News from Around America

Dick Morris: School Choice is Remedy for State Budget Deficits

“They are going to say ‘Well, do I want to spend $13,000 per student in A public school, or a better education at $8,000 in a charter school,’” Morris told EAGtv. “I think they are going to see the value of the $8,000.”

Terry Paulson: It's Time for School Choice!

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Parents Revolt in Chicago: Will Big Education Listen?

Was Connecticut Conned?

Republicans and conservatives in Connecticut may be feeling like all their friends are having a big party, but they are not invited.


While most states in the nation, even some in liberal New England, caught the Tea Party/conservative wave, Connecticut citizens sent all of their incumbent Democratic representatives back to Congress.

And, while Republicans did pick up 14 seats in the Connecticut state house and one in the state senate, the General Assembly will continue to be controlled by Democrats, as it has been for decades.

And, now, the only current, major Republican-held position, that of governor, will be filled by a Democrat as well. Six days after the election, Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tom Foley, a wealthy businessman, new to politics, conceded the race to Democratic candidate, Dan Malloy, the mayor of Stamford, following a ballot controversy.

The troubled ordeal of the governor’s race began in the afternoon of election day, when about half of the city of Bridgeport’s polling stations were discovered to be running out of ballots. It was determined that only 21,000 ballots had been ordered for 70,000 registered voters.

The election snafus continued with questionable decisions by Democratic Secretary of State, Susan Bysiewicz, who attempted to remedy the ballot shortage by photocopying blank ballots while waiting for new ones to be printed.

The Hartford Courant story which chronicled the election, indicates that the Malloy team, understanding that the close gubernatorial race could be decided in their favor in heavily Democratic Bridgeport, “arranged an emergency after-hours hearing in Superior Court in Hartford,” in order to file a motion for a court order to keep Bridgeport polls open for an additional two hours in precincts where there had been a ballot shortage. Secretary Bysiewicz joined that motion, while Republican attorneys and the state attorney general’s office opposed it, arguing that the ballot shortage was the consequence of incompetence.

However, at several minutes before 8:00 p.m. closing time for Connecticut’s polls, Judge Mitchell Berger granted the emergency order for the extension of voting hours in Bridgeport.

Following the court order, the mayor of Bridgeport, Democrat William Finch, used the city’s 911 emergency system, in reverse, to inform voters that the polls would remain open for an additional two hours in precincts with ballot shortages.

With the race so close, both candidates were expressing confidence well after midnight and into the net day. Secretary Bysiewicz displayed more of what the Wall Street Journaltermed, “bizarre” behavior, by announcing “unofficial” election results: that Malloy had won the race by about 3,100 votes.

Two days after the election, a suspicious bag containing 335 photocopied and filled ballots was discovered in Bridgeport. Meanwhile, a video surfaced, taken by the Republican mayor of Vernon, Connecticut, who served as A poll-watcher in Bridgeport, and who observed people voting without identification, voters receiving more than one ballot, and ballots left unsecured at the polling place.

On Friday after election day, Mayor Finch reported that, in Bridgeport, the count showed Malloy had about 17,000 votes to Foley’s 4,500. However, Foley was not prepared to concede based on yet another unofficial count, and suggested he might seek a judicial review of the results.

On Friday evening, Secretary Bysiewicz’s office made yet another announcement, this one that Malloy had won by 5,637 votes, a margin that would not require a recount. Malloy essentially said the results confirmed what he already knew, but Foley expressed considerable discomfort with the results, and insisted he was not planning to concede until he was “certain that the will of the voters was honored.”

At this point, the Republican candidate was sounding strong and decisive, adjectives that did not necessarily cling to him throughout the campaign. While he had been a couple of points ahead in the polls, he had been criticized for not putting out strong conservative views. Foley often appeared weak and ambiguous, with a few bright spots during debates with Malloy. In his literature, however, he demonstrated clear support of merit pay for teachers, school choice, and the need to confront the union pension problem. By contrast, Malloy had been supported by the powerful unions in the state.

