The following opinion piece appeared in the Union Leader. The staff clearly understands our schools have a spending problem and not a funding problem.
Beast from Concord: A school funding monster
THE HOUSE will vote on Wednesday on a bill that would spend $128 million more on public education over two years -- with no way to pay for it anywhere in sight. Any fiscally responsible person would vote "no" on this bill.
The bill is a hodge-podge of education-funding policy -- the result of being amended five times to fix the formulas that wound up disbursing money in patently unfair ways. And even now it is not what many people would call a fair bill. It gives additional money to some property-wealthy communities and takes money from some property-poor ones. It tries to make up for this with tacked-on adjustments thrown in as desperate measures to collect enough votes for passage.
Were the bill nothing more than the Frankenstein's monster that it is, there would be reason enough to oppose it. Add the fact that it deliberately appropriates money the state does not have and cannot be reasonably expected to find in the next two years, and voting "no" is a no-brainer.
The amazing part of the story is that House Speaker Terie Norelli actually planned this all along. Her strategy for devising a new education funding policy was to define an adequate education her first year as speaker (last year), create a new funding formula this year, then figure out how to pay for it next year.
Do you budget like that at home? If you were to send your kids to private or parochial school, would you pick the school first, regardless of cost, then figure out how to pay for it once your child was already enrolled and the bills were due?
Of course you wouldn't. This education funding bill is that irresponsible. But don't worry, House Democratic leaders say. The financing scheme legislators are voting on might be entirely different when it takes effect. The bill creates a study commission that will work on adjustments after the bill is passed.
"Not one dime will be spent before that commission meets and reports its work back," House Finance Committee Chairman Marjorie Smith told the Associated Press last week.
Well, that's comforting. Legislators are being asked not only to spend $128 million we don't have, but to vote for a funding formula that might change in unpredictable ways after it is approved.
That's like signing an adjustable rate mortgage without being able to see the formula the bank will use to adjust the rate.
At this point, do you really need another reason to vote against this bill?
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Education conference sheds light on important school needs
The following piece appeared in the Nashua Telegraph.
Education conference sheds light on important school needs
Covering education in New Hampshire, you sometime lose sight of the fact that many of the issues being dealt with in the Granite State are nationwide issues as well.
Merit pay for teachers, the growing Hispanic student population and the trend toward alternative schools – all issues relevant to Nashua schools – were just some of the topics covered at the Education Writers Association's 61st annual conference in Chicago.
I was one of 200 education writers to attend the conference, held from April 24-26, and it was by far the best professional development opportunity I've ever had. I'm hopeful that much of what I learned can be applied to our local education coverage.
Here were some of the highlights:
• At the Friday afternoon luncheon, Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school district, talked about the drastic changes she has implemented to turn the troubled school system around.
Since taking the position in June, Rhee has finalized the closure of 23 of the city's 144 schools and has fired 100 central office employees, bringing the total number of employees down from 700 to 600.
Closing the schools has not been easy, and there has been a significant amount of criticism from parents, she said.
Rhee said she has tried to make data-driven decisions. With 50,000 students, the city should really only have about 70 schools, she said. Rhee's math works to about the same as what Nashua is running, with 18 schools for 12,500 students.
Using the money saved from the school closures and reduction in staff, Rhee said she has been able to ensure that each school will have an art teacher, a music teacher and a physical education teacher at the start of next year.
"In the District of Columbia, that's almost unheard of," she said.
• A Saturday session focused on the growing Hispanic student population in the country. Richard Fry, senior scholar at the Pew Hispanic Center, went over census data that he believed debunked some myths about Hispanic students.
For example, there are 8.9 million Hispanic students in the country, and 3.8 million English Language Learners, so most Hispanic students are not in an ELL program, he said.
Also, only 16 percent of Hispanic students are foreign born, he said.
Jose Martinez, associate superintendent of the Racine Unified School District, talked about his personal experience going to school in New York City. One of the problems, he said, is ensuring that school districts challenge Hispanic students.
Hispanic students make up 13.2 percent of the enrollment in Nashua, the highest proportion in the state.
In Nashua, data has shown that Hispanic students are underrepresented in the district's gifted and talented program, and that there are an inordinate number of them in the low-level classes in the middle schools and high schools.
Martinez said this happens in districts across the country.
"If you have low expectations, you're not going to get much," he said.
• One of the more entertaining seminars was Friday morning, when two vastly differing opinions were presented on the issue of single-sex education and whether it is truly effective.
Leonard Sax, president and founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, believes that there are innate learning differences in boys and girls, and that there are some students who can benefit greatly from single-sex classrooms with different learning environments.
The difference can be as subtle as changing the room temperature, he said. But it's not enough to simply separate boys from girls, he said.
"Single sex education will be of no value if teachers have no knowledge or background in the subject," he said.
Lise Eliot, an author and a neuroscientist, argued that the differences between boys and girls are not substantial enough to warrant segregating the two groups. She said that single-sex education is more of a response to the systemic problems in public education.
"I really believe that the genders have a lot to learn from each other," she said.
At first, it seemed having two such differing opinions represented was beneficial, but the seminar quickly degenerated into a back-and-forth argument between the two, and the issue at hand was lost.
• At a series of seminars at the offices of the Chicago Tribune, the focus was on multimedia and adapting to the convergence of newspapers with the Internet. Reporters talked about education blogs they had created and projects they had done that utilized audio and video.
Kent Fischer, reporter for the Dallas Morning News, said he uses his blog as a way to get out to the readers all of the little tid-bits and nuggets of information that don't make it into the stories published in the paper.Fischer, who used to write for the Concord Monitor, now covers the Dallas Independent School District.
He gave some examples of how he uses his blog – one entry focused solely on the fact that there are 60 different languages spoken in the district. There is also an entry every morning called "Daily Dish," which includes all news about the district in the past 24 hours.
Fischer said he uses his blog "to give analysis to things that are happening in the district that you can't write in a story."
• Dion Haynes of the Washington Post and Emily Hagedorn of the Bakersfield Californian both went over projects they worked on using multimedia.
Haynes wrote a series of stories focusing on what it would take to fix the Washington, D.C., school system. One of those stories tracked 140 students who did not graduate and look at what they did after high school.
On the paper's Web site, readers could hear from the students themselves in videotaped vignettes.
Hagedorn was on a team at her paper that tackled childhood obesity. The stories tracked a group of teenagers who were trying to lose weight. Reporters gave the teens their own voice recorders to create a diary to chronicle the daily struggles of weight loss.
Those clips were then loaded onto the Web site to go with the story.
• Fischer gave another seminar later in the conference on how to analyze school district spending. He makes regular requests for the check logs, credit card statements, payroll database and purchase orders.
He uses the information to create a database tracking how the money leaves the district. Through credit card statements, Fischer was able to find that $800,000 was spent on retail gift cards, among other things.
The Learning Curve appears Thursdays in The Telegraph. Michael Brindley can be reached at 594-6426 or mbrindley@nashuatelegraph.com.
Education conference sheds light on important school needs
Covering education in New Hampshire, you sometime lose sight of the fact that many of the issues being dealt with in the Granite State are nationwide issues as well.
Merit pay for teachers, the growing Hispanic student population and the trend toward alternative schools – all issues relevant to Nashua schools – were just some of the topics covered at the Education Writers Association's 61st annual conference in Chicago.
I was one of 200 education writers to attend the conference, held from April 24-26, and it was by far the best professional development opportunity I've ever had. I'm hopeful that much of what I learned can be applied to our local education coverage.
Here were some of the highlights:
• At the Friday afternoon luncheon, Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school district, talked about the drastic changes she has implemented to turn the troubled school system around.
Since taking the position in June, Rhee has finalized the closure of 23 of the city's 144 schools and has fired 100 central office employees, bringing the total number of employees down from 700 to 600.
Closing the schools has not been easy, and there has been a significant amount of criticism from parents, she said.
Rhee said she has tried to make data-driven decisions. With 50,000 students, the city should really only have about 70 schools, she said. Rhee's math works to about the same as what Nashua is running, with 18 schools for 12,500 students.
Using the money saved from the school closures and reduction in staff, Rhee said she has been able to ensure that each school will have an art teacher, a music teacher and a physical education teacher at the start of next year.
"In the District of Columbia, that's almost unheard of," she said.
• A Saturday session focused on the growing Hispanic student population in the country. Richard Fry, senior scholar at the Pew Hispanic Center, went over census data that he believed debunked some myths about Hispanic students.
For example, there are 8.9 million Hispanic students in the country, and 3.8 million English Language Learners, so most Hispanic students are not in an ELL program, he said.
Also, only 16 percent of Hispanic students are foreign born, he said.
