In Whose Best Interests?

Democrats have long told anyone who would listen that they "care more" about the poor and oppressed, but do they really? I wrote earlier about how the only way Democrats would address the taxation without representation of the residents of Washington DC was if it would guarantee them another seat - never mind the Constitutionality of the plan. Well my friend Gary Gross has yet another example of the Democrats "caring" ways.

Based on what the Washington Post is reporting, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey has shown the middle finger to DC’s school children. Here’s how the Washington Post ripped into Chairman Obey:

REP. DAVID R. Obey (Wis.) and other congressional Democrats should spare us their phony concern about the children participating in the District’s school voucher program. If they cared for the future of these students, they wouldn’t be so quick as to try to kill the program that affords low-income, minority children a chance at a better education. Their refusal to even give the program a fair hearing makes it critical that D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) seek help from voucher supporters in the Senate and, if need be, President Obama.

He followed that post up with this - a report on the Chicago Tribune's taking the Democrats to task on DC vouchers.

We wrote last week about Democratic efforts to strip 1,900 low-income Washington children of $7,500 "opportunity scholarships" to attend private schools.

It's an experiment in school vouchers, an experiment with little potential downside. But it's an experiment that was launched in 2004 by a Republican-controlled Congress. Today it's on the verge of extinction because the Democratic-controlled Congress wants to do the bidding of public-school teachers unions. The unions see vouchers that let poor kids go to private schools as aiding the enemy.

I want to stop here and bring your attention back to the last sentence.... "The unions see vouchers that let poor kids go to private schools as aiding the enemy..." so people who want to educate kids in a non-traditional manner are the enemy? Gotcha...

Now to be fair - the Obama Administration is on the record as supporting the DC Voucher plan....for the moment...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday that poor children getting vouchers to attend private schools in the District of Columbia should be allowed to stay there, putting the Obama administration at odds with Democrats trying to end the program.

MN Rep. Mark Buesgens has been pushing for this kind of a voucher program for Minneapolis and St. Paul children for years - putting him at odds with the Democrats in the MN State House. Six other states have school vouchers and the grand-daddy of the all is the Milwaukee Public School voucher system which went into effect in 1975. Vouchers are just one tool in the box for parents who are looking for creative ways to help their children learn. Yet Democrats are opposed to it.

Now one could speculate a number of reasons why the Democrats are so opposed to vouchers. You could go the hyperbolic theory (as Democrats do to Republicans when the oppose bad legislation that is supposed to be "for the children") and say Democrats HATE children. Now we all know that is a patently false generalization. We could also go with the cynical theory and say that Democrats will do anything to appease their special interests groups. Cynical as it may be, that theory does seem to have some merit - all the proof we need is in the so-called "stimulus" bill and the omnibus spending bill. While there is some truth in that theory, I am leaning toward a third theory....the theory that supposes that the Democrats are so beholden to the Unions that they will do whatever the Unions want - whether it is card check or killing vouchers regardless of the consequences or who it hurts....and that is the scariest theory of all.

A Fair And Balanced Education

As the parent of a kid who plays multiple sports, I feel the pinch that the Star Tribune talks about in this article. As much as I understand that sports are necessary to help a young person grow, I also understand that the schools mission is to educate kids - not provide a farm program for local colleges.

What bothers me is some of the numbers that the article mentions.

In Lakeville, the district's two high schools will each cut $200,000 (20 percent) from their activities budgets for 2009-10 and participation fees are expected to increase.

Do the math - the Lakeville school district spends $1M a year on extra-curricular activities????? Wouldn't some of this money be better used in teaching "at risk" kids? How many other districts are spending this kind of money on athletics?

At Armstrong High School in Plymouth, participation fees have been raised to $200 for athletics and $100 for activities. But there is still not enough money to buy basic sports equipment like bats and balls. Hockey, skiing and lacrosse teams are no longer allowed to rent bus trailers for hauling their gear to competition. Ninth-grade teams in soccer, tennis, softball and wrestling have been eliminated. And a creative thinking-based academic activity called Future Problem Solving has gone away because, well, because there was no way to solve the current financial problem.

