Joe Clark, a good Christian man, a reasonable conservative, 100% pro-lifer, a knowledgeable man, who is Biblically literate, posted the following “Letter to the Editor” to his blog. It’s about the huge government waste of your tax dollar$ on Big Ed (education that eats tax dollar$ by the tonnage that accomplishes almost nothing worthwhile). There are questionable TV commercials playing that would have you believe that a recent Ohio bill (similar to Wisconsin’s bill, but in Ohio it’s S.B. 5) will destroy your children, cause you to die in agony in a hospital bed unattended and will certainly kill all the senior citizens. Why? Because public unions will have a few rule changes. None of what Ohioans are seeing in those commercials have any merit to them. I have Joe Clark’s permission to reprint. Read on…
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MONDAY, MAY 09, 2011
Public V. Private.Ohio,Wisconsin,Other States Must Slim Down Gov Union Bennies, Especially Public Ed
by Joe Clark
http://www.joeclarke.net/
I wrote the below letter to the editor to a liberal editor at a liberal newspaper (Akron Beacon Journal) in a liberal city (Akron), and so it had to be not so critical of teachers, public employee unions in general, or Democrats at large. That is how you get an editorial written in local newspapers which have the same mindset as the NY Times.
Dear Editor
“I can understand why public school teachers would object to being judged by how they perform in schools where undisciplined and uninterested children stifle the teaches so much that they would never be able to “merit” raises.
I cannot understand why teachers do not empathize with the general public’s need to have a government which spends budgeted tax money within its means. This is all that Ohio Senate Bill 5 is advocating. With high unemployment, and the economy and housing not rebounding fully for much of the population, teachers and all public employees should understand that we do not want to starve them, “kill off” their union membership, nor deprive them of that much of their public employee salaries and benefits. The state of Ohio, as other states, must slim down and tax less in order to attract businesses into a state which otherwise is known as a ‘no right to work state.’ The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that nearly *16 percent of Americans are either on the unemployment rolls or are discouraged from finding work. The statistics are even worse for African Americans. This is no time to squabble over a few dollars in benefits that we simply cannot pay the teachers, especially when the educational outcomes are so inadequate.”
On any given Sunday, or any other day of the week, local newspapers will be chuck full of op-eds featuring stories expounding on how trimming any public union benefits is tantamount to treason. State legislatures in Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere will be fighting union-sponsored impeachments, recall elections, and media campaigns geared to undo states’ slimming of over fat, unaffordable budgets.
Day after day after day, public school teachers (the semi literate contingent among public unions) pound those greedy Republican and Tea Party people who want to rob, starve, and kill public unions into nonexistence. One writer this past week had the nerve to write, “Teachers are the only professionals who have not had any increase in wages in the past several years.” What?
The fact is, that the amount of money thrown into education has distanced every other investment in real dollars. The cost of colleges has risen 900% in the past thirty years, and the same can be said for elementary and secondary education. And where does the money go? 85% of school funding goes to salaries – and that to mainly teacher and administrator salaries. Meanwhile, it was reported that less than 50% of Detroiters are literate. One billion 300 million dollars is fed into the Detroit public ed system, and as of now, Detroit schools are operating with a 300 million dollar deficit. These stats are are comparable to those in every Democratic city across the country. Poor performance after maximum investment.
I have lived through so many failed education experiments that I cannot count them. Back in the 60’s, they tried School Without Walls – the beginning of the “let the child lead the teacher” philosophy. Outcomes Based Education was another loser. Educrats also had the brainstorm that, “If we increase kids self esteem, their school proficiency will accelerate.” Notta. Bill Gates convinced the educrats that if you divide a high school into four smaller high schools (within the same building) the kids’ cognition will advance. Not so much.
Busing was an extremely expensive experiment which, instead of helping blacks by sending them to white schools, chased white people out into the suburbs – away from the inner city schools. And, they took a lot of tax money with them. Now, many schools are nearly 100% black, such as in Detroit. Citizens who have fought hard to send their children to charter schools, funded by the government (or, us), have been resisted every step of the way by Democrats in general (including Obama), and the Public School Unions in particular. However, when the educrats wanted to initiate an “Afri-Centric” public school in my home town of Akron, that was not problem. But, it became a problem after it was discovered that the Afric-Centric curriculum, including courses on how to bang drums and chant African hymns, could not teach the children to read, write, or do math. The public sponsored Afri-Centric school closed after just a few years of embarrassing results. However, these educrats cannot be embarrassed.
There is always one more futile experiment to try.
Such as…
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