Nevertheless, on Monday, November 8th, Foley delivered a somewhat surprising concession speech that was devoid of doubt about the results. Stating that he did not think he could make up a gap of about 6,000 votes, Foley said, “The election on Tuesday was a conclusive victory for Dan Malloy, and this result should not be questioned.”

Foley said that his team had explored the possibility of asking for A precinct-by-precinct re-canvassing of the vote, but determined that, in the end, it would not change the outcome of the election.

Meanwhile, as Foley was conceding, Chris Healy, chair of the Connecticut GOP, and possible contender for national GOP chair Michael Steele’s position, was referring to the situation in Bridgeport as a “complete farce” and a “circus,” and announcing that his team would be asking federal and state authorities to formally investigate the election- in spite of Foley’s decision.

In his concession speech, Foley stated, “what happened in Bridgeport should be looked into,” but asserted that the rest of the state’s counting seemed “very reliable.”

However, the Republican candidate for Attorney General, Martha Dean, an experienced attorney with a constitutional law background, who had Tea Party support during her campaign, had a different view. On November 11th, in an interview with Dan Lovallo, a local talk show host in the state, Dean, who lost to a Democratic candidate, questioned the results of the election in Connecticut’s other two major cities, Hartford and New Haven. Dean appears poised to investigate her hypothesis that illegal aliens are being given a pass to vote in Connecticut elections.

While Connecticut might be perceived as a “deep blue” state, Peter Raymond cites interesting statistics in an article, in American Thinker, about the questions surrounding the controversial election. In particular, he notes that, in the Bridgeport 2010 election, votes for the Republican gubernatorial candidate plunged by 64% from the ten-year average of Republican votes cast for governor. Even in 2006, the last gubernatorial election, Raymond reports that there were 51% more votes cast for the Republican candidate than this year.

In the wake of the election, it is clear that Governor-elect Dan Malloy is beginning his term amid controversy that is not ending quickly. Public hearings are being held in the city of Bridgeport to determine why the election took the path that it did. A fact that Malloy must also reckon with is that most people in Connecticut did not vote for him. The state actually had three candidates for governor. The third, Tom Marsh, originally elected as a Republican to his local position, announced his candidacy for governor on the Independent ticket in the spring. Marsh received 17,000 votes, enough, had he not triangulated the race, to have given Foley the win, assuming that most of those votes would have gone to the Republican candidate.

Based on our survey results, it appears that many high school seniors need to do additional homework

Chicago’s Michael Pfleger and Karen Lewis: When Radicals Disagree

When EAGtv’s reporting team got back from covering a school choice rally in Chicago, they mentioned how impressed they were by one of the event’s speakers – a Father Michael Somethingorother. They appreciated Father Michael’s no-holds-barred support for school choice, but being journalists, they were especially grateful for his colorful sound bites that could be used to spruce up their story. Intrigued by reports of the crusader’s fiery performance, the EAG staff gathered around to watch the video. It only took a couple of seconds for the most politically aware members to recognize the speaker as Father Michael. . . . Pfleger!

You remember him, right? It was Father Pfleger (Barack Obama’s other nutty “pastor”) who said this about Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign:

“I believe she always thought, ‘[The Democratic presidential nomination] is mine. I’m Bill’s wife, I’m white, and this is mine. I just gottA get up, and step into the plate.’ And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama,” and she said, ‘Oh damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!’”

“It’s time for you and I to demand excellent education for every child, no matter their race, their creed, or their zip code! Whether it is public or charter or parochial or private or home schooling, excellent education must be the norm, not the exception! . . . .We always talk about how we expect to have our children value education. Well, the real question is, do adults value education?”

“You see, corporate America realized they didn’t have a big enough piece of the money in K-12 public education. . . . So this so-called school reform – charters, turnarounds, testing, canned curricula, all of it – this so-called reform is not an education plan. It doesn’t help children. Quite the opposite. It’s a business plan.”