I think that raising participation fees is an excellent idea - even if it does stretch our already thin budget even further. It gives the Logical Husband and I a way to help the Junior Logician prioritize. If he wants us to cough up the activity fees, he has to be responsible for keeping his grades at an acceptable level. That said, when the Logical Husband and I were in high school we did not have separate teams for each grade. 9th and 10th grade students played on the Junior Varsity team while the 11th and 12th graders played on varsity. Maybe it is time for schools to go back to that model.

When push comes to shove though, many of these activities are a luxury. 99% of high school student athletes will not make it to the professional ranks. It makes sense, in these tough economic times, that the items that are cut are not the items that the vast majority of the students will need to be successful adults. Things like math, history, English and the other core curricular subjects are the things that schools need to focus on most. Not monument buildings, not staff and sadly not athletics. However if parents can chip in (by car-pooling kids to the games hauling equipment to games etc) to help offset other costs we should. We are (after all) partners in our childrens education and partners are there to help - not just foot the bill.

Politicizing The Classroom

We got an interesting piece in the TN inbox this morning. It appears that a group by the name of "Wildwood Passing Lane" is using Mahtomedi Schools to pass out campaign literature for DFL House Candidate (and former Mahtomedi School board member) Kate Christopher. The MN DFL has Wildwood Passing Lane listed on their website as a local affiliate and on their website they describe themselves as "Grass roots group for MN House District 52B. A group of progressives dedicated to winning elections and influencing public policy in the Mahtomedi area. ". However, when one looks for Wildwood Passing Lane on the MN Campaign and Finance Board records - guess what we found....no listing at all. Rep. Dean has asked the Campaign Finance board to take a look into this to see if any campaign finance laws may (or may not) have been broken.

So one has to ask just what the Mahtomedi School District is doing delivering campaign literature for ANY CANDIDATE to parents in their childrens backpacks? One has to wonder if any school resources (like salary for secretarial staff or teachers) were used to distribute this literature. One also has to wonder if the Mahtomedi School District will offer the same services to Ms. Christopher's opponent, Matt Dean?

We ran into a similar situation last year in ISD 719. ISD 719 used school resources to distribute pro-referendum literature. A group that was questioning the need for the referendum had to go to the school district and demand "equal access". Because you see, schools are not supposed to be campaigning for a single candidate or issue. As a taxpayer funded organization, they are supposed to refrain from campaigning - or if they do decide to engage in campaigning, they need to provide equal access.

Phoning It In

Q Comp is Governor Pawlenty's plan for merit based teachers pay. Because the plan rewards excellence in the workplace and (as a result) no bonuses to employees that do not meet the criteria of doing your job well, the teachers union has been dead set against Q Comp.

Well the state of Utah has implemented a plan similar to Q Comp. The reaction, from media and teachers alike, has been anything BUT similar to the reaction to Q Comp.

Deseret Morning News:

. . . the current 'one size fits all' approach doesn't offer enough incentive. It's time teachers who are worth their weight in gold get paid that gold. Just as it's time for teachers who simply 'phone it in' to be bucked from the horse so true professionals can run the show.

Salt Lake Tribune:
For the first time, Utah school districts are seriously considering how they can distribute bonuses or pay raises to teachers based on how well they do their jobs.

. . . That would benefit not only dedicated, talented teachers but also their students, as mediocre teachers would sharpen their skills in order to earn more money.

The Salt Lake Trib takes it one step further.

. . . [But] there are two myths that must be dispelled before merit systems can be effective. The first is that there are no mediocre or poor teachers in our schools. The second is that, even if there were, there is no way to differentiate between them and the excellent teachers. Both these myths have been used by teacher association leaders to undermine past efforts to adopt effective merit-pay plans.

These are the myths that Education Minnesota and their related teachers unions have long perpetuated. The Salt Lake Trib is right - merit pay for teachers will IMPROVE the system. It would make schools better for all children - regardless of what district they are in. The time has come to quit protecting the teachers that are just "phoning it in". Our children deserve better than this.

