Good news is beginning to trickle in while the country is still twelve months away from changing presidents, and the US Senate. Some of the best news involves education. Michelle Malkin reports: Colorado voters have rejected an attempt to raise state income and sales taxes to fund education, The Denver Post has declared. Colorado bellwether: Voters reject statewide tax increases By Michelle Malkin November 1, 2011 10:46 PM http://michellemalkin.com/2011/11/01/colorado-bellwether-voters-reject-statewide-tax-increases/ Another brief article informs us that teachers are not underpaid as they always claim: Are Public-School Teachers Underpaid? By Andrew G. Biggs Posted on November 01, 2011 11:03 AM http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/281846/are-public-school-teachers-underpaid-andrew-g-biggs I remember former school teacher, former first lady, Laura Bush, saying teachers were not paid enough. Perhaps that explains why her husband allowed Ted Kennedy to write an education bill. In fact, teachers have not been underpaid since Ichabod Crane lusted after Katrina Van Tassel and free meals. Finally, New Jerseys governor, Chris Christie, disappeared in the medias vast abyss after announcing he would not enter the race for the Republican nomination; nevertheless, it was Christie who started the avalanche that is now rolling over teachers unions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rpfK9QkReXI The following article in two parts is the best news of all because it goes a long way toward explaining the strangling ties binding unemployment, education, and the economy. Like the rest of the government, the education bubble is too big to fail, which means that by the time it fails, so will the whole country. The Education Bubble Daniel Greenfield Tuesday, November 1, 2011 Flip through enough of the 99 percent signs and you realize that the majority of that demographic arent complaining about the lack of financial regulation or income inequalities, so much as theyre upset that they took on loans to pay for college degrees to get jobs that dont actually exist. The fault here isnt Wall Streets, its a policymaking apparatus that decided the way to deal with the loss of manufacturing jobs was to get as many college graduates out there as possible to create the industries of tomorrow. This was Clintons platform and its Obamas Winning the Future platform, pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves. The Dot Com boom in the nineties seemed to back up that policy with entirely new companies springing to life with valuations in the hundreds of millions and twenty somethings at the helm. But a good deal of those companies were nothing more than the foam on another bubbleand more problematically the cream of the tech companies were created by college dropouts. Even more problematically, the tech companies liked to save money by importing Chinese and Pakistani employees on H1-B visas as cheap labor, while their lobbies insisted that this would protect American innovation. But the real problem was that swapping manufacturing for college degree jobs solved nothing. American companies that manufacture anything become the tip of an outsourced iceberg. All the companies with the shiny logos depend on Chinese manufacturing and raw materials. They cant create anything that the Peoples Republic of China cant take away from them when the time is right. American companies arent outsourcing labor to China, China is outsourcing design and marketing to them and allowing them to serve as middlemen between Chinese manufacturers and American consumers, until a Chinese company decides to buy their product unit or its reverse engineered copies of their products are good enough that they invest the money in a marketing campaign to establish their own trusted brand. And yet the tech industry is the closest to a college degree success story that we have. The failures are legion. The problem with the college degrees for everyone approach is that creating more college graduates does not proportionally create more jobs, it creates more unemployed college graduates and devalues the worth of a college diploma. Too many college graduates mean that employers will look for higher degree levels. High school diplomas used to be a certificate of competence, then that was devalued through promotion in a system where teachers were expected to move students up to the next class no matter what. When college became the new high school, it was devalued in the same way. There are city and state colleges with students who are barely literate, not in the kids these days use too many abbreviations way, but in the functionally illiterate way. If the goal is to move everyone to the highest level of education possible, the result will not be a more educated population, but an educational system with lower standards and a population that is less educated than ever because actual education becomes more inaccessible as the standards are lowered. Make sure that everyone can afford to take out college loans and the marketplace will compete for students with traditional universities offering a large buffet of educational choices, most of which are not educational or represent any kind of career path outside academia, and private colleges offering useful sounding degrees that no employer will look twice at. For the liberal politicians its a triple score. Money pours into academia which they can use as their own think tanks. The educational system gets four years or more to process students through more sophisticated indoctrination mechanisms. And then the students who cant find jobs join the ranks of the usefully disaffected because somebody must be to blame and it cant possibly be the people pulling the strings of the people shouting at them through megaphones. Clinton told working class voters that the manufacturing jobs were gone, but their