Obama’s Sputter-nik moment: Cash for Education Clunkers
My column today contrasts President Obama’s State of the Union hype about “innovation” and “investment” in education with the abysmal failures of massive federal spending on America’s schools. The White House loves to talk about global “competitiveness,” but refuses to support competition in our government-run K-12 schools monopoly. “Sputnik moment” — or Sputter-nik moment?
As I mentioned yesterday, this is National School Choice Week. Today, House GOP Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.) will propose legislation to revive the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships for low-income families in D.C.. Remember who’s standing in the schoolhouse door.
Related: The Cartel, an excellent documentary on the bloated, bottom-performing New Jersey public schools, features a telling quote from Trenton councilman Jim Coston that sums up decades of government education sinkhole spending: “There’s almost a sense that the worse we do the more money we get.”
Related: Democrat Newark (NJ) Mayor Cory Booker’s telling admission last night on Twitter responding to a reader’s call to “give money to schools:” “OK but I know from experience more $ doesn’t mean better schools. It is necessary but not sufficient.
Related: NRO – Education Message Didn’t Add Up to Excellence
Related: Townhall.com – Obama’s Education Rhetoric Rings Hollow
Related: The Washington Post breaks down Obama’s recycled federal school proposals and shaky, shady claims of education reform success.
Related: NEA Gave More Than $13 Million to Advocacy Groups, including: Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate – $200,000; Health Care for America Now! – $450,000; MediaMatters – $100,000; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund – $25,000; People for the American Way – $64,538; and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network – $10,000.
Related: ‘Report card’ on science: Most US students aren’t ‘proficient’ Sample questions here. It’s going to be pretty damned difficult for America’s kids to achieve the next “Sputnik moment” when they can’t identify which of the Earth’s poles has the coldest weather.
***
Cash for Education Clunkers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011
“We’re going to have to out-educate other countries,” President Obama urged this week. How? By out-spending them, of course! It’s the same old quack cure for America’s fat and failing government-run schools monopoly. The one-trick ponies at the White House call their academic improvement agenda “targeted investing” for “winning the future.” Truth in advertising: Get ready to fork over more Cash for Education Clunkers.
Our government already spends more per capita on education than any other of the 34 wealthiest countries in the world except for Switzerland, according to recent analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Overall inflation-adjusted K-12 spending has tripled over the past 40 years, the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy points out. Yet American test scores and graduation rates are stagnant. One in 10 high schools is a dropout factory. And our students’ performance in one of the most prestigious global math competitions has been so abysmal that the U.S. simply withdrew altogether.
Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget already represents “one of the largest increases” in federal education spending history, and hikes total discretionary spending to nearly $51 billion. Toss in another $35 billion for mandatory Pell grants. And add another $4 billion for the illusory “Race to the Top” charade to improve academic standards.
Then there’s the $10 billion for the Education Jobs Fund signed into law last August — a naked payoff to the public teachers union, which also includes $50 million for the Striving Readers comprehensive literacy development and education program; $82 million for Student Aid Administration; and $10.7 million for the Ready to Teach program.
Oh, and don’t forget the $100 billion in federal stimulus funding for school programs and initiatives administered by the U.S. Department of Education.
As he extols the virtues of “innovation” and “accountability,” the last thing Obama wants you to think about is the actual results of these profligate federal ed binges:
– As education analyst Neal McCluskey accurately described the real impact of the $4 billion Race to the Top paperwork theater: “States must say how they would improve lots of things, but they actually have to do very little. It is decades of public schooling — from the Great Society to No Child Left Behind — in a nutshell.” You need a chainsaw to cut through the bureaucratese of the winning state applications, but the bottom line is that the “race” is “won” only when school reformers get buy-in from the teachers unions — the most stalwart enemies of introducing choice and competition to the atrophying system.
– Despite massive multibillion-dollar “investments” in teacher training, America’s educators are horrifyingly incompetent at even elementary math. Explaining why American grade-school students can’t master simple fractions, one math professor confessed: “Part of the reason the kids don’t know it is because the teachers aren’t transmitting that.” Instead, they’ve ditched “drill and kill” — otherwise known as the basics — for costly educational fads ranging from “Mayan Math” to “Everyday Math” that substitute art, self-esteem and multiculturalism for the fundamentals of computation.
