percent undergraduate tuition hike instituted by the California Board of Regents earlier in the day.

About 50 students remained in the building, which was supposed to close by 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET), UC Davis spokeswoman Claudia Morain told CNN. At one point, as many as 150 students were at the building protesting the tuition increase, she said. She said she hopes campus police can resolve the issue without the need to make arrests.

CNN affiliate KCRA captured footage of students outside the building shouting, “Who’s university? Our university!”

Nearly 400 miles south and hours earlier, hundreds of students marched and chanted against the increase while outside the UCLA building in Los Angeles where regents met to vote on the hike.

Protesting students and others say the increased tuition will hurt working and middle-class students who benefit from state-funded education. But officials argue that a fee increase and deep cuts in school spending are necessary because of a persistent budget crisis that has forced reductions across California’s state government.

“We’re fired up. Can’t take it no more,” students chanted as they marched and waved signs at UCLA. “Education only for the rich,” one sign read. [They seem to need remedial English. - Aggie]

After the vote, students rushed to the parking decks to stage a sit-in to block regents’ vehicles from leaving. Campus police and California Highway Patrol officers in riot gear stood nearby.

As one regent member walked out, students surrounded his path shouted, “Shame on you, shame on you.”

If you go to the link and watch the video, the numbers don’t seem to add up. Perhaps the journalists have it wrong? In any case, the students are very upset. They want a low cost or free tuition but the state is falling apart. Interestingly, the students interviewed were either first or second generation Americans.

On the one hand, the citizens of California wanted to provide free or low cost in-state tuition. On the other hand, they also wanted to provide a myriad of other programs, and jacked up taxes into the stratosphere to do so. They have created perks that residents of other states can only dream of. For example, if you purchase a home in the Golden State, your taxes are tied to the value of the home at the time of purchase. This is a great deal for the elderly, but it means that the state can’t collect as much on real estate taxes as most homes are worth. If you two people live in identical, side-by-side homes, one purchased in 1985, the other in 2007, the tax bills are radically different. This is a perk for some people, but others pay disproportionately. What’s a middle-class tax payer to do?

Dumb political decisions have consequences. It doesn’t matter if the decisions were voted in primarily by Democrats or Republicans, they play out over the years. California decided to control the growth of real estate taxes, and it contributed to the school crisis, although there are other factors at play. Now they have the entertaining sit-ins and student rallies. Buy some popcorn and enjoy.

- Aggie

He’s a hoot

More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers.

Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers.

“That other number, I don’t know where that came from,” said Lauri Hakanen, superintendent of North Chicago Community Unit Schools District 187.

The Obama administration last week released the first round of data designed to underpin the worthiness of its economic stimulus plan, which so far has directed $1.25 billion to Illinois schools. That money has helped save or create 14,330 school jobs in the state, the administration claimed.

But those statistics, compiled initially by the Illinois State Board of Education, appear riddled with anomalies that raise questions about their validity, according to a Tribune analysis of district-by-district stimulus spending and other state data. Many local school officials were perplexed by the stimulus data attributed to their districts.

In the official report, Wilmette Public Schools District 39 was credited with 166 jobs saved by stimulus aid. Superintendent Raymond Lechner said the number should be zero.

I am seeing him now as Superman, flying around the universe, saving jobs for us all. He looks great in tights and a cape.

- Aggie

This is a terrifying article about starvation in North Korea

They clung to their “socialism” as they called it as somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million died.

I got to thinking about the famine in Russia in which an estimated 20 million people starved to death. You may or may not have heard about it; Walter Duranty of the NY Times won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Russia at the time. Unfortunately, he wrote that it was a paradise, without a care in the world.

I am not a fear-monger and don’t see the US heading towards a catastrophe of that scale. No way. But I see an educational system which does not wish to convey to students the fact that collectivism almost never works anywhere. They don’t receive the wisdom that millions of human beings have learned the hard way. I wish we did a better job teaching history.

- Aggie

That’s not even editorializing. That’s fact.

