What you get when conservatism is at the helm:
In a major legislative success for Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana Senate voted 25 to 12 on Wednesday for a bill that would let up to 1,500 low- to middle-income students in New Orleans attend private schools at taxpayer expense.
Already approved by the House, the bill, a $10 million school voucher measure, needs one more routine vote in that body on the Senate language changes before it goes to Mr. Jindal, a Republican, for signing.
Backers say the bill will help some New Orleans children escape a struggling school system that has for years been known for corruption, bad management and poor student performance.
The public school systems don’t work - and in fact, for the most part, they never can work…given the nature of humanity, trying to figure out what is best for millions of kids from a huge variety of backgrounds is impossible. The best we can do is allow parents the flexibility to choose what education they think best for their own children - and school choice is the sharp edge of this new education paradigm which will return to families their power to educate their children.
More and more I come to the conclusion that the strongest indicator of impending failure is how big the proposal is - the more anyone tries to do, the more likely they’ll get it wrong. Keep it small; keep the decision making down on the lowest level possible - do that, and even if there is a monumental screw up, then it will at least affect a smaller number of people. Right now, a few school board dimwits can wreck things for hundreds of thousands of kids at a stroke - a private school can, at most, mess up the lives of a few hundred kids. Additionally, when you put the choice down at the lower level, you’re more likely to get a decision driven by genuine knowledge of what is needed - here in Las Vegas, we have a school board which proposes to figure out what a kid in Summerlin (the rich area) and a kid off Fremont Street (the poor area) needs. It can’t be done. The parents of the Summerlin and Fremont kids, however, likely do know what is needed - as would someone running a private school in each area.
And, now, as an aside - this is yet another major accomplishment which pretty much outweighs all of what Obama has done in his lifetime…given this, I’ll once again offer my prayer that John McCain will look towards Louisiana for a Vice President.
Tags: 2008 Campaign, Bobby Jindal, Education, Louisiana, school choice
June 13th, 2008
For crying out loud:
For parents who obsessively green every aspect of their tykes’ lives, there’s a bit of good news: A new organic preschool, Le Petit Paradis, is accepting students for the fall. Located in a former shoe store on Third Avenue near 93rd Street, the school is currently being redone with environmentally friendly wall paints, bamboo floors, and low-flow toilets. Even the puzzles will be made of wood, not plastic. Its founder, Christina Houri, a French expat and former teacher at Le Jardin à L’Ouest, was inspired to green things up by the “Al Gore movie” and images of dying polar bears, she says. Her educational philosophy combines Montessori’s (“They will learn to do their own juice”) with Bank Street’s developmental-interactive approach, and the $12,995 tuition includes total French immersion. But for many families, the best thing about Le Petit Paradis might be that it’s still accepting applications. Most preschool acceptance letters were mailed out last month. “Any preschool—green or not—is going to draw people,” says Pamela Weinberg, co-author of City Baby: The Ultimate Guide for New York City Parents From Pregnancy to Preschool. “There are not enough.”
Stuff White People Like accurately sums it up:
In spite of the recent ban on the New York Times, New York Magazine came through with an essential article for white person research. It seems as though regular private schools are simply not white enough for many parents. As a result a French ex-pat in New York has opened a French language Preschool, in New York, with $13,000 tuition, features environmentally friendly products and organic food.
This school also helps to give white parents one more reason for not sending their children to public school. “Public schools don’t have organic food, I can’t have my child eating pesticides. So I’m not racist, I’m just concerned over the food health of my child.”
Inside the joke, of course, is the kernel of truth - the people who will pay this 13 grand are very likely to be people who claim to support the public schools, but wouldn’t dream of sending their own children to one. Between theory and practice is often a wide gap - and nothing ever wider than the gap between the theories and practices of rich people, especially liberal rich people (and, yes, I’m sure there will be a Republican or two involved here - but if you think that Joe Sixpack GOP-base would have anything to do with this nonsense then you’re ready to purchase the Brooklyn Bridge). Another small observation - when liberals say “tax the rich”, they don’t mean adding a surcharge to the 13 grand tuition in order to help subsidise public schools…no, they actually want you and me (the aforementioned Joe Sixpacks, in our varied manifestations) to pony up.
Tags: Education, humor
May 4th, 2008
Edgar Anderson over at Minding the Campus interviews a University of California San Diego student:
Q. Justice.
A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board… My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women. I said I disagree, “Who’s to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let’s be honest, you know, a lot of women don’t become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much ’cause you have no life if you’re a CEO to raise a family or anything.” But she said, “How can you be a woman and think that? That’s totally wrong. That’s what’s wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead.” She was unbelievable.
When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance… she said, “Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude.” And she went on and on how they’re terrible people…
Q. So Imagination. What is that?
A. I really don’t know. I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about…
Q. But did you have reading lists?
A. Yeah, I have the book. You’d spend a week on Vonnegut or similar writing, or the next week it’d be about graffiti, and another week it’d be immigration, and another week it’d be Vietnam. It wasn’t tied together at all, so we never ended up with anything.
But I remember for graffiti the professor said how pretty much we don’t understand that it’s an art form, and it’s just a misunderstanding why people don’t like graffiti and why police try to cover it up. She said that people are just trying to express themselves, and she never went into how it was vandalism or anything like that.