– Among the supposedly cutting-edge programs funded by Obama’s federal stimulus program is the $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit Public Schools. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence and incompetence. The teachers union sabotaged classroom instruction and denied schoolchildren an education through an apparent illegal work stoppage. Yet, Washington went ahead and forked over a whopping $530 million in federal porkulus funds to reward yet more Detroit government school failure and bail out the reckless-spending boobs who mismanaged the DPS budget and engineered a fiscal crisis. The $49 million technology program distributed some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers, plus thousands of printers, scanners and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through 12th grade.
One teacher was caught late last year trying to pawn his shiny new booty. No doubt, he has company. Nationwide, in both urban and rural school districts, large and small, these technology infusions have turned out to be gesture-driven boondoggles and political payoffs that squander precious educational resources — with little, if any, measurable academic benefits. Mark Lawson, school board president of one of New York state’s first districts to put technology directly in students’ hands, told The New York Times in 2007: “After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none. The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”
That about sums up federal intervention in public schooling: It’s a taxpayer-subsidized distraction to the local educational process that throttles true competition, rewards failure and mistakes blind government largesse for achievement.
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Sister Toldjah
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Actually been done by several radio stations: Ask an average NYC High School student on the street “where is West Point” and the wild wacky guesses will make you cry. Don’t pit them against the product from the little old schoolhouses of the early 20th century, without high-tech A/V equipment and computers and MTV! It ain’t the money or technology! It ain’t the innovation, it’s the motivation!!
James Greenidge
Queens NY
If Congress enacted a way to make it easy to get a deferred payment government loan to buy gasoline is there ANY question which way the price of gasoline would go? Is there ANY question that petroleum companies would be standing shoulder to shoulder with politicians explaining what a great idea it was?
The cost of college tuition has risen many times more than most other commodities and we have to hear even MORE proposals on subsidizing them with easy student loans and grants?
ABOLISH the Dept of Education – that would be a good start to fixing our country.
All nighter Michelle? Well said. My daughter in law has been a public school teacher for 8 years, but now that her kids are starting – adios. She’s going to home school them. No other choice. Don’t get her started, she’ll chew your ear off.
Re: His generation’s Sputnik moment – does the egghead in chief even know that was the one and only time the Soviets kicked our azz? Sheeez what dope.
Oh yeah, and the people who give our infrastructure a “D” would be the American Society of Civil Engineers, who of course make boatloads of money building infrastructure. Another false crisis. We’ve traveled in Europe, Asia, Austrailia, Africa – Sorry Barry, US is still the best. Saying Russia’s infrastructure has surpassed ours is just goofy. It’s a wreck. Heeere comes Porkulus 2 – or is it 3? I forget.
The west pole.
*This answer brought to you by an public education.
HAHAHHAHHAAAAHHAHHAAA
We sent our kids to charter schools. Best thing we ever did.
Michelle forgot “fuzzy math”. Idiots and their feel-good math.
.oO wondering which country has the most crime-ridden schools (not really)
But then in Russia when engineers say that lack of maintenance of a bridge’s rusted slip bearings on I5 have reached a critically dangerous condition – they probably are less inclined to divert a few billion in highway funds to build a light rail system that no one is going to use.
Sputnik No – Buttnik Yes …
These presidential pontifications about education always remind me of this old joke …
A self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.
“You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one” the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear. “The Young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon. Our space probes have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, ships and electric and hydrogen cars, cell phones. Computers with light-speed processing… And more.”
After a brief silence the senior citizen responded as follows:
“You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young … so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little _____, what are you doing for the next generation?”
I think that pretty much sums it up … don’t you?
Yeah, but in Russia Putin and his buds would take off with the cash and the engineers would prop up the busted slip bearings with some 2x4s and bailing wire.
Some of us here at work did a little experiment by asking several people where the electricity came from to power their devices in their office and at home, over half said the light socket.
Having been part of America’s “Sputnik moment” … I know it was a race to the moon — First one with a man on the moon wins. Apparently our chief wooden head doesn’t.
Hey, I too have done the electricity thing … yep people think it is the wall socket where you get the electricity from. Nothing about the coal behind it. It’s why our children score so low in science.