But you wouldn’t know it to read the MSM:

A top White House economist says spending from the $787 billion economic stimulus has already had its biggest impact on economic growth and will likely not contribute to significant expansion next year.

Christina Romer, the chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Thursday that the $194 billion already spent gave a jolt to the economy that contributed to growth in the second and third quarters of the year. She told a congressional panel that by the middle of next year, the impact of the stimulus will level off. Romer said spending so far has saved or created 600,000 to 1.5 million jobs but warned that unemployment will remain high, above 9.5 percent, through the end of 2010.

The idea of a “saved” job is dubious, but I suppose there are some—in certain favored sectors of the economy:

President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan spared tens of thousands of teachers from losing their jobs, state officials said Monday amid a nationwide effort to calculate the effect of Washington’s $787 billion recovery package.

…

In California, the stimulus was credited with saving or creating 62,000 jobs in public schools and state universities. Utah reported saving about 2,600 teaching jobs. In both states, education jobs represented about two-thirds of the total stimulus job number. Missouri reported more than 8,500 school jobs, Minnesota more than 5,900. In Michigan, where officials said 19,500 jobs have been saved or created, three out of four were in education.

That’s great news… for teachers. But then, they earned it:

Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have enthusiastically welcomed the election of Barack Obama, a “friend of public education,” to the White House.

“So much about this campaign has been historic and electrifying,” said AFT president Randi Weingarten. “The incredible voter interest Barack Obama generated, especially among young, independent and first-time voters; the sea change in voting patterns across America; and the election of America’s first African-American president are all extraordinary milestones for our country.”

“As we pause to savor this moment for its historic significance, we should also consider what it means for the children of our nation,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, adding that President-elect Obama “knows that our long-term economic strength requires a renewed commitment to public education.”

…

The NEA and AFT, representing millions of teachers and education workers across the United States, played a significant role in the campaign. Both unions mounted pro-public education campaigns and websites, and reached out to their members and their families with millions of pieces of mail, phone calls and emails. Both unions also educated young members and first-time voters on issues related to public education and college affordability.

Mm-hmm. And now they want a return on their investment. There are stories in the news about Obama facing down the teachers unions (over merit pay, year-round school, etc.), but he’s got their back and they have his.

Meanwhile, the country circles the drain. The stimulus package was supposed to cap unemployment at 8%, but we’re looking at 10% soon, and for a long time to come.

As Rush likes to say, New Zealand is looking better and better.

- Aggie

A frustrated lyricist, I’d like to try writing a paean to our Dear Leader.

Ahem.

Barack Hussain Obama
Was raised by his typ’cal white gramma.
He did well at school,
Cause he was no fool
But now he has banished our summah:

If the academic year gets pushed deeper into summer, as President Obama is advocating, the grumbling will not be limited just to students and teachers who will be forced to spend more days in school.

Critics say the president’s call for a longer academic calendar and a shorter summer vacation will bring on a host of unintended consequences — including increased costs for school systems, major cuts to the nation’s hotel and tourism industries, and a serious blow to summer camp operators.

Obama says kids in the U.S. spend too little time in the classroom, putting them at a disadvantage when competing with students in other countries. The president has suggested that making school days longer and extending the school year will increase learning, raise test scores and close the achievement gap.

So, more of what’s failed—is that the prescription? Let’s not challenge the teachers unions on performance and initiative, let’s not give parents choice and responsibility, let’s just pile on more hours a day, more days a year. All of which should help the indoctrination program.

Mm, mm, mm.

Barack Hussain Obama
Sure knows how to create a drama.
He floats a rash scheme
That would make Jefferson scream,
Then whines, “Man, you guys are a bummer.”

Ask what you can do for me:

I think the White House and Obama fouled this up from the beginning, making it look much more political than necessary, and gave their critics a boatload of ammunition with which to attack them. The speech, included in its entirety below, turned out to be entirely innocuous. But by asking teachers to impress upon children the need to “help President Obama,” they made it look blatantly political. They seem to have forgotten that they’re the public servants, and that the people do not live to serve political masters. As Frank Wilson puts it in another context, Americans see themselves as citizens, not subjects, with the President only of a higher rank for the temporary period of time that we put him there. This has been incompetently handled from beginning to end, including the highly embarrassing scheduling that inadvertently excluded millions of students from the speech.