When we talked about the entertainment industry and the show The L-Word, she said that having straight actresses portray lesbians was the same as white people painting themselves black. And so I don’t think that anyone agreed with her on that…
Do read the whole thing as it neatly illustrates both the worthlessness of most modern liberal arts education, as well as the closed mind and leftwing bigotry prevalant at all too many colleges and universities. Can you imagine a graffiti professor? Can you imagine a teacher taking issue with the position of a paper rather than the quality of the argument? Also, for someone to say they “hate” a certain class of people - I thought colleges were supposed to be the home of broad minded people? Of course, we know better - they aren’t. The far left gained control starting in the late 60’s, and these days intellectual inquiry is nearly dead on campus.
On the bright side, this student was clearly not fooled - and she relates that a lot of her classmates also saw through the scam. On the dark side, a lot of students probably do fall for it - the intellectually incurious and the apple-polishers always willing to please probably buy the whole thing…and thus get the best grades, become TA’s and eventually become professors or employees of other (mostly government-subsidised, as colleges and universities are) leftwing bastions, ready to put another generation on the treadmill of leftwing political orthodoxy.
My bet is that a majority aren’t fooled - going along with Lincoln’s dictum that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. But, still, the time spent being indoctrinated in liberal/left orthodoxy is time spent away from learning the truth, so the overall effect is a loss for our society. Not believing the lies, but lacking the truth, people can be at a loss for what to do, and can often fall for leftwing ideas if they are dressed up with a dose of conservatism to make the Marxist poison go down. We see the result of all of this here on the blogs, and out in the larger world - the complete propagandised leftist robots who just rote repeat what their professors spoon-fed them, and the people who weren’t fooled but don’t know the truth, and are wary of taking it from a conservatism heavily demonised by their education experience.
What to do? My view is that our best option is to de-fund liberal arts education at the federal level…no college loans or grants for it. A rather harsh step, but the primary thing we’d be de-funding is really just leftwing propaganda on campus. Force colleges to choose between lefty indoctrination and having actual paying students, the colleges will mostly drop the liberal arts courses…save for those few which are so popular that the kids are willing to pony up for them on their own (and my further bet is that such a devastation of liberal arts would allow center and right people to enter the field on a competitive basis…see who gets the more students: a course on American history taught by a conservative, or a course on Herstory taught by a bitter feminist…)
Tags: Education, liberal indoctrination
March 23rd, 2008
Read it and weep, fellow Americans:
Los Angeles, Mar 7, 2008 (CNA).- A California court decision restricting two parents’ ability to homeschool their children could subject all California parents to criminal penalties for homeschooling, WorldNetDaily reports.
Allegations of abuse had been brought against Phillip and Mary Long of Los Angeles, who disciplined their homeschooled children with spankings. After the case was closed by the court, the two attorneys appointed to represent the Longs’ two youngest children filed a special appeal challenging the Longs’ right to continue homeschooling their children.
The Second Appellate Court in Los Angeles granted the attorneys’ appeal. Justice H. Walt Croskey, whose opinion was joined by two other judges, declared, “Parents who fail to [comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program.”
The Long family’s children were enrolled in Sunland Christian School, a private homeschooling program. Judge Croskey, without hearing arguments from the school, said this was a “ruse of enrolling [children] in a private school and then letting them stay home and be taught by a non-credentialed parent.”
The appellate court confirmed a lower court’s finding that “keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where (1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children’s lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents’ ‘cloistered’ setting.”
Did you catch that? The worry from the judge is that the parents might be a baleful influence on their children and thus only a properly credentialled representative of the government’s education monopoly can ensure what is best for the children. This is just the latest in a long line of attempts by the left - going back more than 200 years - to remove children from parental control and have the State raise them to be what the State wishes them to be.
This nauseating ruling must be overturned - it is the family which is the foundation of society, not government-run indoctrination centers…err, I mean “public schools”. The damned schools can’t even teach kids to read and write at times, yet a group of judges holds public schools to be superior in education quality to parents who actually love their children! Enough is enough - it is time we smack down this sort of nonsense and let the left know that we won’t allow them to destroy us.
Cross posted at Battle Born Politics.
UPDATE: Governor Schwarzenegger steps up to the plate:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denounced a state appeals court ruling that severely restricts homeschooling and promised Friday to change the law if necessary to guarantee that parents are able to educate their children at home.
“Every California child deserves a quality education, and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children,” Schwarzenegger said in response to the ruling, which said children educated at home must be taught by a credentialed teacher.
“Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education,” Schwarzenegger said. “This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts, and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will.”
Tags: Education, family issues
March 8th, 2008
I guess not:
Brazil’s lawyers have been shocked to find that a boy aged eight has managed to pass the entrance exam to law school.
The Bar Association said the achievement of Joao Victor Portellinha should be taken as a warning about the low standards of some of Brazil’s law schools.
“If this is confirmed, the Education Ministry should immediately intervene … to investigate the circumstances of this case,” said the association’s president in Goias state, Miguel Angelo Cancado.
Joao Victor is still in fifth grade, two levels ahead of normal for his age, but his mother says he is not a cloistered genius. “He is a regular boy,” she told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. “He is very dedicated, likes to read and study, but he has fun and makes friends.”
I can’t but feel that this might be more universal in law schools than we suspect…at any rate, it would explain a lot of things, especially how John Edwards and the rest of the ambulance chasers managed to get into law school…
Tags: Education, lawyers
March 7th, 2008