Michelle, I worry about whether you are getting enough sleep. You often post during the early morning hours. Bless you and hope you are rested.
Yes, this was the old chestnut of the “inner city” child being asked where milk comes from and he replies from the store. But they know every rapper and gutter word under the sun. It’d be funny if it weren’t likely these are tomorrow’s uninspired welfare receipents. Crude culture = crude kids.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
The Department of Education is just one more Federal agency that should not be; it serves no useful purpose and does indeed do harm. The school milk program was the first weed-pull it out.
Federal agencies:
three chopping blocks
no waiting
Government monopoly = guaranteed failure and economic dysfunction. It is a bad model and needs to be trashed at every level and opportunity.
Defeat the Democrat/Marxist propaganda machine now. There is no budget money the government should have access to save for basic commerce, military and custodial duties. Period. That eliminates the graft and corruption motive immediately.
Wellll, they’re not wrong.
The failure by the Democrats to understand how the lack of competition is directly responsible for the destruction of education in our country is a prime example of their brain defect.
I know dozens of “highly intelligent,” “well educated” people who simply cannot grasp that truth.
“Insanity” is the only correct word for that kind of disconnection from reality.
Putting an ineligible marxist in office was suicidal.
As for the “Sputnik” moment, I wonder whether to take it in “the rushed response resulted in nothing more than several failed American rocket launches” direction or “the fully-engaged space race led to an utter and secret failure by the Soviets” one.
I’ve read every response over at the NRO and none of them came close to the clarity and strength of Steyn’s comments so I have decided to share them.
Mark Steyn on the THE STATE OF THE UNION
beenthere said:
Mark Steyn is dead on balls accurate.
Reduce the population of those that aren’t near high-speed rail and they may get there.
is to have complete control over your lives, all of your money, and soylent green.
Obama talked about the trapped miners in Chile and American ingenuity, what he forgot was that if those miners were trapped in a mine in this country, they would still be underground. Bureaucracy kills ingenuity and education, look what it did during the BP oil spill in the gulf. There was so much red tape that nothing got done in a timely manner. And Obama is the king of regulations.
“Freeze and spend”.
“Together, I can do anything!”
It’s not how much money we spend on education, it’s how much money we waste!! And it’s a lot! If we just cut out the waste, we wouldn’t need to spend another dime! Geting rid of bad teachers would cut a lot of waste. Oh, and maybe they should stop building those multi-million dollar plush, luxury school buildings, like in California (which by the way is going bankrupt, remember?) We have the stoopidest “leaders” this country has EVER known!!
Obama’s speech was a re-tread. He stole most of the good stuff from the republicans and made it sound like HIS ideas. And did anyone hear the comment from Pelosi last night? Something about republicans were the party of “no” for two years. Can these people come up with anything original???
Virginia Patriot is going to love this.
Hawaii Governor Abercrombie (“I’m going to teach those birthers.”) admits that there are no Obama birth records. Fatal.
Buh-bye Obama. One term POTUS. Yes!
We have spent the last 40 years or so throwing money at our education system… The majority of that went to administration costs… I know on a personal level that I received a better education in the 50s and 60s, with less money spent, and much larger class sizes in schools… Why not get rid of “NEW MATH”… Forget about no grading… Re-introduce SOCIAL STUDIES, GEOGRAPHY, and don not forget AMERICAN and WORLD HISTORY… Basically let’s trash all the failed programs that have beaten the education system into the ground for the last 40 years, and get back to basics… Oh, don’t forget to get the PARENTS involved this time… It doesn’t take a “VILLAGE”, it takes a concerned parental structure!!!
When the Soviet Union broke up and the KGB files were opened, everyone found that the KGB operatives in the space program sabotaged our rockets to make them blow up. This allowed the Soviets to put Sputnik into orbit before us. What no one talks about is that Sputnik used batteries that died in about 2-3 days. The satellite was still orbiting but not doing anything.
When the Soviets stopped sabotaging our rockets and Vanguard launched our Explorer I satellite 4 months later, it was powered by (wait for it!) early solar power units.
Now, which one was the better satellite? The first one up that did nothing and died in 3 days or the one that made an important discovery? In this case, being first means nothing if it doesn’t work.
Typical. Socialist. Garbage. Propaganda.
