Get Your Education Myths Here

We all know a lot about schools. We know they are underfunded. We know that
teachers are underpaid. And we know that Johnny can’t read.

Actually, write
Jay P. Greene & Marcus A. Winters, we’re wrong.

Schools aren’t underfunded. Anything but.

In fact, public K-12 spending is approaching $10,000 per pupil
— double what it was three decades ago, adjusting for inflation. And total
school spending is approaching $500 billion — more than we spend on national
defense ($454 billion) and
more than the entire GDP of Russia ($433 billion).

That means, if you prefer to look at it that way, that K-12 soaks up about five percent of GDP, about
the same level for the last 20 years. Want more?

Many people believe that teachers are horribly underpaid.
In fact, the average elementary-school teacher makes $30.75 per hour,
more than architects ($26.64), mechanical
engineers ($29.46), and chemists ($30.68).

Why do we have these wildly inaccurate ideas about education? It’s
partly because we all think we are education experts. But the main problem
is the propaganda machine of the education industry.

Unfortunately, teachers unions, school-board associations, and others
with a financial stake in education policy take advantage of our vulnerability
to myths about education. While most of us feel comfortable entrusting our
children to their teachers at school each day, the interest groups that
represent them and their schools do not warrant our trust. Teacher unions and the rest of the education establishment, like other interest groups, will support claims that advance their agendas regardless of
whether those claims are based on facts or myths.

And until we understand the real facts about education, our children will suffer.

Guardian Leftie Bails on Schroeder

You’d think that the chaps at Britain’s lefty Guardian would love German Chancellor Schröder.
He’s as solid a Social Democrat as you could imagine. He’s defending the European “social model” from
the evil forces of Anglo-American globalization. He’s earned standing “O”s for his strident (and
convenient) anti-Americanism. So why is
Martin Kettle bailing out on the Unions-Kanzler?

Well, it’s because of a personal failure of leadership, whatever that means.

The SPD’s central failure has been its inability to provide a
coherent social-market-based
answer to the problems posed for the nation state by globalisation.

Well that’s a thought! The problem is, of course, that there is no coherent social-market-based answer
to the problems posed by globalization. The whole idea of the social market is to ignore the
market and promise big fixed benefits and pensions to your supporters when you don’t have a clue
whether you will ever be able to pay those benefits without bankrupting the nation.

Actually, the Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere do have a coherent plan to solve
the problems posed by globalization. It is to retreat
as slowly as possible, pretending that they are delivering on their promises while slowly withdrawing
them, bit by bit.

But the laugh is on Kettle. Recent news indicates that the German economy is finally starting
to perk up after 15 years in the doldrums. Wage costs are down and exports are up. It’s all probably
due to Germany’s famous “Mittelstand,” the medium-sized business that dominate Germany’s exports.
If Angela Merkel wins the election and becomes Chancellor then
she will get the credit for the economic upswing that is already in progress.

Does Martin Kettle really want that?

Parents Saving Their Children

As everyone continues with the delicious pleasure of the blame game, it is well to remind ourselves
what the Katrina aftermath is really all about.

It is about children getting separated from their parents.

In this story reported by the Los Angeles Times we learn of seven children found
wandering around an evacuation center under the supervision of a seven-year-old.

How could that happen? How could parents so neglect their children as to allow them to become
separated from them in such a crisis? The answer is salutary. The children were picked up from
the roof of a building by a helicopter. Their parents elected to stay behind and get picked up later.
The children needed to be saved first.

“I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my life
for my kids. They should feel the same way,” said [one of the fathers]. “They were shedding tears.
I said, `Let the babies go.’”

His daughter and her friends followed his advice.

“We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them,” Williams said.The helicopter didn’t
come back. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas,
and although Williams was reassured that they would be reunited, days passed without any contact.

Fortunately, the story ended happily, as the publicity over the seven abandoned children enabled
the parents to find out where their children had been taken. And so the families were reunited. No
blame game, just
humans doing the right thing for their children.

The Welfare State in Action

What happened in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster,
writes
Robert Tracinski. It was man-made. Man-made over the last 40 years
of the welfare state.

What kind of people would not club together after a disaster to help each other?

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for
an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the
very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away,
frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to
treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction?
Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

Tracinski and his wife puzzled over this for a while, and then they realized what was going on.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of
the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior
that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and
protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and
doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around
and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. And they don’t use the chaos
of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses
and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is
going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never
worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off
of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

And of course, you would expect that the government of a welfare state city would
be incompetent. “In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials
is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters — not
to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.”

It is going to be interesting to see whose “narrative” tells the story of the battle of New Orleans.
Will it be the incompetence of President Bush, the man who failed to get federal assistance into the
city within moments after the disaster? Or will it be the corruption and incompetence of the government
and the people of New Orleans? It will be up to the American people to decide.