Jose Martinez, associate superintendent of the Racine Unified School District, talked about his personal experience going to school in New York City. One of the problems, he said, is ensuring that school districts challenge Hispanic students.
Hispanic students make up 13.2 percent of the enrollment in Nashua, the highest proportion in the state.
In Nashua, data has shown that Hispanic students are underrepresented in the district's gifted and talented program, and that there are an inordinate number of them in the low-level classes in the middle schools and high schools.
Martinez said this happens in districts across the country.
"If you have low expectations, you're not going to get much," he said.
• One of the more entertaining seminars was Friday morning, when two vastly differing opinions were presented on the issue of single-sex education and whether it is truly effective.
Leonard Sax, president and founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, believes that there are innate learning differences in boys and girls, and that there are some students who can benefit greatly from single-sex classrooms with different learning environments.
The difference can be as subtle as changing the room temperature, he said. But it's not enough to simply separate boys from girls, he said.
"Single sex education will be of no value if teachers have no knowledge or background in the subject," he said.
Lise Eliot, an author and a neuroscientist, argued that the differences between boys and girls are not substantial enough to warrant segregating the two groups. She said that single-sex education is more of a response to the systemic problems in public education.
"I really believe that the genders have a lot to learn from each other," she said.
At first, it seemed having two such differing opinions represented was beneficial, but the seminar quickly degenerated into a back-and-forth argument between the two, and the issue at hand was lost.
• At a series of seminars at the offices of the Chicago Tribune, the focus was on multimedia and adapting to the convergence of newspapers with the Internet. Reporters talked about education blogs they had created and projects they had done that utilized audio and video.
Kent Fischer, reporter for the Dallas Morning News, said he uses his blog as a way to get out to the readers all of the little tid-bits and nuggets of information that don't make it into the stories published in the paper.Fischer, who used to write for the Concord Monitor, now covers the Dallas Independent School District.
He gave some examples of how he uses his blog – one entry focused solely on the fact that there are 60 different languages spoken in the district. There is also an entry every morning called "Daily Dish," which includes all news about the district in the past 24 hours.
Fischer said he uses his blog "to give analysis to things that are happening in the district that you can't write in a story."
• Dion Haynes of the Washington Post and Emily Hagedorn of the Bakersfield Californian both went over projects they worked on using multimedia.
Haynes wrote a series of stories focusing on what it would take to fix the Washington, D.C., school system. One of those stories tracked 140 students who did not graduate and look at what they did after high school.
On the paper's Web site, readers could hear from the students themselves in videotaped vignettes.
Hagedorn was on a team at her paper that tackled childhood obesity. The stories tracked a group of teenagers who were trying to lose weight. Reporters gave the teens their own voice recorders to create a diary to chronicle the daily struggles of weight loss.
Those clips were then loaded onto the Web site to go with the story.
• Fischer gave another seminar later in the conference on how to analyze school district spending. He makes regular requests for the check logs, credit card statements, payroll database and purchase orders.
He uses the information to create a database tracking how the money leaves the district. Through credit card statements, Fischer was able to find that $800,000 was spent on retail gift cards, among other things.
The Learning Curve appears Thursdays in The Telegraph. Michael Brindley can be reached at 594-6426 or mbrindley@nashuatelegraph.com.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
The Real Engine of Blue America a.k.a Tax Eaters vs Taxpayers
The following was sent to me from an old acquaintance and tax fighter back in Illinois who works at Townhall.com. New Hampshire is becoming a Blue State not because of individuals per se but because the unions around the state are becoming more powerful. There will come a tipping point where it can't be tipped back unless individuals fight for spending reform and to elect individuals who fight for the taxpayer and not the unions and tax eaters. City Journal.
The Real Engine of Blue America
Steven Malanga
Is it really true that America is politically divided between conservative “Red” states in the southern and middle sections of the country and liberal “Blue” states on both coasts? Not exactly: a close look at the district-by-district voting patterns of the coastal states in the 2004 elections brings into crystal-clear focus the real nature of our political divisions. There’s really no such thing as a Blue state—only Blue metropolitan regions. Indeed, the electoral maps of some states that went for John Kerry in 2004 consist mostly of Red suburban and rural counties surrounding deep Blue cities.
What makes these cities so Blue is a multifaceted liberal coalition that ranges from old-style industrial unionists and culturally liberal intellectuals, journalists, and entertainers to tort lawyers, feminists, and even politically correct financiers. But within this coalition, one group stands out as increasingly powerful and not quite in step with the old politics of the Left: those who benefit from an expanding government, including public-sector employees, workers at organizations that survive off government money, and those who receive government benefits. In cities, especially, this group has seized power from the taxpayers, as the vast expansion of the public sector that has taken place since the beginning of the War on Poverty has finally reached a tipping point. In New York City, this coalition has helped roll back some of the reforms of the Giuliani years. In California cities and towns, it is thwarting the expansion of private businesses, Wal-Mart above all. In nearly 100 municipalities, it has imposed higher costs on tens of thousands of businesses by persuading city councils to pass “living-wage” laws.
This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the merging of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions, born in the 1950s and nowadays the 800-pound gorillas of policy debates in many statehouses and city councils. Today, public unions don’t merely use their power to win contract concessions for their members. They help elect sympathetic legislators and defeat proponents of smaller government; they lobby for higher taxes, especially on the rich and on businesses; and they oppose legislative efforts, such as privatization initiatives, aimed at making government smaller and more efficient.
For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of essential government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike. Even some private-sector union leaders questioned the wisdom of letting public-sector workers organize and giving them the right to strike. But that began to change in the mid-1950s, when the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) began lobbying for the right of local workers to organize and bargain collectively. The organization scored its first major victory in 1958, when it persuaded New York City mayor Robert Wagner, looking to strengthen his union support, to give municipal workers collective bargaining rights. Over the next several years, other states and cities, especially those with strong union movements, also passed laws allowing public employees to unionize. Buoyed by these victories, AFSCME’s membership rose from 100,000 in 1955 to 250,000 by 1965 and to more than 1 million by 1985.
Other government-employee organizations followed AFSCME’s lead. In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) set out to win collective bargaining rights for U.S. teachers, using Mayor Wagner and labor-friendly New York as a test case. Though New York’s first teachers’ walkout, in November 1960, had little public support, the union movement gained adherents among teachers nationwide, so that over the next five years there were 36 strikes against municipal school systems. In 1966 alone, another three dozen strikes occurred, as teacher militancy rose in places like Newark, Baltimore, and Youngstown, Ohio. Meanwhile, membership in the AFT more than doubled to 136,000 from 1960 through 1966.
In retrospect, most of the warnings voiced in those tumultuous years proved accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their monopoly power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector, and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation and pension packages that would be impossible to roll back once enacted.
But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining and inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes. Today, the endorsement of a public-sector union is crucial to the election of many local candidates, and public unions now often spend far more on lobbying and political advertising on local issues than any business group does. Nor could the critics have envisioned a time when a shrinking private-sector union movement would forge alliances with the public sector, and when the lines between the two would increasingly blur, as formerly private-sector unions, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), would come to represent increasing numbers of health-care and other workers whose jobs depend on public money.
Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax eaters are the social-services groups spawned by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding. Before the War on Poverty, most social-services agencies were privately funded and had little stake in government spending policies. Groups like Catholic Charities, for instance, received less than 10 percent of their support from government sources. But all that changed beginning in 1965, when federal spending on social services soared, increasing from $800 million to $2.2 billion between 1965 and 1970, and then rocketing to $13 billion by 1980. This geyser of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations, as social-services entrepreneurs conjured into being a constellation of housing groups, subsidized day-care centers, employment-training programs, health clinics, and much more—all designed to tap into the new War on Poverty money.
This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight. Before the 1970s, the government didn’t even count private social services as a sector, because it was so small. But in 1972, a Bureau of Labor Statistics employment census found 550,000 people working in the sector. By 1980, that number had more than doubled to 1.1 million. The sector’s upward arc has continued unabated since then, with especially fast growth during the 1990s. Today the field teems with some 3.3 million workers, most supported by government-funded programs. Whereas in the early 1970s private social services accounted for less than 1 percent of the American workforce, today it accounts for 3 percent of jobs.
Because the clientele for social services is concentrated in the big cities, much of the growth in social-services employment took place there, too. In New York, for example, social-services jobs increased from 52,000 to 183,000 between 1975 and 2000, so that by the end of the millennium more New Yorkers worked in social services than on Wall Street. In Philadelphia, social-services jobs more than doubled to nearly 30,000 from 1988 (the first year for which numbers are available) to 2000. In Boston, during the same period, these jobs increased by 67 percent to nearly 55,000, while in Chicago they grew by nearly 140 percent to 83,000. In all these cases, social-services employment grew much faster than the cities’ economies as a whole. And cities poured their own funds into such programs to augment the (much greater) federal spending, especially in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration restrained the growth of federal social-services programs. New York City, for instance, increased its spending on programs for the homeless from $8 million in 1978, two years before Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, to $100 million annually by 1985. In the early 1980s, New York State increased its spending on alcohol and drug addiction programs alone by two-thirds to nearly $500 million.