Teachable Moments

So one of the many "mom" things I have been dealing with this week is the Junior Logician's viewing of "An Inconvenient Truth" in his 8th grade Science class. Their science class has been talking about "global warming" for a few weeks now. Today, the Junior Logician brought home two sheets - one a page for the kids to calculate their carbon footprint and the other a sheet entitled "Reflections on 'An Inconvenient Truth' What Am I Willing To Do??" I have to admit that I was curious as to how he was going to answer. While we have never directly talked about the issue, he has heard my radio programs talking about it from time to time. While several of his answers were spot on, there were a couple of things that I do need to work with him on - mostly taking shorter showers....sewer and water charges being what they are and all. The one answer that I did get a chuckle out of was his answer to the suggested action "Eat Less Meat". His simple answer to that was a very emphatic "NO!"

While filling out the carbon footprint calculator, he had to ask about certain energy saving appliances that we have in the house. It was nice because it gave us the opportunity to talk about ALL the reasons for having low-flow toilets and Energy Star appliances (cost savings and energy savings). It also gave us the opportunity to talk about the pros and cons of things like compact fluorescent bulbs and the like.

Yeah, I could have complained about the propaganda as many conservative parents do. However, I prefer to use these moments to teach the Junior Logician how to apply critical thinking to the propaganda. It is a skill that will serve him well over the next few years.

Global WHAT?

Yesterday I commented on the "20 Things You Can Do To Stop Global Warming" handout that the Junior Logician came home with. Today I found a couple of stories that I may send him to school with. The first comes from Fox News and it reports that (shades of 1970) we may be headed into another Ice Age.

Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.
Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.
He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade."This is the fastest temperature
change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,"
Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

Of course critics said that Chapman "cherry picked" the data....a charge that never really seems to gain much traction when it is leveled at the global warming zealots!

The second comes to us via the Idaho Statesman and it reports that there is a new anthropogenic global warming denier....and he comes from a very unexpected direction.

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused
by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power - a concept tied closely to the underground nuclear testing his former environmental group formed to oppose.

Needless to say, this call for nuclear power has not gone over well with Moore's former mates.

His critics, like Andrea Shipley, executive director of the Snake River Alliance, say he has simply sold out.
"The only reason Patrick Moore is backing something as unsafe and risky as nuclear power is he is being paid by the nuclear industry to do so," Shipley said.

Sadly, the charge that someone who changed their mind on an enviro issue has "sold out" is a very common one. However, Ms. Shipley's charges that nuclear power is "unsafe and risky" ring hollow when you consider that nuclear power generation IS the cleanest, most environmentally friendly power source out there and it has been much safer than it's detractors fear.

When one looks at the 1991 report by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, (UNSCEAR) one would see that the routine generation of nuclear electricity releases only negligible amounts of radioactive materials to the environment. "The average dose any individual in the world receives each year from all of the activities in the peaceful nuclear fuel cycle is less than 0.1 percent of the inevitable exposures he or she receives from natural radiation sources, such as cosmic rays and radon emitting building materials" ( Trudeau 59).

If these enviro-groups were serious about stopping carbon emissions and were serious about cleaning up the environment, they would back nuclear power. It is safe for people and the environment and is a guaranteed source of cheap, plentiful energy. Since they don't, one has to assume that their goals are not to guarantee cheap, plentiful energy for all nations....which leads one to assume that they really want us all to go back to pre-industrial times which is not good for those living in poverty now.

School Daze

Others have posted about the upcoming school referendums in their communities. The Savage Lands are facing their own bonding and levy referendums. In years past, denizens of the Savage Lands have paid little attention to school referendums. In large part this was due to the fact that we knew that our school district was growing and needed to build more schools, hire more teachers etc. However, as our taxes have gone up and up and an insatiable local government (on all levels to be fair) has asked for more and more out of the taxpayers, people have started to pay attention and what they found may spell doom for the school board.

Based on the Minnesota Department of Education data (complied here) a friend of mine put together the following graph.