Pasadena Phil said:
The only question I have is, how does an individual that lives in a State furthest removed from the continental US acquire a Social Security card issued from Connecticut.
Same way China leads the world in American identity theft (which is probably another reason Obama praised China last night).
More on the COLB issue. Sorry for the off-topic. I will stop now! (However, this is BIG!)
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=255489
I’m not sure they issued SS cards at birth back then. I don’t know when that started, but it was somewhat recent. It doesn’t answer the question of why he has one from CT in the first place, however! I am SO curious about all this!! Something that will be written about for centuries…the biggest fraud against the U.S.A. ever!
Can anyone answer this basic economic and math question?
Why is it that anytime there is a discussion about “cutting” expenditures we are hit with the argument that we have to “make up” that money somewhere else so it is “revenue neutral”?
If we do that how are we “cutting” any of our expenditures?
Doesn’t the term “revenue neutral” by simple definition mean we are still spending the same total amount of tax payer dollars?
Aren’t we just robbing Peter to pay Paul while the two of them continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic as it heads straight into the iceberg?
Just wondering how that works …
Does the name Yuri Gagarin ring a bell?
Can you imagine if Obama is off the ballot in 20-30 states come 2012? That would be beautiful!
DOJ thug investigative team head for Hawaii and Arizona in 6, 5, 4, 3…..
The One needs protection.
What in the world did people think when his birth records were not routinely released? You would have thought we were asking for the nuclear launch codes based on the Progressive reaction.
57 sounds better.
Yes, the Soviets put Gagarin into space, but he did not orbit the earth officially. According to the international rules (it’s a French organization) you must land in the same vehicle in which you orbited. Gagarin had to parachute out of the Vostok capsule because it was such a piece of garbage; it didn’t have room for it’s own parachutes and there was no way for Gagarin to know when to deploy and the ground couldn’t help him either.
The French overlooked this obvious violation of their own rules and gave the award to the Soviets anyway.
hahahahahahahahaha
I am one HAPPYSCRAPPER BIRTHER and proud of it! When everyone was ridiculing and calling us insane, we KNEW there was something very stinky going on! Common sense, folks!! I am hoping this hits the fan soon so my curiosity can take a rest. I am dying to know the truth!!
I am shocked.
I attended a school district outside of Detroit, MI 30 years ago and it was a horrible. I can only imagine what those schools are like today.
They had a school shooting in Los Angeles a week or so ago. When they showed the school, it was surrounded by BARS!! THAT is what a lot of our schools have become! Prisons! And the poor kids who are trying desparately to succeed don’t have a prayer. This shi# has to stop!! Our children are being destroyed by the regressive movement and we have been blindly living our lives thinking everything was just great. I pray it isn’t too late to defeat and rid ourselves of the scum of the earth.
In our town, with a fairly well-heeled population, the kids can’t even spell, much less aspire to scientific heights.
Everyday I pass a defaced red stop sign that reads: STOP AIDES.
Good grief.
marybel … perhaps they wrote “AIDES” because they couldn’t spell “CZAR” …
So, no lemonaide then?
The high school my youngest son is supposed to attend is considered the worst in the city. (I transferred him out of the city.) When I went there to get registration papers, there was a police car in the parking lot. One was there when I returned to deliver the papers. One has been there every time I’ve been there. My oldest son was there for 3 days before his transfer came though. The gangs are so prevalent, he never wore any color (white shirt and blue jeans) just to be safe. He sat at lunch and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. And he’s 6’4″!
But, if you visit the school you’ll see it’s very nice. It’s the newest high school in the city and in any other state, would be the flagship high school. Not in The People’s Socialist Quagmire of California.
I’ve said it before: My grandmother taught in a one-room schoolhouse and my mother (and her siblings) attended that school. They were better educated in the basics of math, history, and English than most of today’s college graduates.
Which is why they can insist with a straight face that electric cars are cheaper and better for the environment.
The problem with saying this is it immediately sends the signal to lazy parents that it’s the federal government’s fault that their children aren’t learning.
Lazy parents now have the luxury of believing that their children aren’t learning because the government isn’t innovative enough and hasn’t invested enough in THEIR child’s education.
pueblo1032 is right about needing to get parents involved. Every teacher I speak to says that the best students are the ones whose parents care. Other countries provide better education to their children because parents care.