Almost from the War on Poverty’s inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves a powerful political force, as when New York welfare workers, for example, mobilized recipients in the early 1970s to storm government offices demanding higher benefits. Some social-services agencies organized their employees and clients into grassroots political operations, parlaying their huge empires built on government and foundation money into political power. Ramon Velez, for example—whose Bronx network of government-funded health centers, alcoholism clinics, and other programs garnered over $300 million in government money over 25 years—engineered the election of several city council and state assembly members in the Bronx, and Velez himself served on New York’s city council.
At the same time that the War on Poverty was gearing up and federal spending on social services was beginning to soar, the Johnson administration created the two gigantic health-care programs, Medicaid and Medicare, providing care to the poor and the elderly, respectively. In the process, Washington vastly changed the economics of U.S. medical care, turning it increasingly into a government-funded industry. From the very start, Medicaid and Medicare, initiated within a year of each other, cost far more than anyone had expected, because they encouraged overuse of the health-care system, prompted overbilling by doctors and hospitals, and led to widespread fraud. In less than five years, the federal budget for Medicaid rose to $6 billion from just $1.2 billion in its first year, 1966, while expenditures by the states, which shared the program’s cost, also ballooned. With so much money pouring in, the country’s health-care industry mushroomed. In the entire decade before the federal programs began, U.S. health-care employment had increased by about 800,000 jobs, but in the first ten years of Medicaid and Medicare, the growth rate more than doubled, and the industry added more than 2 million new jobs, including more than 1 million in hospitals.
The new federal programs made many hospitals dependents of the state, especially in cities with the largest Medicaid populations. Within a few years, urban hospitals that had previously received very little federal money were living principally on Medicaid and Medicare. And once government had become a prime payer in the health-care system, hospitals that had low occupancy rates or duplicated services provided by other local institutions could survive on government dollars rather than being forced to close. Such institutions could gold plate their treatments of patients in order to increase revenues, so that hospitalizations and length of hospital stays increased. As a result, by 1980—to take only one example—experts estimated that New York City had 5,000 more hospital beds than it really needed. Also as a result, at least in part, health-care jobs grew from 3.9 percent of the U.S. private workforce in 1965 to nearly 10 percent today. Shrinking the bloated system and stemming abuses became politically impossible. Above all, what would become of all those who worked in hospitals that should be closed?
The gradual government takeover of health care—a process still continuing—has transformed the industry’s institutions, executives, and workers into lobbyists for ever-greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs. Hospitals and health-care unions were the chief opponents of the Gingrich Congress’s efforts to balance the federal budget in the mid-1990s in part by cutting the growth of Medicaid and Medicare, and these special interests successfully derailed some of the steepest proposed cuts. At the state and local levels, especially in cities where the industry heavily depends on Medicaid and Medicare, hospitals and hospital workers have become two of the most influential power blocs. In New York State, for instance, a coalition of hospitals and unions spent $13 million in 1999, a record for Albany, lobbying to turn back cuts in the state’s huge Medicaid system. Dennis Rivera, the head of Local 1199, a New York City–based union of health-care workers, has become the most powerful union leader in the state, far more influential than the head of the state AFL-CIO.
The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition—public-employee unions, hospitals and health-care worker unions, and social-services agencies—has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country’s national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy.
Increasingly in U.S. cities, the road to electoral success passes through the public- employee/health-care/social-services sector. In New York, for instance, more than two-thirds of city council members are former government employees or ex-workers in health care or social services. The first Latino speaker of the California State Assembly, Antonio Villaraigosa—who narrowly lost the 2001 election for mayor of Los Angeles and served as a national co-chair of John Kerry’s presidential campaign—is a former organizer for the Los Angeles teachers’ union. Jane Campbell, the current mayor of Cleveland, snapped up a $3,000 grant back in 1974 to start WomenSpace, a feminist advocacy group, and used her role as executive director of the organization to launch a 20-year career in elective office in Ohio. Kansas City mayor Kay Barnes entered public life working as a paid staffer in the 1960s for the Cross-Lines Cooperative Council, a local social-services network, and she later helped found and run the Women’s Resource Service, an advocacy center on the campus of the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
One reason that these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the public sector have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners. An exit poll conducted by City Journal of the 2001 New York mayoral election found that private-sector workers heavily backed Michael Bloomberg, the businessman candidate who had been endorsed by Rudy Giuliani and had run on a pledge of no new taxes (which he broke after his first year in office), while those who worked in the public/health-care/social-services sectors favored his Democratic opponent, who ran on a promise of raising taxes to fund further services. In the race, Bloomberg won among private-sector voters by 17 percentage points, while the Democrat won by 15 points among those who worked in the public/nonprofit sectors.
And of course public-sector workers, who know they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote. Though they make up about one-third of New York City’s workforce, public/nonprofit-sector voters made up 37 percent of the electorate in the 2001 mayoral race. Minority workers who earned their living in the public sector were dramatically more likely than their private-sector counterparts to vote.
With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs. Today it’s the members of the New New Left, through their unions and community-based organizations, who are most likely to run political phone banks, distribute campaign literature and run get-out-the-vote efforts for their favored candidates. Indeed, when a member of the Local 1199 health-care workers union ran for New York’s city council in 2003, a local Democratic politician noted admiringly that the candidate, through her union colleagues, could field “a million foot soldiers.” And, like the old Tammany Hall and other urban political machines, these efforts have sparked complaints. Members of the New New Left advocacy group ACORN, which ran aggressive voter-registration drives in many cities during the 2004 elections, were accused of submitting fake or forged registrations in places such as Duluth, Cincinnati, and St. Petersburg, Florida.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the urban Left has evolved into so narrow a movement, promoting no more than its own self-interest. Though it started out as a romantic, if wrongheaded, idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America’s private economy couldn’t provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to be demonstrably wrong, and many Americans now reject them. Unlimited welfare proved an economic and social disaster, producing an underclass of perpetual recipients who, after years on the dole, felt incapable of functioning as productive citizens. Liberalization of the criminal laws and judicial leniency, part of a War-on-Poverty mind-set that saw criminals as victims of society, only led to soaring crime rates, which drove law-abiding citizens out of cities and condemned those who could not leave to lives of fear. Government-funded alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs that placed little emphasis on personal responsibility and individual redemption had zero effect on the rise of addiction.
By the mid-1990s, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it. Changes in welfare law that imposed time limits on assistance and required recipients to work have turned out to be a great success, reducing public-assistance rolls and getting millions of people back to work, without raising the poverty rate. Tough, activist policing innovations have sharply reduced crime, freeing millions of Americans, especially those in inner cities, from fear.
In the face of such realities, the new urban Left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even though it retains the jargon of “social justice.” The living-wage movement is largely the work of unions more interested in laws that bolster union membership and derail privatization or productivity-boosting measures than in legislation that genuinely helps the poor. Many of the living-wage laws enacted around the country exempt unionized companies from adhering to wage guidelines, encouraging firms to unionize. Legislative bodies commandeered by these advocates have cynically enacted laws that have been a boon to their allies but have harmed the cities themselves, as for example the New York City Council’s passage of a living-wage law that raised the wages of home health-care workers but cost the city and state millions of dollars—in the midst of the city’s worst budget crisis ever. In the same spirit, in municipalities throughout California, the New New Left coalition has successfully advocated for laws that restrict consumers’ choices by making it difficult for Wal-Mart and other nonunion retailers to open in places where unionized stores predominate.
But by donning the mantle of “social justice” and invoking the liberation language of the 1960s—for example, in its campaigns to win domestic-partner benefits for municipal workers—the New New Left has managed to dupe a generation of celebrity liberals, idealistic young voters, and religious leaders who have become their allies in the Blue-state coalition. Actor buddies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have campaigned for living-wage laws in their home state of Massachusetts, while clergy hold pro-living-wage religious services, blissfully unaware of how unions have hijacked the movement for their self-interested goals. The union representing television and radio actors urged its members to boycott California stores during the state’s 2003 supermarket-industry strike, and celebrities like actress Melissa Gilbert joined workers on the picket lines. Groups like ACORN rely in many of their campaigns on the volunteer labor of idealistic college students, who are unaware of the controversy that the organization generates by refusing to pay its own workers minimum wages and by using federal legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act to shake down banks.
Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable in the cities, because the tax-eater sector is now so large that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. But the coalition is also becoming the real power in national campaigns, working both within the Democratic Party and outside it. AFSCME, the AFT, and SEIU were among the largest contributors to the Media Fund, a $65 million advertising effort aimed at defeating President Bush in 2004. Those groups, plus ACORN, also supplied much of the manpower for the national voter-registration effort aimed at defeating the president. A succession of Democratic presidential hopefuls traveled to New York to seek the blessing of 1199/SEIU union chief Dennis Rivera, who once held a seat on the Democratic National Committee, and when John Kerry picked his running mate, he immediately called SEIU boss Andrew Stern, a John Edwards supporter, to say, “I heard you.” About one in ten delegates to the 2004 Democratic National Convention was a member of a teachers’ union.
The tax-eaters’ party has seized control of many of America’s cities; now it is trying to make the next big leap.
The Real Engine of Blue America
Steven Malanga
Is it really true that America is politically divided between conservative “Red” states in the southern and middle sections of the country and liberal “Blue” states on both coasts? Not exactly: a close look at the district-by-district voting patterns of the coastal states in the 2004 elections brings into crystal-clear focus the real nature of our political divisions. There’s really no such thing as a Blue state—only Blue metropolitan regions. Indeed, the electoral maps of some states that went for John Kerry in 2004 consist mostly of Red suburban and rural counties surrounding deep Blue cities.
What makes these cities so Blue is a multifaceted liberal coalition that ranges from old-style industrial unionists and culturally liberal intellectuals, journalists, and entertainers to tort lawyers, feminists, and even politically correct financiers. But within this coalition, one group stands out as increasingly powerful and not quite in step with the old politics of the Left: those who benefit from an expanding government, including public-sector employees, workers at organizations that survive off government money, and those who receive government benefits. In cities, especially, this group has seized power from the taxpayers, as the vast expansion of the public sector that has taken place since the beginning of the War on Poverty has finally reached a tipping point. In New York City, this coalition has helped roll back some of the reforms of the Giuliani years. In California cities and towns, it is thwarting the expansion of private businesses, Wal-Mart above all. In nearly 100 municipalities, it has imposed higher costs on tens of thousands of businesses by persuading city councils to pass “living-wage” laws.
This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the merging of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions, born in the 1950s and nowadays the 800-pound gorillas of policy debates in many statehouses and city councils. Today, public unions don’t merely use their power to win contract concessions for their members. They help elect sympathetic legislators and defeat proponents of smaller government; they lobby for higher taxes, especially on the rich and on businesses; and they oppose legislative efforts, such as privatization initiatives, aimed at making government smaller and more efficient.
For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of essential government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike. Even some private-sector union leaders questioned the wisdom of letting public-sector workers organize and giving them the right to strike. But that began to change in the mid-1950s, when the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) began lobbying for the right of local workers to organize and bargain collectively. The organization scored its first major victory in 1958, when it persuaded New York City mayor Robert Wagner, looking to strengthen his union support, to give municipal workers collective bargaining rights. Over the next several years, other states and cities, especially those with strong union movements, also passed laws allowing public employees to unionize. Buoyed by these victories, AFSCME’s membership rose from 100,000 in 1955 to 250,000 by 1965 and to more than 1 million by 1985.
Other government-employee organizations followed AFSCME’s lead. In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) set out to win collective bargaining rights for U.S. teachers, using Mayor Wagner and labor-friendly New York as a test case. Though New York’s first teachers’ walkout, in November 1960, had little public support, the union movement gained adherents among teachers nationwide, so that over the next five years there were 36 strikes against municipal school systems. In 1966 alone, another three dozen strikes occurred, as teacher militancy rose in places like Newark, Baltimore, and Youngstown, Ohio. Meanwhile, membership in the AFT more than doubled to 136,000 from 1960 through 1966.
In retrospect, most of the warnings voiced in those tumultuous years proved accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their monopoly power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector, and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation and pension packages that would be impossible to roll back once enacted.
But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining and inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes. Today, the endorsement of a public-sector union is crucial to the election of many local candidates, and public unions now often spend far more on lobbying and political advertising on local issues than any business group does. Nor could the critics have envisioned a time when a shrinking private-sector union movement would forge alliances with the public sector, and when the lines between the two would increasingly blur, as formerly private-sector unions, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), would come to represent increasing numbers of health-care and other workers whose jobs depend on public money.
Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax eaters are the social-services groups spawned by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding. Before the War on Poverty, most social-services agencies were privately funded and had little stake in government spending policies. Groups like Catholic Charities, for instance, received less than 10 percent of their support from government sources. But all that changed beginning in 1965, when federal spending on social services soared, increasing from $800 million to $2.2 billion between 1965 and 1970, and then rocketing to $13 billion by 1980. This geyser of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations, as social-services entrepreneurs conjured into being a constellation of housing groups, subsidized day-care centers, employment-training programs, health clinics, and much more—all designed to tap into the new War on Poverty money.
This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight. Before the 1970s, the government didn’t even count private social services as a sector, because it was so small. But in 1972, a Bureau of Labor Statistics employment census found 550,000 people working in the sector. By 1980, that number had more than doubled to 1.1 million. The sector’s upward arc has continued unabated since then, with especially fast growth during the 1990s. Today the field teems with some 3.3 million workers, most supported by government-funded programs. Whereas in the early 1970s private social services accounted for less than 1 percent of the American workforce, today it accounts for 3 percent of jobs.
Because the clientele for social services is concentrated in the big cities, much of the growth in social-services employment took place there, too. In New York, for example, social-services jobs increased from 52,000 to 183,000 between 1975 and 2000, so that by the end of the millennium more New Yorkers worked in social services than on Wall Street. In Philadelphia, social-services jobs more than doubled to nearly 30,000 from 1988 (the first year for which numbers are available) to 2000. In Boston, during the same period, these jobs increased by 67 percent to nearly 55,000, while in Chicago they grew by nearly 140 percent to 83,000. In all these cases, social-services employment grew much faster than the cities’ economies as a whole. And cities poured their own funds into such programs to augment the (much greater) federal spending, especially in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration restrained the growth of federal social-services programs. New York City, for instance, increased its spending on programs for the homeless from $8 million in 1978, two years before Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, to $100 million annually by 1985. In the early 1980s, New York State increased its spending on alcohol and drug addiction programs alone by two-thirds to nearly $500 million.
Almost from the War on Poverty’s inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves a powerful political force, as when New York welfare workers, for example, mobilized recipients in the early 1970s to storm government offices demanding higher benefits. Some social-services agencies organized their employees and clients into grassroots political operations, parlaying their huge empires built on government and foundation money into political power. Ramon Velez, for example—whose Bronx network of government-funded health centers, alcoholism clinics, and other programs garnered over $300 million in government money over 25 years—engineered the election of several city council and state assembly members in the Bronx, and Velez himself served on New York’s city council.
At the same time that the War on Poverty was gearing up and federal spending on social services was beginning to soar, the Johnson administration created the two gigantic health-care programs, Medicaid and Medicare, providing care to the poor and the elderly, respectively. In the process, Washington vastly changed the economics of U.S. medical care, turning it increasingly into a government-funded industry. From the very start, Medicaid and Medicare, initiated within a year of each other, cost far more than anyone had expected, because they encouraged overuse of the health-care system, prompted overbilling by doctors and hospitals, and led to widespread fraud. In less than five years, the federal budget for Medicaid rose to $6 billion from just $1.2 billion in its first year, 1966, while expenditures by the states, which shared the program’s cost, also ballooned. With so much money pouring in, the country’s health-care industry mushroomed. In the entire decade before the federal programs began, U.S. health-care employment had increased by about 800,000 jobs, but in the first ten years of Medicaid and Medicare, the growth rate more than doubled, and the industry added more than 2 million new jobs, including more than 1 million in hospitals.
The new federal programs made many hospitals dependents of the state, especially in cities with the largest Medicaid populations. Within a few years, urban hospitals that had previously received very little federal money were living principally on Medicaid and Medicare. And once government had become a prime payer in the health-care system, hospitals that had low occupancy rates or duplicated services provided by other local institutions could survive on government dollars rather than being forced to close. Such institutions could gold plate their treatments of patients in order to increase revenues, so that hospitalizations and length of hospital stays increased. As a result, by 1980—to take only one example—experts estimated that New York City had 5,000 more hospital beds than it really needed. Also as a result, at least in part, health-care jobs grew from 3.9 percent of the U.S. private workforce in 1965 to nearly 10 percent today. Shrinking the bloated system and stemming abuses became politically impossible. Above all, what would become of all those who worked in hospitals that should be closed?
