Well, what did you expect? Somebody has to pay back teacher’s unions, both for their political support and for their willingness to indoctrinate children in the ways of progressive thought, provided they continue to get theirs. And as choice tends really to fuck up even the bestest totalitarian plans, it — like dissent — needs to be carefully managed and controlled. For the greater good.
From the Washington Examiner:
With President Obama’s obvious blessing, Congress effectively voted in February to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship program as of spring, 2010, despite preliminary, data-driven analyses by experts at Georgetown University, the Manhattan Institute, and the U.S. Department of Education. Those analyses showed the program to be overwhelmingly popular with parents and a boon to the academic progress of their children. The Senate’s anti-school choice leader, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Congress could always reauthorize the program if later studies showed conclusively it was helping the children’s educational performance. As it turns out, such a study had already been completed by the Department of Education last November. But the public did not know about it because the Obama administration sat on the results for months, then buried them in a larger report released late in the afternoon of April 3, a Friday. The report showed that scholarship recipients are reading at a significantly higher level than their public school counterparts.
It’s worth noting that Obama has made an absolute fetish of claiming to let facts drive public policy – but when it comes to the scholarships, not even the federal government’s own peer-reviewed, data-driven, apolitical study moved Obama to stop the political interference with the program. Even worse, Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, decided to revoke “new†scholarships for 200 incoming students who already had been told the award was theirs.
As for Fenty, he is not only failing to defend the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships, he is also hobbling the even-more popular District charter school program. Fenty proposes to cut the charters’ “facilities†budget by 26 percent (from $90 million to $66 million), while increasing funding for the chronically failing conventional public schools by 5 percent ($13 million) – despite the fact charter school enrollment is up 17 percent and down 9 percent in the failing schools. Once again, the politicians opted to reward failure instead of encouraging success.
We heard a similar argument from this Administration as a justification for cutting missile defense — namely, that until it is proven unconditionally effective (a condition unreachable when the criterion for such proof is the kind of further testing the cutting off of funding renders impossible), funding it would be ill-advised.
Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the same criteria for funding social programs progressives tend to favor, programs whose perennial failure only proves to leftist ideologues that not enough money is being funneled into these endeavors.
— Which, when you do the math, reveals a calculus in which success is punished and failure perpetually compensated.
Up is down. Black is white. Arbuckle is Keaton.
****
update: Oy.
Good thing you can still be a non-union Teacher in Texas.
Black children what can read good are not at all helpful to Barack Obama. That’s how people get ideas.
Up is down. Black is white. Arbuckle is Keaton.
And Iran feels threatened by Israel.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N14452667.htm
Wouldn’t want to offend, eh wot?
I figured at least poor kids in DC would get their slice of hope. I guess they’ve served their purpose. Back on your heads!
And happyfeet wins another thread early.
2
Yeah I know better to keep them out of the middle-class, uneducated, and attending racist indoctrination centers such as Trinity United. That way they will vote correctly and look to the government to pay for their gas and mortgages.
The report showed that scholarship recipients are reading at a significantly higher level than their public school counterparts.
Next stop, recruitment of the susceptible to teh immorality of the internet!
As a former resident of DC I can only shake my head at how typical it is that one of the only programs that is actually working! would be thrown under the bus in deference to the AFT and NEA…
But you can’t question their motives, because, you know, they’re doing it for the children…
A popular slogan used to be, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”…
Now instead, along the lines of happy’s most excellent and apropo pithy comment, it needs to be reworked. Since a crisis should never be wasted so too should not a chance to indoctrinate a young mind…
Besides, all that reading comprehension is overrated; why read or even think for oneself when we have our betters to do all that for us…
All you need is to move the “a” and add punctuation:
A mind is terrible, a thing to waste.
I’m trying to muster up some outrage, but my outrage generator is broken. They have overloaded my systems for so long they burned them out. They’ve won.
Funny thing is all the parents of those school children with the cancelled vouchers will continue to vote Democrat until their dying breath.
They’s a results oriented Administration so they’ll get the results they seek. Or so they think. Others may think differently.
Well, yeah. I mean, what have Republicans ever done for them?!
First the DC gun ban, now this.
My guess is the Dem’s think the residents of DC are captive constituents (like so many indentured New Delhi re-teens enslaved in a cruel carpet-weaver’s shop) and that they’ll neither flee to other states that offer better opportunities to their kids, nor regret the increased crime that comes with giving their their guns away.
I think free migration to more permissive states will prove a potent “distraction” to Obama’s best-laid collectivizey plans. I think Black people are smarter than Obama thinks.
14
You are joking right?
We’re all fucking doomed.
I feel the same way about Welfare. Also, fiscal stimulus.