Obama just did the opposite of providing leadership on this issue.
So Obama is going to freeze his annual $trillion+ deficit spending…isn’t that bold?
Republicans need to shut this guy down and take away his check book. The Department of Education, and every one of his Czars, need to be eliminated. In thirty years, the Dept of Education has done nothing but suck tax dollars into a gigantic bureaucratic abyss. It’s annual budget is well into the billions. Obama’s rule by executive order Czar departments also need to go. Hugo Chavez hasn’t grabbed as much power as the commie in Chief.
Um, how many years of budget surpluses, with all the excess going to paying down debt, will it take to get us out of this huge hole?
Will that ever happen?
Oh, sure. As soon as aerobatic swine do Immelmanns.
What this country needs is more Chinese Mothers.
I watched the SOTU speech last night.
Reruns suck!
I do recall from college at a seminar guesting Robert Jastyrow that Von Braun wanted to launch a satellitte for the International Geophysics Year in 1955(?) but the Army and Eisenhower snubbed him. The navy kept blowing up Vanguards till Sputnik pressed Ike to call Von Braun to save his face and he got his satelitte (Explorer 1) off at first try. So yes, we could’ve been first in space in two counts long before had our leaders been a little more open-minded.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Actully I fond the more overly “Nationalistic” parts of his speech to be funny considering its from the same guy who says color and suchshouldn’t matter. Seems he likes taking shots at the “yellow” folk. But anyways another thing I found funny was how he pointed out how our industries are falling and then goes WE NEED MORE COLLEGE. Correct me if I’m an ignorant savage, but how smart do you need to be to run a drill press, tractor, or swing a hammer? If our Older model was so good, why in the blue hell is he wanting to force our systems down a service based economic society? Just who will our serves be aimed at when EVERYONE seems to be jumping on that crazy gravy train? Nevermind the Asian Nations OBama liked jumping on have been doing that YEARS in advance of us?
Then again maybe he’s on to something who wants to work hard or honestly anymore here…
The liberal mindset is a variation of the saying, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, pretty soon every problem you encounter starts looking like a nail.” Just substitute “printing press” for the hammer, and “spending opportunity” for the nails.
What it all comes down to, in the end, is a student, a teacher and a parent – and whether they’re working with or against one another.
Back in the olden days of yore, Robert Heinlein wrote that his elementary school was a one-room affair with one teacher for 30+ students in his class; yet somehow all of them learn to read by the end of the first grade without the assistance of massive government subsidies.
The problem today is that too many parents are either (1) themselves products of the “Me Generation” of the 1970s, too busy looking out for their own satisfaction and who see the public schools as a continuation of out-of-sight, out-of-mind day care; or (2) foolishly thinking that the degree of their popularity with their children is proportional to their success as parents.
Children of the former end up with X-Box and MTV as surrogate parents. Children of the latter end up ranking at or near the bottom of every international educational ranking except for self-esteem, in which they come in first place.
Teachers unions and the litigious environment we live in today ensure that teachers spend less time teaching and more time concerned with job preservation, self-preservation and top-down imposed inculcation in politically-correct dogma. The old teacher-parent alliance that existed when I grew up – I’m sure I’m not alone in recalling that if I screwed up at school, the principal’s disapproval was only the beginning of my woes – has broken down in favor of the, “How dare you touch my little angel! I’m gonna sue you and the district for all you’re worth!” model.
The children, of course know this; if the teachers are afraid of them and/or don’t care, and mom and dad either don’t care or themselves adopt a hostile response to the school if the teacher or the principal try to rein in the little darlings, an inmates-running-the-asylum outcome should surprise no one. No wonder schools are so quick to resort to labeling kids as “ADD” or “ADHD” or whatever the nom-du-jour is nowadays so they can prescribe drugs to keep a lid on things.
Shoveling money on top of such a toxic educational environment is no different than putting more and more Band-Aids on top of a malignant melanoma.
Educational systems that subscribe to liberal orthodoxy, however, must by their very nature subscribe to the liberal predilection for using avoidance mechanisms so they won’t have to confront, not to mention overcome, nasty truths and unpleasant situations at home and at school.