Eleven years of "negative fund balances" (as the school board calls it) is a good indicator that the board is not exactly paying attention to how much they are spending and how fast. The school board says that they have to have these "negative fund balances" because this is a rapidly growing district. You can not argue with the fact that this district IS rapidly growing. However, when you compare this school boards spending with the spending of other rapidly growing school districts in the area, you start to see even more clearly, what this board is doing wrong.

Shakopee is probably the closest to Prior Lake/Savage in size, growth and challenges in the state. Both have roughly 6000+ students registered, both have had to build new schools in order to accomodate the growth in their districts and Shakopee has a higher number of ESL Students (which is considered special education) due to a large Hispanic population and an even larger Russian population. Yet while Prior Lake/Savage have run deficits for 11 years, Shakopee has run budget surpluses! Similar challenges, similar funding (from the state AND property taxes) and yet very dissimilar results.

This is why the residents of the Savage Lands (and every school district) need to pay attention to what their local government entities are doing. If you let them go unscrutinized, as residents of the Savage Lands have done for the last decade) you get the results we see today! Every level of government needs the scrutiny of the electorate. Left unchecked, government gets a sense that they are more entitiled to your money than you are. They didn't work for it, the taxpayer did and as our Founding Fathers showed us - sometimes you have to fight to keep what you work so hard for!

The good news is that all we have to do today is get engaged and look up the information (as the concerned citizens at Citizens For Accountable Government did). It may be bad for your blood pressure momentarily, but if that information motivates you to get off of the couch and get involved, you will be better for it!

1 plus 1 equals...

This is not a rant about what our school district is doing wrong. As a matter of fact, it is quite the opposite. As much as I have been beating up on them lately, I figured I was due...

The Junior Logician brought home an interesting math assignment today. His math teacher has a brother in law who is in the 2nd PLT, D Co, 2-2 SCR. As a result, all of this teachers math classes are adopting the platoon. They are collecting items for care packages and each student was "assigned" a soldier in the platoon to send letters and birthday cards etc to.The assignment consisted of two pages. The first page was a list of items that they are collecting to send over to the soldiers (and a short list of items that are not acceptable to send). The second page consisted of instructions on the letter writing project, including the soldiers name, rank, birth date and MOS (military occupation specialty). After all of the grammatical reminders of how to write a proper letter came the following instructions.

Topics you can talk about:
Ask them about themselves, family, where they are from, how/why the came to
serve our country.
Ask how long they have been in Iraq, what the weather is like, what the
kids and schools are like, what their job duties are, what they do for fun, when
they get to come home, how often they get to talk to family, how much do they
see the country improving.Ask how they are doing. Ask them questions that are
caring.

Topics you CANNOT talk about:
Negative personal feelings on the war, your political views and/or your
parents views (we are not here to protest the war)
Only school appropriate questions will be allowed (nothing about killing
people, negative things about the war, drugs/alcohol etc.)

The capitalization emphasis is the teachers, the bold mine.

The teacher also emphasized (a couple of times) that she will be proof reading all letters prior to them being sent.

As often as we complain about teachers and the "liberal" indoctrination that seems to be coming from the schools, it was so refreshing to see this come home tonight. The Junior Logician is very excited about the project. He couldn't wait to get home to tell me all about the project and his soldier and to plan what we were going to get for the care packages. It is one of the few projects in school that I have seen him this excited about.

This is a good reminder to those of us on the right that teachers are not a single monolithic entity. There are some very good individuals out there and they are out there doing the right thing.

Another hard sell

The Big Stink referred to this stat the other day in post on the slew of referendums on the ballot this fall and it just blew my mind. One school district in four in this state is going to the voters looking for more money and they are pushing it hard.

Across the metro, education officials are sounding those and other dire alarms
to voters who will be asked this fall to give schools more money in the form of
higher taxes.

When ISD 719 (Prior Lake/Savage) announced their twin referendums many voters and taxpayers said "did they learn nothing from the last election? Apparently the answer to that question was "NO".

Whatever the justification, for many school districts this year represents a
perfect financial storm. Many districts tried to win property tax increases last
fall, but about 60 percent of those measures failed. Some of the same factors
blamed for that showing remain in 2007. Although surveys conducted by education
officials show positive feelings toward schools, fears about increased property
taxes in a time of economic uncertainty inspire many voters to say "No," school
leaders said.