…

Update II: I’ve run the speech through a word frequency counter and found the following results:

56 iterations of “I”
19 iterations of “school”
10 iterations of “education”
8 iterations of “responsibility”
7 iterations of “country”
5 iterations each of “parents”, “teachers”
3 iterations of “nation”

In other words, Barack Obama referenced himself more than school, education, responsibility, country/nation, parents, and teachers combined. And to think that people accused Obama of self-promotion!

That’s outrageous! I want Congressional hearings:

The controversy over President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush’s speech — they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech. “The hearing this morning is to really examine the expenditure of $26,750 of the Department of Education funds to produce and televise an appearance by President Bush at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC,” Ford began. “As the chairman of the committee charged with the authorization and implementation of education programs, I am very much interested in the justification, rationale for giving the White House scarce education funds to produce a media event.”

Obama got caught with his metaphorical dick in his hands, and has tried to paper over a blatant political appeal with a flimsy excuse for a pep talk. And even then, he can’t bring himself to speak for the nation. He believes he is the nation.

Folks, we won’t get the satisfaction of seeing this man exposed for the collectivist fraud that he is. Too many powerful institutions are invested in his reputation and his legacy. But more people are wising up every day. And when Obama’s vision of the social contract is repudiated once and for all, the media will wail and gnash their teeth—to no avail. May he enjoy a long lifetime as the youngest ex-President ever.

How did they react when Bush talked to one group of students in school?

Oh, they had a hissy fit. Don’t let them tell you that Obama’s talk to every school child in the country is somehow ok. It is not.

As Barack Obama prepares a nationwide broadcast to America’s students next Tuesday, it has been revealed that Democrats complained in 1991 when then President George H. W. Bush broadcast a speech from a Northwest Washington junior high school.

In fact, the House Majority leader at the time, Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), said “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students.”

Such was reported by the Washington Post on October 3, 1991 (h/t KY3 Political Notebook via

House Democrats criticized President Bush yesterday for using Education Department funds to produce and broadcast a speech that he made Tuesday at a Northwest Washington junior high school.

The Democratic critics accused Bush of turning government money for education to his own political use, namely, an ongoing effort to inoculate himself against their charges of inattention to domestic issues. The speech at Alice Deal Junior High School, broadcast live on radio and television, urged students to study hard, avoid drugs and turn in troublemakers.

“The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’ “

What losers.

- Aggie

Here’s one approach

Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: “We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television’s “Colbert Report.” They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded “self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort,” to quote the school’s website.

Students, almost all poor, wear uniforms and are subject to disciplinary procedures redolent of military school. One local school district official was horrified to learn that a girl was forced to clean the boys’ restroom as punishment.

Conservatives, including columnist George Will, adore the American Indian schools, which they see as models of a “new paternalism” that could close the gap between the haves and have-nots in American education. Not surprisingly, many Bay Area liberals have a hard time embracing an educational philosophy that proudly proclaims that it “does not preach or subscribe to the demagoguery of tolerance.”

It would be easy to dismiss American Indian as one of the nuttier offshoots of the fast-growing charter school movement, which allows schools to receive public funding but operate outside of day-to-day district oversight. But the schools command attention for one very simple reason: By standard measures, they are among the very best in California.

The Academic Performance Index, the central measuring tool for California schools, rates schools on a scale from zero to 1,000, based on standardized test scores. The state target is an API of 800. The statewide average for middle and high schools is below 750. For schools with mostly low-income students, it is around 650.

The oldest of the American Indian schools, the middle school known simply as American Indian Public Charter School, has an API of 967. Its two siblings — American Indian Public Charter School II (also a middle school) and American Indian Public High School — are not far behind.