The gradual government takeover of health care—a process still continuing—has transformed the industry’s institutions, executives, and workers into lobbyists for ever-greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs. Hospitals and health-care unions were the chief opponents of the Gingrich Congress’s efforts to balance the federal budget in the mid-1990s in part by cutting the growth of Medicaid and Medicare, and these special interests successfully derailed some of the steepest proposed cuts. At the state and local levels, especially in cities where the industry heavily depends on Medicaid and Medicare, hospitals and hospital workers have become two of the most influential power blocs. In New York State, for instance, a coalition of hospitals and unions spent $13 million in 1999, a record for Albany, lobbying to turn back cuts in the state’s huge Medicaid system. Dennis Rivera, the head of Local 1199, a New York City–based union of health-care workers, has become the most powerful union leader in the state, far more influential than the head of the state AFL-CIO.
The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition—public-employee unions, hospitals and health-care worker unions, and social-services agencies—has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country’s national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy.
Increasingly in U.S. cities, the road to electoral success passes through the public- employee/health-care/social-services sector. In New York, for instance, more than two-thirds of city council members are former government employees or ex-workers in health care or social services. The first Latino speaker of the California State Assembly, Antonio Villaraigosa—who narrowly lost the 2001 election for mayor of Los Angeles and served as a national co-chair of John Kerry’s presidential campaign—is a former organizer for the Los Angeles teachers’ union. Jane Campbell, the current mayor of Cleveland, snapped up a $3,000 grant back in 1974 to start WomenSpace, a feminist advocacy group, and used her role as executive director of the organization to launch a 20-year career in elective office in Ohio. Kansas City mayor Kay Barnes entered public life working as a paid staffer in the 1960s for the Cross-Lines Cooperative Council, a local social-services network, and she later helped found and run the Women’s Resource Service, an advocacy center on the campus of the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
One reason that these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the public sector have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners. An exit poll conducted by City Journal of the 2001 New York mayoral election found that private-sector workers heavily backed Michael Bloomberg, the businessman candidate who had been endorsed by Rudy Giuliani and had run on a pledge of no new taxes (which he broke after his first year in office), while those who worked in the public/health-care/social-services sectors favored his Democratic opponent, who ran on a promise of raising taxes to fund further services. In the race, Bloomberg won among private-sector voters by 17 percentage points, while the Democrat won by 15 points among those who worked in the public/nonprofit sectors.
And of course public-sector workers, who know they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote. Though they make up about one-third of New York City’s workforce, public/nonprofit-sector voters made up 37 percent of the electorate in the 2001 mayoral race. Minority workers who earned their living in the public sector were dramatically more likely than their private-sector counterparts to vote.
With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs. Today it’s the members of the New New Left, through their unions and community-based organizations, who are most likely to run political phone banks, distribute campaign literature and run get-out-the-vote efforts for their favored candidates. Indeed, when a member of the Local 1199 health-care workers union ran for New York’s city council in 2003, a local Democratic politician noted admiringly that the candidate, through her union colleagues, could field “a million foot soldiers.” And, like the old Tammany Hall and other urban political machines, these efforts have sparked complaints. Members of the New New Left advocacy group ACORN, which ran aggressive voter-registration drives in many cities during the 2004 elections, were accused of submitting fake or forged registrations in places such as Duluth, Cincinnati, and St. Petersburg, Florida.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the urban Left has evolved into so narrow a movement, promoting no more than its own self-interest. Though it started out as a romantic, if wrongheaded, idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America’s private economy couldn’t provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to be demonstrably wrong, and many Americans now reject them. Unlimited welfare proved an economic and social disaster, producing an underclass of perpetual recipients who, after years on the dole, felt incapable of functioning as productive citizens. Liberalization of the criminal laws and judicial leniency, part of a War-on-Poverty mind-set that saw criminals as victims of society, only led to soaring crime rates, which drove law-abiding citizens out of cities and condemned those who could not leave to lives of fear. Government-funded alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs that placed little emphasis on personal responsibility and individual redemption had zero effect on the rise of addiction.
By the mid-1990s, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it. Changes in welfare law that imposed time limits on assistance and required recipients to work have turned out to be a great success, reducing public-assistance rolls and getting millions of people back to work, without raising the poverty rate. Tough, activist policing innovations have sharply reduced crime, freeing millions of Americans, especially those in inner cities, from fear.
In the face of such realities, the new urban Left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even though it retains the jargon of “social justice.” The living-wage movement is largely the work of unions more interested in laws that bolster union membership and derail privatization or productivity-boosting measures than in legislation that genuinely helps the poor. Many of the living-wage laws enacted around the country exempt unionized companies from adhering to wage guidelines, encouraging firms to unionize. Legislative bodies commandeered by these advocates have cynically enacted laws that have been a boon to their allies but have harmed the cities themselves, as for example the New York City Council’s passage of a living-wage law that raised the wages of home health-care workers but cost the city and state millions of dollars—in the midst of the city’s worst budget crisis ever. In the same spirit, in municipalities throughout California, the New New Left coalition has successfully advocated for laws that restrict consumers’ choices by making it difficult for Wal-Mart and other nonunion retailers to open in places where unionized stores predominate.
But by donning the mantle of “social justice” and invoking the liberation language of the 1960s—for example, in its campaigns to win domestic-partner benefits for municipal workers—the New New Left has managed to dupe a generation of celebrity liberals, idealistic young voters, and religious leaders who have become their allies in the Blue-state coalition. Actor buddies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have campaigned for living-wage laws in their home state of Massachusetts, while clergy hold pro-living-wage religious services, blissfully unaware of how unions have hijacked the movement for their self-interested goals. The union representing television and radio actors urged its members to boycott California stores during the state’s 2003 supermarket-industry strike, and celebrities like actress Melissa Gilbert joined workers on the picket lines. Groups like ACORN rely in many of their campaigns on the volunteer labor of idealistic college students, who are unaware of the controversy that the organization generates by refusing to pay its own workers minimum wages and by using federal legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act to shake down banks.
Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable in the cities, because the tax-eater sector is now so large that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. But the coalition is also becoming the real power in national campaigns, working both within the Democratic Party and outside it. AFSCME, the AFT, and SEIU were among the largest contributors to the Media Fund, a $65 million advertising effort aimed at defeating President Bush in 2004. Those groups, plus ACORN, also supplied much of the manpower for the national voter-registration effort aimed at defeating the president. A succession of Democratic presidential hopefuls traveled to New York to seek the blessing of 1199/SEIU union chief Dennis Rivera, who once held a seat on the Democratic National Committee, and when John Kerry picked his running mate, he immediately called SEIU boss Andrew Stern, a John Edwards supporter, to say, “I heard you.” About one in ten delegates to the 2004 Democratic National Convention was a member of a teachers’ union.
The tax-eaters’ party has seized control of many of America’s cities; now it is trying to make the next big leap.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Understandably reluctant
Quote of the Day - "Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." - Joseph Stalin
The following piece appeared in the Eagle Times.
Understandably reluctant
The impact all-day kindergarten will have on students as they move through elementary, middle and then high school is not a certain thing.
Logic would tell us that the more time young children spend in a learning environment the better they will be as they get older. But as everyone knows, other factors affecting a child's ability and desire to learn, such as the home environment, can erase the benefit of early learning.
In Newport, a group of residents are pushing hard for the school board to find $40,000 in next year's budget to pay a third of the $120,000 needed for full-day kindergarten. A Newport businessman has pledged $40,000 and community members are trying to raise another $40,000 in donations. If that effort proves successful, then the school board will have to decide whether it will come up with the final piece.
The money for all-day kindergarten was included in the proposed budget but when that budget failed at the polls, the board had to come up with $186,000 in reductions to meet the default budget figure. The administration recommended, and a split board agreed, to cut the full-day kindergarten money.
But board member Jim Lantz remained committed to seeing the program survive and that led to the present situation.
No doubt the school board would have no qualms with funding this program as well as many others if the money was there. But providing the best educational opportunities throughout the school district is not its only responsibility; it also has to consider the tax impact of every program it includes in the budget. If $40,000 goes toward kindergarten, where will it come from? This problem makes it entirely understandable that board members are reluctant to vote for the program.
In the past, Newport voters have rejected separate warrant articles for all-day kindergarten. That message has not been lost on some board members. The concern that coming up with $40,000 in the new budget will anger voters and come back to haunt the board at next year's budget vote is real. The $80,000 in non-tax dollars will not be there for 2009-10 and the board could get in trouble with voters if it just plugs the $120,000 into the next budget.