It is a perfect storm that all taxing units need to be painfully aware of. Cities, counties and school districts across the state are talking tax increases. All of them talk about their piece of the pie as if it was the only part of the tax burden. For example, I ran into one of our City Councilmen while walking out of our neighborhood Cub Foods a couple of weeks back. He commented on a letter to the editor I had in our local paper about the planned city tax increases. The first words out of his mouth (in attempting to justify the increase was ) "Well our city taxes are less than any of the other cities in our county!" My response (as was the response of another neighbor lady who joined our conversation) was "well when you add your 3 percent to the counties 9 percent to the school districts 12 percent....." All of a sudden a quarter of our annual income goes to pay local level taxes!

The cities, counties and school districts seem to think that the taxpayers are endless sources of money to support their wasteful spending habits. The first thought that crosses most of the minds of these city, county and school boards - when faced with budget shortfalls is to raise taxes! Oh to be sure, they will eventually talk about cuttings "costs" but only after the citizens have screamed in reaction to the latest tax increase and only to prove that there is nothing left to cut.

I do support both referendum requests. The budget-cutting effort this spring
highlighted how tight, and how little waste, is in the current budget.

If there was ever any reason needed to show the importance of city and county wide elections it is this one. The cuts that were "proposed" last spring were cuts to educational programs that have minimal impact on the school district budget but have maximum impact on parents. The hope is that these parents will then think "we can't vote against this - they'll cut more programs". The school board holds you children hostage to their greed!

So the next time that they tell you it is "for the children" you will know what they really mean.

How well do you know your American history?

The Logical Husband sent me this story the other day and it got us both to thinking how many natural born Americans would be able to pass a similar test for American citizenship. Given the discussions that I have had with Republicans AND Democrats lately I am afraid the answer is not encouraging.

According to this page, one of the question is "What is the day of Independence? Independence from whom?" Now to me those seem to be brutally easy questions to answer, but according to a radio bit that Sean Hannity aired on his program yesterday, the majority of people that they talked to on the streets of New York had no clue that we won our independence from the British. I would not have believed it if I had not heard it with my own ears.

Want to test your knowledge? There is a quiz here. Good luck!

Chris Lind Update

Well, I certainly struck a chord with this post. Members of our local educational community have made multiple comments defending the action of the school board in the comment section. That the comments were (mostly) respectful and worked toward greater understanding of the issue is greatly appreciated. It is imperative that we all communicate if we are ever going to resolve probems within the community. Talking WITH one another (as opposed to talking AT one another) is sometimes a lost art.

Two commenters took issue with my characterization that this is "persecution". I will concede that the title of the post may have been a bit hyperbolic, but given the past history of this school district it is not a totally unfair characterization - especially given today's Star Tribune story on the issue.

"His story is difficult to tell -- he's reluctant to say much, and the school district says it's legally prevented from saying much, including the substance of the complaints against Lind.
A dedicated Christian, Lind has become a de facto advice-giver, friend and religious mentor to some students. He said the district told him not to talk to students -- even off campus -- about "traditional values," namely, the district didn't want him to talk to students about abstinence or their sexual orientation. He didn't listen.
"I can't say I followed that directive," said Lind, 43. "I didn't feel that, morally, I could."

Again, I go back to one of my basic complaints about how the district is handling this. The district can not, under the tenants of the Constitution, dictate someone's speech off campus. I fully understand the need for restriction of speech ON CAMPUS. However, off campus is another story. Whether a teacher (or any other employee of a school district) chooses to use it or not, they have the same basic rights of free speech that all Americans have. They can and should advocate for the things that they believe in - as long as that advocation is off campus and on their own time and that is where Chris limited his speech about his faith. According to the Star Tribune report the board is targeting Chris because of his faith and that my friends is persecution, it is discrimination, it IS unConstitutional.