Among the thousands of public schools in California, only four middle schools and three high schools score higher. None of them serves mostly underprivileged children.

We wrote about a school in Arkansas that has had phenomenal results in one of the poorest counties of the United States by keep kids in school for very long days, six days a week, eleven months a year. Basically, what is happening is that the culture of the streets is being replaced with the culture inside the school. And that culture is goal-oriented and focused on success in middle-class America. This approach seems to work.

But it will probably never catch on.

A little more:

On Tuesday, American Indian’s high school will graduate its first senior class. All 18 students plan to attend college in the fall, 10 at various UC campuses, one at MIT and one at Cornell.

“They really should be the model for public education in the state of California,” said Debra England of the Koret Foundation, a Bay Area group that has given more than $100,000 in grants to American Indian. “What I will never understand is why the world is not beating a path to their door to benchmark them, learn from them and replicate what they are doing.”

So to learn what they’re doing, go to the link.

- Aggie

Many El Paso, Texas High School students live in Mexico

Interesting that in a time of recession and economic angst, we are paying for the education of Mexican students, both in private schools through donations and in the public school system in border states. I wonder what percentage of California students are here illegally from Mexico? I don’t even have a big problem with it, I just wonder.

Marina Diaz knows each day could be her last when she leaves for school each morning.

But that doesn’t stop her from making the trip from her home on the dusty outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a key battleground in Mexico’s drug wars, to El Paso, Texas, where she attends high school.

From the moment she catches a bus to downtown Juarez, she is mindful of her surroundings. This is a city that saw 1,600 homicides last year. She warily watches the federal soldiers patrolling the streets.

Diaz, 18, finally relaxes after she clears customs at a border checkpoint and passes the “Welcome to Texas!” sign greeting pedestrians at the intersection of El Paso Street and 6th Avenue in downtown El Paso. From there, it’s another five minutes to the Lydia Patterson Institute.

She is not the only student making the trip across the border each day. In fact, most of the students in the school do it: About 70 percent of the institute’s 459 students live in Juarez. Some are American citizens with Mexican parents; others are Mexican citizens who carry a student visa to any one of three U.S.-Mexico border checkpoints in El Paso that serve tens of thousands of students, white-collar workers and day laborers each day. Students describe their lives and daily challenges »

When she gets to the school each morning, Diaz changes out of her jogging pants and into her uniform skirt.

“Because of the people over there, I don’t feel comfortable with the men and stuff, so I wear pants,” she explains. “You definitely see a difference here. The streets, they are more clean here than they are in Juarez, and I think the people respect you a little more. You don’t have to worry about people giving you trouble.”

El Paso, population 734,000, has long enjoyed the benefits of strong community ties with its industrial sister city of approximately 1.5 million. But the violence and insecurity created by the war between the Mexican government and the drug cartels has strained that relationship.

For students at Lydia Patterson, who live in Juarez and cross the bridge each weekday, the small, United Methodist preparatory school has become a safe haven in the months since drug-related violence in Juarez has intensified.

“My school is a home for me because I have teachers and they treat me like parents,” says Hazel Barrera, 18. “Here, they take care of us and they make us feel comfortable and safe.”

Lydia Patterson’s faculty and administrators — many of whom are graduates of the school, and also reside in Juarez — say the school’s mission is very much the same as it was when it was founded nearly 100 years ago as a sanctuary for Mexican families fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution.

“Our students are exceptional, and I always tell them I respect them and I admire their courage because they’re living through this horrible time,” says the school’s president, Socorro Brito de Anda.

I also wonder about our problem solving skills. If the mission of the school is to provide sanctuary for Mexican families fleeing violence, why hasn’t that changed in 100 years? What other approaches can be taken? I am fine with a private school providing an education to these kids, but I have to wonder about doing the same thing, over and over again for 100 years and expecting a different outcome.

I guess this is similar to the Darfur problem or the Free Tibet stuff - it probably isn’t going to change and there isn’t a thing to be done about it.
- Aggie