So the question is whether there exists a solid majority that favors all-day kindergarten or is it a vocal minority. Perhaps the best approach is for the board to find the $40,000 this year, assuming the public donations are received, then have a separate warrant article in 2009. In this way, the kindness of businessman Ray Malool, who donated $40,000, and the hard work of those raising money in the community does not go unrecognized or unrewarded. But once again, the board needs to hear from all taxpayers about this program and making it again a separate warrant article will give them that answer.
Go to the Eagle Times
to read the great comment by Suzanne.
The following piece appeared in the Eagle Times.
Understandably reluctant
The impact all-day kindergarten will have on students as they move through elementary, middle and then high school is not a certain thing.
Logic would tell us that the more time young children spend in a learning environment the better they will be as they get older. But as everyone knows, other factors affecting a child's ability and desire to learn, such as the home environment, can erase the benefit of early learning.
In Newport, a group of residents are pushing hard for the school board to find $40,000 in next year's budget to pay a third of the $120,000 needed for full-day kindergarten. A Newport businessman has pledged $40,000 and community members are trying to raise another $40,000 in donations. If that effort proves successful, then the school board will have to decide whether it will come up with the final piece.
The money for all-day kindergarten was included in the proposed budget but when that budget failed at the polls, the board had to come up with $186,000 in reductions to meet the default budget figure. The administration recommended, and a split board agreed, to cut the full-day kindergarten money.
But board member Jim Lantz remained committed to seeing the program survive and that led to the present situation.
No doubt the school board would have no qualms with funding this program as well as many others if the money was there. But providing the best educational opportunities throughout the school district is not its only responsibility; it also has to consider the tax impact of every program it includes in the budget. If $40,000 goes toward kindergarten, where will it come from? This problem makes it entirely understandable that board members are reluctant to vote for the program.
In the past, Newport voters have rejected separate warrant articles for all-day kindergarten. That message has not been lost on some board members. The concern that coming up with $40,000 in the new budget will anger voters and come back to haunt the board at next year's budget vote is real. The $80,000 in non-tax dollars will not be there for 2009-10 and the board could get in trouble with voters if it just plugs the $120,000 into the next budget.
So the question is whether there exists a solid majority that favors all-day kindergarten or is it a vocal minority. Perhaps the best approach is for the board to find the $40,000 this year, assuming the public donations are received, then have a separate warrant article in 2009. In this way, the kindness of businessman Ray Malool, who donated $40,000, and the hard work of those raising money in the community does not go unrecognized or unrewarded. But once again, the board needs to hear from all taxpayers about this program and making it again a separate warrant article will give them that answer.
Go to the Eagle Times
to read the great comment by Suzanne.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Gregory J. Millman: Understanding home schooling
The following article appeared in the Union Leader.
Quote of the day . “You home-schoolers think you can change the world. But you can’t. Nobody can.” This quote is what a Professor said to one of the author's sons at a community college.
I had many thoughts when I read this quote. First how on earth can any human being say this to a child. Second how ignorant can this man be. I think readers would all agree that these individuals changed the world......Hitler, Genghis Khan, Martin Luther KIng, Einstein, Richard Feynman, Madame Curie, Charles Manson, Jesus, Muhammad, just to name a few. Third this man is disillusioned and should not be in a classroom. Here is a professor going through the motions, every teacher and professor should strive to make a difference in every student's life in hopes that that student will one day change the world, for the better of course.
Cathy
Gregory J. Millman: Understanding home schooling
By GREGORY J. MILLMAN
Saturday, Apr. 5, 2008
During a break in a high school debate tournament not long ago, my 17-year-old son struck up a conversation with a student on the rival team from a New Jersey public school. “Where’s your school?” asked the boy. When my son replied that he was home-schooled, the student probed.
“How do you socialize when you’re at home all the time?” he asked.
“Well, for one thing, I’m here, right?” my son laughed.
My children have gotten used to most of the standard questions from their conventionally schooled peers: Are you super-religious? Do you stay at home in your pajamas and watch TV all day? Is your mom a teacher?
Adults, on the other hand, can be surprising. Like the professor at the community college where one of our sons was taking a course, who went out of her way to pull him aside, sit him down and tell him, “You home-schoolers think you can change the world. But you can’t. Nobody can.”
It’s hard to generalize about home-schoolers, but if there’s one thing we know, it’s that we are changing the world, or at least the world of education choices. Others, though, see us as either misguided or threatening — and probably cheered last month’s California appeals court ruling that all children in the state must be taught by credentialed teachers. At least 166,000 California children are home-schooled. And most home-schooling parents don’t have teaching credentials, so the ruling is worrisome, even though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it “outrageous.” The decision will probably be appealed, but the teachers’ unions are applauding in the meantime.
Nonetheless, home-schooling is booming. In 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that the home-schooled population nationwide was 1.1 million. And the National Home Education Research Institute estimates that it may be growing at double-digit rates.
There’s no denying that the modern home-schooling movement was born of the desire to shake off stultifying school bureaucracies and to sidestep the uncertain mission of public schools, which is set by adults with often conflicting priorities for children. A century of ideological struggles has defined the hodge-podge taught in schools, and they persist to this day. Will schools teach evolution or intelligent design? Offer safe-sex or abstinence-only instruction? Encourage art and dance or treat them as distractions from No Child Left Behind tests? Home-schoolers can make our own decisions based on what’s best for our children.
But “home-schooling” is a misnomer, really. Most of it doesn’t even take place at home, and the schooling has little in common with what goes on in school. The legal definition varies from state to state, as do registration and other requirements. In New Jersey, the law only requires parents to see that their children get an education “equivalent” to public instruction.
What home-schoolers most readily reflect are the virtues of the old American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising — we co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we’ve found that home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed.
And contrary to most popular belief, home-schooling isn’t the brainchild of religious fanatics. It actually got started in the counterculture of the 1960s. In his landmark 1964 book, “How Children Fail,” teacher and education reformer John Holt accused schools themselves of causing students to fail; eventually, he came to advocate a sort of “underground railroad” out of compulsory schooling. It wasn’t until the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s that the movement spread through communities that believed public schools were threatening their moral values.
The boundaries between the counterculture and Christian home-school traditions blurred through the 1990s and 2000s, as home-schoolers from various backgrounds came to discover how much they actually have in common. Today, a well-estabmished and widesrread infrastructure of home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn’t consider themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly religious. People like my family.
My wife and I hadn’t originally planned on home-schooling, but with six children and one modest income, we couldn’t afford a house in one of the better school districts in the state. We were living in Plainfield, an elegant old gentral New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence. In one notorious incident, third-graders in one school were strip-searched because someone suspected one of them of stealing $20. That wasn’t what we wanted for our children. We first tried a local Catholic school, but we thought that the teachers’ expectations for students were too low. Since we couldn’t afford classy private school tuitions, we turned to home-schooning.
Though we first tried to teach the children what the official curriculum standards said they ought to be learning in school, we soon realized that this only made sense in the context of a school. So we scrapped dry textbooks and workbooks and found more interesting ways for our children to learn.
We haunted used-book sales and assembled a library of classics for pennies on the dollar. We introduced statistics by driving to Florida for spring training (learning some geography on the way). When the dollar was strong and the airlines offered good deals in the off-season — when other children were in school — we took ours to Europe to see the great art and architecture or to learn about ancient Rome by walking through the Forum. Travel showed our children things they never could have learned in classrooms.
For several years, they participated in a fife and drum corps, playing colonial and traditional patriotic music, marching in parades, learning not only music and history but also teamwork, perseverance, discipline and a great deal about the communities through which they marched. This kind of experience is fairly typical of home-schooling.
Home-schoolers also work across a much wider socioeconomic spectrum than the conventionally schooled. We have worked on many projects, and in many organizations, that draw participating home-schoolers from all around our state, from far beyond school district borders. We joined a Shakespeare troupe founded by a single mother who was a college professor of literature. She taught the children to find the characters through the language, and they staged a complete Shakespeare play every year. Other members of that troupe founded a home-schooled robotics team, building robots to compete in regional, national and international events. We founded a debate and speech team that continues to compete at the middle school and high school levels.
The results? Studies have shown that home-schooled children outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized academic tests but also on tests of social skills. This, I believe, isn’t because home-schoolers do things better than schools do them, but because we do better things than schools do.
I’ve never heard a home-schooling parent refer to a child as “learning disabled,” for instance. There are many kinds of intelligence, but conventional schools usually only focus on one. Take late reading. A conventional school education depends on written textbooks and workbooks and homework, so a child who can’t read is unable to learn.But home-schoolers have developed systems and approaches that work with the kind of talent and intelligence a child has. One of our sons didn’t read until he was 8 years old. That was no disability, though. He learned from audio tapes and DVDs and from being read to and — very importantly — from going outside and looking around. He could spot a deer on a hillside or a bluebird in a tree long before the rest of us. When he finally decided to read, he jumped into “The Chronicles of Narnia” and finished the series within weeks. “I want to read the books before I see the movie,” he told us.