kids would all have college degrees. Obama went one better by telling working class voters that they would be retrained to hold down Green Jobs, even as theyre falling faster than the Green companies and their sweetheart government pork. Those lies are what make the class warfare rhetoric out of DC so doubly despicable. Politicians have never honestly talked to voters about what happened to the American economy, instead they fell back on the same mantra of opening up new markets through globalization and creating new jobs through education. None of this is new. The country with the highest degree rate in the world is Russia. The USSR ran its citizens through its educational system at a rate that Elizabeth Warren could only gasp in awe at. But what was its education actually worth? About as much as American degrees are becoming worth. If you throw enough money and manpower at the educational system, you will have a really big educational system. What you will not have is anything of worth to go with it. Only one country that has a higher degree rate than the United States has a higher per capita income and that country has its own oil industry. The usual handwringing that liberal pundits and politicians engage in over how the American educational system is failing compared to countries with higher degree ratios is wasted noise. These same statistics are trotted out to justify dumping more money into the black hole of an educational system under the pretext of job creation. But do the statistics even matter? According to the OECD (another useless globalization organization wrapped around a WW2 fossil) the Israeli educational system is a hopeless failure. In its 2009 evaluation claimed that Israeli students were behind Turkey, Dubai and Russia in math and science. Yet peculiarly enough Israel keeps collecting Nobel prizes and turning out minor things like instant messaging, drones and Kinect. When reality contradicts statistics, its wise to go with reality. Thats a skill most politicians havent learned, but its a rather valuable one. The universalization of education is not about remaining competitive in a global marketplace or any of that other nonsense piously repeated by politicians with their hands in more pockets than a thieving octopusits about promoting the homogeneity of ideas across a population. Which is why the importance placed on universal education increases as a country becomes more culturally diverse or internally divided. The original Department of Education was created two years after the Civil War. The Kalamazoo School Case, which set the precedent for forcing taxpayers to fund public education and created the entire system of property tax school robbery we live under today, took place during the same period. As was the National Education Association whose Committee of Ten played a key role in the standardization of the national curriculum. A better name for universal education is federalized education, and there is very little difference between the two in the United States. The growing federal control of education is a mechanism for maintaining control of increasingly divided populations. It may be a failed mechanism, but like the rest of the governments boondoggles, it long ago created a class of people who depend on the system and have a vested interest in its expansion.
PART TWO: When this is understood, the failure of innovation in the system is also obvious. The educational system is not a means of empowering thinkers, but of standardizing a static consensus of ideas. Its a great way to learn liberal dogma, but an inefficient way of learning anything else. The expansion of the system is not about remaining competitive with China, just as funding more Green Jobs is not about Winning the Future, its about shaping the voters of tomorrow. Were not falling behind due to a lack of college graduates, but because were smothered by a system of stifling bureaucratic conformity that is far more concerned with its grip on power than with jobs or income. The resemblance to the USSR is not at all accidental. The system would rather have 10,000 subsidized jobs that it creates than 10,000,000 jobs in the free market. It would rather have a middle class of 5 million college graduates, (40 percent of them government employees), than have a free market middle class of a 100 million, (only 30 percent of them college graduates and less than 0.5 percent of them government employees.) And it would rather have an angry mob camped out near Wall Street, than have a viable economy. The educational bubble isnt creating a new Middle Class that will keep social security viable, it is creating dissatisfied people who feel that they are entitled to better and dont know who to blame. Like the rest of the government, the education bubble is too big to fail, which means that by the time it fails, so will the whole country. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/41908
I was kind of surprised by the enclosed article. The young litigant, Wendy Ruiz, is an anchor baby, yet the article says: Ruiz was born in the United States, and has lived in Florida her entire life. As such, she is both an American and Florida citizen in the eyes of the law. The issue of anchor babies has not been settled by the Supreme Court. Miami Dade College must see it that way because it: . . . insisted upon charging her out-of-state tuition when her parents were unable to produce legal immigration documents. I do not know if every college will follow Miami Dade in determining tuition for anchor babies. Id sure like to hear Governor Chris Christie, et al., state their views. Children of Illegal Immigrants Sue Florida Over States College Tuition Policy November 2, 2011 9:29 AM MIAMI, Fla. (CBS Tampa) Children of illegal immigrants living in Florida are suing the state for charging them out-of-state tuition. Wendy Ruiz, a sophomore at Miami