"He says students of all stripes -- "the popular kids, the goth kids, the brainiac kids" -- have approached him looking for advice. He's met with them off campus, at places such as Caribou Coffee, to talk. Sometimes, he said, parents with a troubled child would ask him to help. Some of these relationships went on for years, he said.
Lind says he would meet with students "maybe once" without parents' knowledge but would call parents for permission to mentor their children beyond that point."

This is a point of contention for the teachers in the comment thread. I do understand their concern, but there are circumstances when prior parental approval may not be wise. I would ask the teachers to put themselves into the following hypotheticals. Suppose you found out that one of your students was being sexually or physically abused by a parent or guardian. You know, as a "trusted adult" that you should try to counsel that child into making the right choice (going to the authorities). Would you go to the parent or guardian for permission to talk to that child first or would you just talk to the kid off campus where they might loosen up? Doing the former would set that kid up for retaliatory abuse from the abusive parent and doing the latter puts you in the same boat as Chris. WHAT DO YOU DO???? The second hypothetical is this. You overhear a student talking to a friend about commiting suicide. Mindful of the suicides that we had in the high school just two short years ago, what do you do? Time is of the essence in this situation....mom and dad are at work and the kid said he wanted to stage it so that he (or she) was dead by the time that mom and dad got home! What I am getting at is that there are times when parental permission is not appropriate or available on the first chat. Subsequent visits, oh heck yeah, and never, ever EVER in private. Since it appears that Chris was doing both of those anyway I would think that those concerns have been addressed.

"According to Joe Flynn, the district's lawyer, because Lind wasn't a licensed school employee or a union member, the district doesn't need to go through an extensive hearing process before dismissal. There have been no Scott County criminal or civil charges filed against Lind." (emphasis mine)

No criminal or civil charges have been filed....that is a telling statement. According to this there has been no negligence, no criminal activity, no other compelling reason for the employment action. Why is this happening if there is no negligence or criminal activity? Because the School Board, in it's role of employer, gave the employee an unconstitutional order? An order that the employee rightly refuse because of it's unConstitutionality? It is certainly looking that way...especially in light of this statement.

"Human resources director Tony Massaros wouldn't answer a generic question about what off-campus staff behavior the district can regulate. "

If the Human Resources Director can't even answer a generic question about off campus behavior, how are they going to be able to justify this action to the public and to any attorney's that might come as a result of the action (yes there are lawsuits being talked about that are dependent of the boards decision....our tax dollars at work).

A lot more detail is becoming known (thanks to the Star Tribune) we are getting a clearer picture of the school boards actions in this matter. I can not say that this is a picture that I (as a parent in the district and a taxpayer) am completely comfortable with. I may have been quick on the trigger (with the hyperbole) last week but it is starting to look justified. Should we the taxpayer, as the employers of the school board, take a closer look into this issue?

One step forward, one step back

A positive step in Eritrea.

"Eritrea has banned the life-threatening practice of female circumcision, the Eritrean information ministry has said. "

Female circumcision is a barbaric, painful proceedure that is common in Africa and the Middle East. There has been a large push to get this practice stopped and every country that abolishes this barbaric practice is one more country moving into the 20th century (in terms of womens rights).

Now the step backward.

"Though Christmas is 8 months away, the traditional celebration of the birth of Christ in Italian school districts has become a raging controversy.
Parents of pupils at the Casa del Bosco nursery school in the multi-ethnic Oltrisarco district of Bolzano have been informed that at the school's Christmas concert, the students will not be permitted to sing "Tu scendi dalle stelle" [From Starry Skies Thou Comest].
Ths school's teachers singlehandedly made the decision to eliminate the carol to placate Muslim and other foreign born children, though they celebrate Chinese New Years and "learn about the significance of Ramadan."

Sigh.....I have no problem with the school learning about ALL religious celebrations. Bring on Ramadan, bring on the Chinese New Year, bring on Passover, Easter and anything else! BUT you are wrong, wrong WRONG when you allow the children to celebrate every religion BUT ONE!!! That is discrimination, that is bias and that is government entities promoting one religion over another.

The teachers overstepped their boundaries - the local imam even said so (I'll give credit where credit is due). Rather that trying to justify their actions they should just rescind the decision and move on. What will they do?