Home-schooled students’ high performance continues into college. Admissions officers at IUPUI, a joint-venture urban campus of Indiana University and Purdue, and at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, have tracked the performance of admitted home-schoolers and found that they earn higher GPAs than the general student population. Associate Dean Joyce Reed of Brown University has called home-schoolers “the epitome of Brown students,” telling the university’s alumni magazine that “they are self-directed, they take risks, and they don’t back off.”
Admissions officers at other highly selective colleges, such as Swarthmore and Stanford, have made similar statements. Some colleges and universities are admittedly more open than others to making the effort to understand home-schooling, but we’ve gone through the admissions process with three daughters, and all were admitted to excellent colleges.
Conventional schools are like the nation’s Rust Belt companies, designed in the 19th century but struggling to meet the standards of international competition today. School boards and administrators should be concentrating on ways to make schools more like home-schooling — not on ways to force home-schooled children to go back to schools. People who are free to think for themselves usually get together and find solutions that are better than what bureaucrats can devise.
Those are the kinds of principles that gave us California’s Silicon Valley. Let’s hope that someday soon, home-schooling will be perfectly legal there once again.
Gregory J. Millman is co-author, with Martine Millman, of “Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey,” to be published in August.
Quote of the day . “You home-schoolers think you can change the world. But you can’t. Nobody can.” This quote is what a Professor said to one of the author's sons at a community college.
I had many thoughts when I read this quote. First how on earth can any human being say this to a child. Second how ignorant can this man be. I think readers would all agree that these individuals changed the world......Hitler, Genghis Khan, Martin Luther KIng, Einstein, Richard Feynman, Madame Curie, Charles Manson, Jesus, Muhammad, just to name a few. Third this man is disillusioned and should not be in a classroom. Here is a professor going through the motions, every teacher and professor should strive to make a difference in every student's life in hopes that that student will one day change the world, for the better of course.
Cathy
Gregory J. Millman: Understanding home schooling
By GREGORY J. MILLMAN
Saturday, Apr. 5, 2008
During a break in a high school debate tournament not long ago, my 17-year-old son struck up a conversation with a student on the rival team from a New Jersey public school. “Where’s your school?” asked the boy. When my son replied that he was home-schooled, the student probed.
“How do you socialize when you’re at home all the time?” he asked.
“Well, for one thing, I’m here, right?” my son laughed.
My children have gotten used to most of the standard questions from their conventionally schooled peers: Are you super-religious? Do you stay at home in your pajamas and watch TV all day? Is your mom a teacher?
Adults, on the other hand, can be surprising. Like the professor at the community college where one of our sons was taking a course, who went out of her way to pull him aside, sit him down and tell him, “You home-schoolers think you can change the world. But you can’t. Nobody can.”
It’s hard to generalize about home-schoolers, but if there’s one thing we know, it’s that we are changing the world, or at least the world of education choices. Others, though, see us as either misguided or threatening — and probably cheered last month’s California appeals court ruling that all children in the state must be taught by credentialed teachers. At least 166,000 California children are home-schooled. And most home-schooling parents don’t have teaching credentials, so the ruling is worrisome, even though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it “outrageous.” The decision will probably be appealed, but the teachers’ unions are applauding in the meantime.
Nonetheless, home-schooling is booming. In 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that the home-schooled population nationwide was 1.1 million. And the National Home Education Research Institute estimates that it may be growing at double-digit rates.
There’s no denying that the modern home-schooling movement was born of the desire to shake off stultifying school bureaucracies and to sidestep the uncertain mission of public schools, which is set by adults with often conflicting priorities for children. A century of ideological struggles has defined the hodge-podge taught in schools, and they persist to this day. Will schools teach evolution or intelligent design? Offer safe-sex or abstinence-only instruction? Encourage art and dance or treat them as distractions from No Child Left Behind tests? Home-schoolers can make our own decisions based on what’s best for our children.
But “home-schooling” is a misnomer, really. Most of it doesn’t even take place at home, and the schooling has little in common with what goes on in school. The legal definition varies from state to state, as do registration and other requirements. In New Jersey, the law only requires parents to see that their children get an education “equivalent” to public instruction.
What home-schoolers most readily reflect are the virtues of the old American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising — we co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we’ve found that home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed.
And contrary to most popular belief, home-schooling isn’t the brainchild of religious fanatics. It actually got started in the counterculture of the 1960s. In his landmark 1964 book, “How Children Fail,” teacher and education reformer John Holt accused schools themselves of causing students to fail; eventually, he came to advocate a sort of “underground railroad” out of compulsory schooling. It wasn’t until the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s that the movement spread through communities that believed public schools were threatening their moral values.
The boundaries between the counterculture and Christian home-school traditions blurred through the 1990s and 2000s, as home-schoolers from various backgrounds came to discover how much they actually have in common. Today, a well-estabmished and widesrread infrastructure of home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn’t consider themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly religious. People like my family.
My wife and I hadn’t originally planned on home-schooling, but with six children and one modest income, we couldn’t afford a house in one of the better school districts in the state. We were living in Plainfield, an elegant old gentral New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence. In one notorious incident, third-graders in one school were strip-searched because someone suspected one of them of stealing $20. That wasn’t what we wanted for our children. We first tried a local Catholic school, but we thought that the teachers’ expectations for students were too low. Since we couldn’t afford classy private school tuitions, we turned to home-schooning.
Though we first tried to teach the children what the official curriculum standards said they ought to be learning in school, we soon realized that this only made sense in the context of a school. So we scrapped dry textbooks and workbooks and found more interesting ways for our children to learn.
We haunted used-book sales and assembled a library of classics for pennies on the dollar. We introduced statistics by driving to Florida for spring training (learning some geography on the way). When the dollar was strong and the airlines offered good deals in the off-season — when other children were in school — we took ours to Europe to see the great art and architecture or to learn about ancient Rome by walking through the Forum. Travel showed our children things they never could have learned in classrooms.
For several years, they participated in a fife and drum corps, playing colonial and traditional patriotic music, marching in parades, learning not only music and history but also teamwork, perseverance, discipline and a great deal about the communities through which they marched. This kind of experience is fairly typical of home-schooling.
Home-schoolers also work across a much wider socioeconomic spectrum than the conventionally schooled. We have worked on many projects, and in many organizations, that draw participating home-schoolers from all around our state, from far beyond school district borders. We joined a Shakespeare troupe founded by a single mother who was a college professor of literature. She taught the children to find the characters through the language, and they staged a complete Shakespeare play every year. Other members of that troupe founded a home-schooled robotics team, building robots to compete in regional, national and international events. We founded a debate and speech team that continues to compete at the middle school and high school levels.
The results? Studies have shown that home-schooled children outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized academic tests but also on tests of social skills. This, I believe, isn’t because home-schoolers do things better than schools do them, but because we do better things than schools do.
I’ve never heard a home-schooling parent refer to a child as “learning disabled,” for instance. There are many kinds of intelligence, but conventional schools usually only focus on one. Take late reading. A conventional school education depends on written textbooks and workbooks and homework, so a child who can’t read is unable to learn.But home-schoolers have developed systems and approaches that work with the kind of talent and intelligence a child has. One of our sons didn’t read until he was 8 years old. That was no disability, though. He learned from audio tapes and DVDs and from being read to and — very importantly — from going outside and looking around. He could spot a deer on a hillside or a bluebird in a tree long before the rest of us. When he finally decided to read, he jumped into “The Chronicles of Narnia” and finished the series within weeks. “I want to read the books before I see the movie,” he told us.
Home-schooled students’ high performance continues into college. Admissions officers at IUPUI, a joint-venture urban campus of Indiana University and Purdue, and at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, have tracked the performance of admitted home-schoolers and found that they earn higher GPAs than the general student population. Associate Dean Joyce Reed of Brown University has called home-schoolers “the epitome of Brown students,” telling the university’s alumni magazine that “they are self-directed, they take risks, and they don’t back off.”
Admissions officers at other highly selective colleges, such as Swarthmore and Stanford, have made similar statements. Some colleges and universities are admittedly more open than others to making the effort to understand home-schooling, but we’ve gone through the admissions process with three daughters, and all were admitted to excellent colleges.
Conventional schools are like the nation’s Rust Belt companies, designed in the 19th century but struggling to meet the standards of international competition today. School boards and administrators should be concentrating on ways to make schools more like home-schooling — not on ways to force home-schooled children to go back to schools. People who are free to think for themselves usually get together and find solutions that are better than what bureaucrats can devise.