Allan Bloom Was On Our Side, Claims Liberal

Who would have thought that the man that liberals sneered at for his best-selling
The Closing of the American Mind would some day come to be celebrated at the
back of The New York Times Book Review as a writer who would probably be on the side
of liberals today?

You see, even while they were publicly excoriating Allan Bloom for his reactionary views,
some liberals actually appreciated what he was doing. According to
Jim Sleeper:

some thoughtful liberals found themselves reading “The Closing” under
their bedcovers with flashlights, unable either to endorse or repudiate it but sensing that
some reckoning was due.

So what is Sleeper’s game? What is he doing praising the Allan Bloom that criticized the liberal
academy so roundly twenty years ago?

He is using Bloom as a club to beat today’s generation of conservative activists, first of all
Roger Kimball in The New Criterion. Kimball has written
Retaking the University: A Battle Plan and Sleeper wants to blunt his attack.

What exactly is Kimball’s plan, you wonder? It amounts to little more than to “say that the job of criticism is never finished”
and call for a serious look at tenure in the university. Some battle plan!

And then
there are other conservative activists like David Horowitz and his campaign for an “Academic
Bill of Rights” that must be stopped.

You see, Bloom was never a conservative ideologue. Oh no. Instead the University of Chicago
professor was “an eccentric intrepreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay
life [and]... mistrusted modernity, capitalism and even democracy so deeply that he believed the
university’s culture must be adversarial.”

So that means that Bloom would side with liberal professors in their
intellectual citadel against the conservative hordes at the
gates? Well yes. You see, it’s all very well for David Horowitz to say that “I don’t want the universities
to be conservative.” But we know how far to believe that! Did you know that Horowitz’s “small board
of directors included John O’Neill of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth[?]”

Well. Need I say more? Allan Bloom, the Epicurean gay professor, would never had sided with the
public face of the evil Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!

The Battle of New Orleans

Updated from the war of 1812 to the present era.
(After lyrics by Jimmy Driftwood, sung by Lonnie Donegan, see
here,
here and
here.)

In August ’05 we took a little trip

Volunteers and Guardsmen down the mighty Mississip.

We took a little bacon and we took a little beans

And we caught the bloody looters in the town of New Orleans.



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



We coudn’t see no cops and we couldn’t see no mayor

But we saw their badges lying where they threw ’em in the sewer

We passed by Governor Blanco and the victims on the roofs

We saw all the results of the politicians’ goofs



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



Our leaders said we could take ’em by surprise

If we didn’t fire our muskets til we looked ’em in the eyes

We held our fire til we seen their faces well.

Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave ’em... well.



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



Yeah, they ran through the flood and they ran through the levees

Slipping on the badges of the cops-a-while-ago.

They ran so fast that the media couldn’t catch ’em

on down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



The hurricane had left the Crescent City in a mess

We need now Mayor Rudi ’cause he leads us through the stress.

He’ll clear away the sludge and rebuild the shattered dreams

And run for President from the town of New Orleans



We fired our guns and the looters kept a’comin.

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on

down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.



Yeah, they ran through the flood and they ran o’er the levees

Tripping on the badges of the cops-a-while-ago.

They ran so fast that the media couldn’t catch ’em.

Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

The 2008 Fix is In

What fools we were to think that George W. Bush was an imbecile. It is all so clear now. How he
arranged 9/11 just as the Arab nation suspects—but not as an excuse to invade the Land of the Two Holy Places, oh no. It
was part of a fiendish plan hatched by Karl Rove to boost Mayor Rudolph Guiliani and to scotch the presidential plans of Hillary
Clinton. Then Bush set up the war in Afghanistan and Iraq to
distract the anti-war left. And, of course, he crossed up the Democratic mayors and governors of the Gulf Coast
so that they would blow off their post 9/11 disaster planning and First Responders training.

So it was all a setup. Now that the inevitable hurricane has made a mess of the Gulf Coast we
are waiting for the other shoe to drop. President Bush knows, as he has planned all along, that he will soon be
“forced” by universal demand to appoint Guiliani as Gulf Coast Czar to clean up the mess. How did he
do it? No one will ever know.

And if the socially liberal Guiliani can be the favorite presidential candidate of conservative
Republican women because “he made us safe,” could independent suburban women possibly feel any different?

Might not even a few childless liberal nuns pause in their devotions before the altar of Roe v. Wade and crinkle
the ghost of a smile towards the knightly Rudi?

The brilliance of it. The strategery. The audacity. It is a coup that out-shines in brilliance
the very best efforts of of a Talleyrand, Metternich, or a Bismarck. And it brings to an end the
presidential ambitions
of the Clinton family, at least in this generation.