OH, and thank ghod for the Philadelphia parochial school system.
And thank God for Al Sharpton:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/04/023336.php
That never happens. Shepherds need sheep (and assistant shepherds). Result!
The conservative-tic success-punishment phrasing doesn’t work — especially here. Just say they’re racists. They are.
Power over another is the ability to decide what life he has. They’ve decided: Not this better one, darkies. Not your own, better or not.
Call it what it is, and them what they are. If the National Review rhetoric of the eternally “well-intentioned” error doesn’t fit, put it away.
(It never fits.)
There’s got to be a Coke bottle in there, somewhere, Jeff. Then we can all call it a day.
#15, Mr. Pink, “Joking, right?” I usually toss my own brand of irony into my comments at Jeff’s site.
BTW: There’s a very informative seminar on Federalism and states’ rights at the American Enterprise Institute. I think it touches directly on the vouchers issue.
One smart guy presents a new term (for me), “foot-voting,” and then he talks about regional, state-to-state migration’s constructive impact on the “competitive” Federal model. Boiled down, “foot-voting” foils central planners’ plans.
Gaza is a finite, resource-poor territory that is surrounded by barbed-wire. If the Dem’s want the Gaza model to succeed in DC, they’ll need to build a fence around it, too, to keep all the disgruntled people in.
Careful about what you do with your feet, unless it’s walking.
Especially if you’re in an airport men’s room/
#19, Somali Pirates = Volunteer Coast Guard? LOL
Sharpton proves yet again that sh*t floats.
RE foot-voting: I don’t think Diebold planned on people toeing-in their preferences.
But I do drive I-40 in the SW a lot, and sometime in February, between Gallop and Kingman, I realized that I hadn’t seen an Arizona, California or Nevada license plate for miles. Instead, I discovered I was surrounded by sedans, coups and mini-vans from Delaware, Virginia, Florida, Rhode Island (??!), Illinois, New York and Michigan, all headed West, and all loaded for bear.
I’ve been noticing this for weeks, this seeing caravans of outta-staters lately: it’s making me feel like a stranger in my own state, all this pilgrim-ing. ‘Seems something’s up.
“Seems something’s up.”
They’re all heading for Galt’s Gulch.
Some how this seems appropriate to re-post at this time.
Education is hard!
I hope these tea party things have legs…
Outlaw!
This is a joke, Mr. Pink? Not at all. Seveaz nails it.
THE cornerstone of Federalism is mobility.
One current and two former specialists in strategic defenses said the [Obama] administration rejected the request because it feared that moving the huge floating radar system would be viewed by North Korea as provocative and upset diplomatic efforts aimed at restarting six-nation nuclear talks.
My first reaction to this was, “whose side are these sonuvabitches on?” It wasn’t until after I said it that I realized it was a rhetorical question, and not really all that sarcastic.
Does treason have to be premeditated and malicious? Can you be a traitor through just plain fucking stupidity?
B Moe,
A problem with the treason angle.
Under the Constitution, Treason consists solely of giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the US. Absent a declaration of war, a Congressional finding of enemyness, as it were, the only other binding determiniation of who the enemies of the US are lies within the judgment of the President….
None of which rules out “high crimes and misdemeanors” but that’s a different political can of worms.
the only other binding determiniation of who the enemies of the US are lies within the judgment of the President….
Legally speaking, okay. But as a practical matter I am willing to take someone else’s word for it if they declare me an enemy. What I am wondering is does treason have to be intentional? If someone is aiding and abetting an enemy through ignorance rather than malice it is it still considered treason, of should I use another word?
There’s an aineresting leagal question–Is intent a required elementf treason?
I don’t know.
I believe the Constitution defines treason and doesn’t mention intent.
Paraphrasing Jerry Pournelle, were I the Grand Wizard of the KKK I couldn’t think of a better way to keep black people down than the DC school district.
[…] and that Mr Obama’s administration would let science and the facts dictate decision-taking? From Jeff Goldstein: Well, what did you expect? Somebody has to pay back teacher’s unions, both for their political […]
Under the Constitution, Treason consists solely of giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the US.
Hmmm… isn’t the Korean War still technically in progress?
I thought I’d read that no peace treaty has ever been signed, but I could be wrong about that.
No. If you could, most of our government, past and present, would be facing the firing squad.
S, B & P wrote:
No, because there never was a Korean War. My sainted mother worked in General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, writing those very uncomfortable letters to the families of soldiers killed in Korea, and she was not allowed to ue the word “war.” She could only refer to the Korean “police action” or “conflict.”
No, there is no formal peace treaty; there is only an armistice.
O! no!
The President is annoyed by what he sees as the naivety and the herd mentality of the media…
Are pigs flying? No, not really.