Those are the kinds of principles that gave us California’s Silicon Valley. Let’s hope that someday soon, home-schooling will be perfectly legal there once again.
Gregory J. Millman is co-author, with Martine Millman, of “Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey,” to be published in August.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Students rallied to the cause - Students used by Educators.
The difference between what I know now at 44 and what I knew when I was in high school is amazing. Even the difference between what I know now and what I knew at 29 is amazing. Most people know that most teenagers believe they know everything. It is not until people become adults they realize how little they actually knew when they were in high school. I am glad to say when I was in high school my teachers had enough class to not use us as political pawns. I can tell you knowing what I know now I would have been very angry if they had.
I am sure these students have not had a course in economics or finance and that they have no concept of what is in teachers' contracts or a teacher's pension. Further I am sure they have no concept as to how the current situation will effect their tax burden when they are adults. Shame on every adult who is using these children for their own gain.
After reading the below story I am reminded of the Komsomol.
Cathy
Quote of the Day "Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful." Neal Boortz
The following piece appeared in the Union Leader.
Students rallied to the cause
By JOHN WHITSON
New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
MANCHESTER – An impressive number of students packed Memorial High School's auditorium and cafeteria at Monday night's public hearing on the city budget.
Some were urged to attend by school officials.
Some rallied to the cause online at Facebook, a social networking site.
Others simply took the time to inform themselves and made the effort to turn out.
Still, the student turnout has some wondering if educators crossed a political line.
Grace Sullivan, executive director of Manchester Community Television, said she's seen plenty of budget hearings over the years.
"This was the first one that was driven by students," she said. "It was a student crusade."
Sullivan said her daughter, away at college, called her after finding an online discussion about school spending in Manchester at Facebook.
"The kids used Facebook to get it organized throughout vacation week," said Sullivan.
MaryEllen McGorry, principal of West High, makes no apologies for urging students to turn out Monday night.
"Two days before vacation and (Monday), I just got on the intercom and reminded them that there was a public hearing," said McGorry. "I encouraged them to go as (sports) teams in uniforms as a show of solidarity."
The school board has a policy that prohibits using schoolchildren as couriers to distribute printed material of a political nature.
City Athletics Director Dave Gosselin said last week that he encouraged students and parents to attend Monday's meeting and protect funding for sports.
Superintendent Henry Aliberti said removing the middle man and speaking directly to parents about the possibility of spending cuts doesn't violate district policy. But Aliberti said he'd have to double-check district policy to see if school officials are allowed to talk to students the same way.
Former Mayor Raymond Wieczorek, now an executive councilor, thinks that's "splitting hairs."
Wieczorek presided at City Hall in the 1990s when the school board policy was adopted. He said school-wide announcements and teacher-student budget talks are "absolutely" the same thing as printed political material.
Rachel Hedge, a Memorial junior who spoke at Monday's hearing, said she didn't need prodding to attend.
"For those of you who are criticizing the teachers saying that they scared' us into attending, you could not be further from the truth," Hedge wrote at UnionLeader.com. "Not one of my teachers told me that I should attend or speak."
Tonya Ryan, of Manchester, wrote in with a different slant.
"My daughter was told by one of her teachers that her music class could be cut. I had to talk to her and inform her that it was not for certain just to calm her down," wrote Ryan. "How dare this school department manipulate my children and others for their political stances!"
Mayor Frank Guinta said students should be encouraged to attend civic meetings and decide issues for themselves.
"I think what occurred at this public hearing was designed for political posturing rather than civic engagement," said Guinta.
"It appeared very clear that they were encouraged to take a particular stance," he said, "and that's where the objection is."
McGorry said she was aware of school district policy when making her announcements.
"I certainly didn't consider it skirting the policy at all," she said. "I believe I was informing the students of their right to attend and be heard like any other citizen."
Wieczorek said the concept behind the school board's policy on political mailings is to avoid adults using kids as pawns in the budget process.
"Why wouldn't you expect the kids to come out lobbying for their schools if they're asked," he said.
Hedge sees it differently.
"We are high schoolers; almost adults," she wrote. "We understand what this budget could do to our future. ... We have the right given to us by the First Amendment to exercise free speech and assembly."
I am sure these students have not had a course in economics or finance and that they have no concept of what is in teachers' contracts or a teacher's pension. Further I am sure they have no concept as to how the current situation will effect their tax burden when they are adults. Shame on every adult who is using these children for their own gain.
After reading the below story I am reminded of the Komsomol.
Cathy
Quote of the Day "Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful." Neal Boortz
The following piece appeared in the Union Leader.
Students rallied to the cause
By JOHN WHITSON
New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
MANCHESTER – An impressive number of students packed Memorial High School's auditorium and cafeteria at Monday night's public hearing on the city budget.
Some were urged to attend by school officials.
Some rallied to the cause online at Facebook, a social networking site.
Others simply took the time to inform themselves and made the effort to turn out.
Still, the student turnout has some wondering if educators crossed a political line.
Grace Sullivan, executive director of Manchester Community Television, said she's seen plenty of budget hearings over the years.
"This was the first one that was driven by students," she said. "It was a student crusade."
Sullivan said her daughter, away at college, called her after finding an online discussion about school spending in Manchester at Facebook.
"The kids used Facebook to get it organized throughout vacation week," said Sullivan.
MaryEllen McGorry, principal of West High, makes no apologies for urging students to turn out Monday night.
"Two days before vacation and (Monday), I just got on the intercom and reminded them that there was a public hearing," said McGorry. "I encouraged them to go as (sports) teams in uniforms as a show of solidarity."
The school board has a policy that prohibits using schoolchildren as couriers to distribute printed material of a political nature.
City Athletics Director Dave Gosselin said last week that he encouraged students and parents to attend Monday's meeting and protect funding for sports.
Superintendent Henry Aliberti said removing the middle man and speaking directly to parents about the possibility of spending cuts doesn't violate district policy. But Aliberti said he'd have to double-check district policy to see if school officials are allowed to talk to students the same way.
Former Mayor Raymond Wieczorek, now an executive councilor, thinks that's "splitting hairs."
Wieczorek presided at City Hall in the 1990s when the school board policy was adopted. He said school-wide announcements and teacher-student budget talks are "absolutely" the same thing as printed political material.
Rachel Hedge, a Memorial junior who spoke at Monday's hearing, said she didn't need prodding to attend.
"For those of you who are criticizing the teachers saying that they scared' us into attending, you could not be further from the truth," Hedge wrote at UnionLeader.com. "Not one of my teachers told me that I should attend or speak."
Tonya Ryan, of Manchester, wrote in with a different slant.
"My daughter was told by one of her teachers that her music class could be cut. I had to talk to her and inform her that it was not for certain just to calm her down," wrote Ryan. "How dare this school department manipulate my children and others for their political stances!"
Mayor Frank Guinta said students should be encouraged to attend civic meetings and decide issues for themselves.
"I think what occurred at this public hearing was designed for political posturing rather than civic engagement," said Guinta.
"It appeared very clear that they were encouraged to take a particular stance," he said, "and that's where the objection is."
McGorry said she was aware of school district policy when making her announcements.
"I certainly didn't consider it skirting the policy at all," she said. "I believe I was informing the students of their right to attend and be heard like any other citizen."
Wieczorek said the concept behind the school board's policy on political mailings is to avoid adults using kids as pawns in the budget process.
"Why wouldn't you expect the kids to come out lobbying for their schools if they're asked," he said.
Hedge sees it differently.
"We are high schoolers; almost adults," she wrote. "We understand what this budget could do to our future. ... We have the right given to us by the First Amendment to exercise free speech and assembly."
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Sometimes the truth hurts.
I received the following from a tax fighting Mom and school board member in Illinois.
Cathy
Sometimes the truth hurts.
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat. One of her liberal ideals was she was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs (in other words, the redistribution of wealth). She was deeply ashamed that her father was a staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, 'How is your friend Susan doing?' She replied, 'Susan is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus and for her college is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over.'
Her wise father asked his daughter, 'Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0? That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.'
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, 'That's a crazy idea! How would that be fair? I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time and a lot of hard work! Susan has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!'
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, 'Welcome to the Republican party'
Cathy
Sometimes the truth hurts.
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat. One of her liberal ideals was she was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs (in other words, the redistribution of wealth). She was deeply ashamed that her father was a staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, 'How is your friend Susan doing?' She replied, 'Susan is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus and for her college is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over.'
Her wise father asked his daughter, 'Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0? That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.'
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, 'That's a crazy idea! How would that be fair? I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time and a lot of hard work! Susan has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!'
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, 'Welcome to the Republican party'
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