Dade College, is one of those behind the lawsuit. She is paying $5,000 more than she technically has to, because her college insisted upon charging her out-of-state tuition when her parents were unable to produce legal immigration documents. Ruiz was born in the United States, and has lived in Florida her entire life. As such, she is both an American and Florida citizen in the eyes of the law. Its so unfair, she told CBS Tampa. I was born here. This makes no sense. Rather than keeping quiet, Ruiz chose to take action. She and five other college-age Floridians are now involved in a class-action lawsuit that seeks to overturn the rule. Miriam Haskell of the Southern Poverty Law Center is working on the case. We believe strongly that young people should be treated equally, and have a right to access education, Haskell stated to CBS Tampa. (This policy) is deterring not just Wendy and the four other plaintiffs, but scores of others in Florida. Gerard Robinson, the Florida Commissioner of Education, and Frank T. Brogan, the Chancellor of the State University System, are listed as the defendants in this case. When CBS Tampa called the Florida Department of Education, the press office said they could not comment on pending litigation. Haskell said that the case has been filed in federal court. This policy violates the federal constitution. This is not a state statute, she said. It violates the equal protection clause, which guarantees equal rights for all United States citizens. The constitution doesnt make exceptions based on who the parents are. In the meantime, Ruiz is doing her best to continue with her education despite the thousands of dollars she must now pay in tuition costs. I have financial aid (but) the rest I pay out of pocket, she said. During the week I work at the school in administrative services, and on the weekends I tutor, I babysit Ive been a waiter, and had other jobs. To make time for her jobs, Ruiz said that she has assumed part-time student status, and is presently taking eight credits in the form of three courses. Haskell noted that, though sometimes grueling, Ruiz is still fortunate. Some are able to make ends meet. Some try to do later education, or take a longer time with their education, she said. But hundreds are completely deterred from going at all. Three of the plaintiffs (in this case) are unable to attend at all. The hope is to resolve the issue and see this rule reversed before it reaches trial. Weve reached out to them, and given them the opportunity to talk with us before moving forward, Haskell said. (They have not done so) yet, but it hasnt been too long. According to NPR, State Rep. Reggie Fullwood (D-15) has introduced legislation that would grant access to in-state tuition rates to qualifying citizens, regardless of the immigration status of his or her parents. You know I would be extremely happy if we didnt have to push this legislation, if there was some policy fix or some administrative fix that could be done, Fullwood told NPR. I would be one of the happiest people around. Ruiz is optimistic that the situation will resolve itself in a way that allows for more affordable opportunities for her and others in her situation. Until then, shes not backing down. This is not stopping me from coming to school. I want to have a bright future ahead of me, she said. This (situation) is making me strong and more independent, and more willing to speak my voice. Added Ruiz, It makes me more determined to what I want to become. http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2011/11/0...e-florida-over-states-college-tuition-policy/
First, I would like to comment that I hold a strong dislike of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their organization is corrupt, misleading, and deceptive, and funnels the donations they get to alternative issues, and paying high salaries to their board of directors. They are not political neutral, rather spreading propaganda and even lies to further their own social cause. They seem to care more about jewish issues than anyhting else, but pretend to care about immigrant rights to get more donations. Second, anchor babies are a HUGE drain to America's education and legal systems, costing tax payers trillions. Let us examine just one state. There are 13,682,000 hispanics in California. It costs around 195000 USD to send just one of them through public education*, assuming they do not go to college. That means it has/will cost 2668 trillion dollars in education alone in just one state! It is extremely doubtful that the parents are able to pay enough taxes to cover the cost of their children. No wonder California is going bankrupt! *It costs 15000 annually to educate a child in a California school, children are entitled to 13 years of "free" public education. But my view is that the anchor babies themselves are not to blame, but rather the government that has intentionally allowed undocumented workers to provide cheap labor within the USA. If the USA chooses to allow illegals to work in the country, they should be prepared to deal with the cost of all the many anchor babies. Preferably tax the wealthy to pay for them all. That will punish them so that perhaps next time they will think twice about wanting cheap laborers (who are too afraid to form workers unions) for their businesses.
You got that right. I dont' fall for propaganda pushed by institutions, think tanks, and other politically corporate funded organizations. The internet is a great place for information, but it also has a lot of bogus information that simple people with limited intelligence seem to gravitate to. Particularly, stuff filld with sensational content, and made up statistics dumbed down so simple ones can draw a simple conclusion. IMO behavior speaks the truth, and a long analysis of it will give me a more clear evaluation of what is legit and what is propaganda.