This is why it doesn’t matter how much money you spend per pupil, and why teacher-to-student ratios are irrelevant, and why giving kids fancy notebook computers doesn’t make them any smarter. If you don’t have a solid parent-teacher-student relationship to build upon, no edifice you try to superimpose on it, no matter how expensive, is going to stand.
Or as they say in the Combat Engineers:
“Water plus dirt = mud; water plus mud = more mud; you can’t build a damn thing on mud.”
/rant
I’d send a copy of that speech to GITMO for use in torturing the inmates. What a massively stupid speech. There was not an ounce of logic in it. Pulling lofty ideas out of his butt, which have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever working, will not improve this economy and generate jobs.
Education will improve when we have bulldozed the schools flat and home schooled instead. Why doesn’t bho travel the country spreading pixie dust? The GOP should use his speech with a laugh track for campaign adds.
More from Ben Stein.
What does Mr. Bakshian mean, “anymore”? Seriously, has Obama seemed like a leader in the past?
He never did….
You beat me to it!
Kudos!
Today’s public schools are cesspools of rude administrators and ill informed teachers. I have dealt with school districts in 3 different states and they all stunk. When I want to learn something, I don’t go and find the person who is the worst teacher in that subject.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…actually it was NORAD Cheyenne Mtn, I was just a kid one-winger in the Space Defense Center. We watched the Soviets launch a bunch of their “Soyez” (sp?) rockets, which not only were worthless, but broke up in space and left nothing but debris behind. They were desperate to beat the US, and they used very efficient propoganda outlets to make the Americans think they were “winning” the space race. After all of this was de-classified, everything the Soviets did proved to be almost worthless. They stole a lot of classified from the U.S.
Here is a great article on the cost of private school vs public school and why vouchers should be offered.
You can throw all the money you want at education, but the key to success is more demographic than financial.
Michael Lind and Pat Buchanan have recently covered this topic that most in the MSM are afraid to touch.
Lets see….we are already spending more money on education than anybody…we are consistently getting less education …and the answer is to spend more money Following the trend wouldn’t more money ensure less education?
Speaking of education, I just saw this article in which a woman was jailed for sending her kids to a better school district. The neighoring school district was much better, so she used her father’s address to enroll her children. The school district she was supposed to send her kids to hired a PI to prove she did not live in the other district. For trying to help her kids get a better education she gets convicted…
Socialism is for idiots. Socialism produces idiots. The US needs independent thinkers, which are not created by our current crappy schools. More money will just make it easier to produce pathetic students faster.
when will we start putting the blame where it really belongs?
with all the spoiled lazy unmotivated selfish children…
and I’m not just talking about Obama’s inner circle!
No the MSM isn’t afraid to touch it, because the MSM is part OF it.
The things our president doesn’t know would fill a library… I happen to remember sputnik first hand; I watched it go overhead when I was a kid. That was in 1957. The Russians landed an unmanned rocket on the moon in 1959. We obviously were the first and only nation to go there with a manned orbiter and return. But our efforts were mostly because of the success of the private sector. The state-controlled, Russian space effort lagged then and still lags from a technological standpoint. So what is Obamster proposing? A statist effort, of course.
My favorite moment last night, was Obama and Hillary going out of their way to ignore each other and look the other way. No love lost there.
A real eye opening article in the San Francisco Chronicle says it all.
And California having the highest paid teachers in the country, and the most amount spent per student, ranks bottom. So I guess throwing more money at it certainly hasn’t fixed the problem. But it sure has lined the pockets of the unions and teachers quite well…
Goes along with his many Pravda moments.
Thank you for that excellent news.
(I just hope they don’t drop the ball this time)
If enough states require verification of eligibility, Owebowmao may decide he needs to spend more time with his family……
If his birth certificate (a valid one, not a fraudulent jpeg on the internet)says his father is Barack Obama Sr., he is ineligible. Somebody just has to have the guts to say so.
The average teacher has an SAT score of less than 800, and 9th grade math and science are their only required subjects. So you want these people to teach your children how to be competitive in the 21st century. Did I mention their jobs are protected by tenure and union rules, so no matter how incompetent they are, they keep teaching. Imagine going to have medical care from a doctor who had an 800 SAT score and a 9th grade education of anatomy.