Reclaiming Choice, Federalism, and Results in Education

Education policy has often stumped or scared conservatives. It shouldn’t—we’ve long sided with children and parents against special interests—and especially not now. Federal education policy has all the defects that fueled activists’ ire this election season: skyrocketing spending, bureaucratic meddling and overreach into states’ constitutional authority. And it still leaves American children behind their potential.

Washington first ventured into local school policy with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). The 31-page, $1 billion Great Society project redistributed wealth to low-income districts, aiming to close the achievement gap between needy students and their peers.

Forty-five years later, the gap remains, educational performance has generally stagnated, and graduation rates haven’t improved.

What has changed is the federal role. ESEA has grown into a 600-page bureaucratic labyrinth known as the No Child Left Behind Act, with a mandate for everyone to hate. The annual price tag to taxpayers: $25 billion.

Conservatives can set a bold new course on education, beginning with these three priorities for federal reform:

• Stop the Spending Spree: Federal K-12 education spending has increased 116% since 1980. In 2009, the U.S. Education Department saw a one-time windfall from the Obama “stimulus” package that instantly (and, thankfully, temporarily) doubled its budget. The administration has since called for a nearly 10 percent increase in FY 2011. It’s time to return to the more sober spending levels of FY 2008, while asking tough questions about federal programs’ cost-effectiveness overall.
• Restore Federalism: Federal intervention has failed to improve American education, and Washington should get out of the way and send dollars and decision-making back to those closest to the child. That’s the argument conservatives will make in the looming debate over reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Their alternative is the A-PLUS Act, sponsored by Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and John Cornyn (R-TX). The plan would allow state leaders to consolidate funding from dozens of federal K-12 education programs and direct it to the most pressing education needs in their states without all the federal red tape.
• Promote Parental Choice in Education: Every child should be free to attend a safe and effective school. Parents should have the power to choose such a school, with money that follows the child. In Washington, D.C., vouchers currently permit 1,200 students to escape the failing and often violent public schools. But congressional opponents, led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), have tried to kill school choice. The Obama administration even revoked the scholarships of 216 students promised a spot in the program last year. Speaker-elect John Boehner (R-OH), a strong voucher proponent, met with scholarship families last Monday on his first day back in the office after elections, signaling his priority of restoring and expanding parental choice in our nation’s capital.

• Tackle the Pension Problem: In many states, teacher pension plans have helped make state budgets unsustainable. The Manhattan Institute estimates that teacher pension plans’ unfunded liabilities collectively amount to roughly $933 billion. Less than a quarter of that is due to the stock market’s recent poor performance; most of the deficit comes from poorly planned defined benefit plans and chronic under funding. State leaders cannot afford to postpone dealing with the pension crisis. Delay will only make a bad situation even worse. Shifting to defined contribution plans is one place to start.
• Promote State Systemic Education Reform: State leaders should focus on results rather than inputs, and empower parents and teachers based on those results. For decades, teachers unions and their allies have clamored for more funding with little to show for it. Now states like FloridA have set the pace by shifting to results-oriented policy that rewards achievement and gives students better opportunities when schools fail. Gov. Jeb Bush’s systemic reform has made impressive strides where federal policy has perennially failed. Black students in Florida have made academic gains at twice the rate of their peers nationwide in the past decade. Hispanic students match or outperform statewide averages in 31 states. Other states should follow suit by adopting the key ingredients of systemic reform: authentic accountability to parents and taxpayers, parental choice in education, and performance-based rewards for teachers.

Detroit native Kid Rock teams up with the NFL and United Way Thanksgiving 2010

He’s Back! Bill Ayers, Robert Kennedy’s Son — and What this Has to Do With “Higher” Education

Bill Ayers is back in the news. Robert Kennedy’s son, newly on the board of the U of I Chicago, led a move denying Ayers emeritus status as a retired professor. Newsweekcovered the story here (they lost a bit of the nuance in my quote but the story is an accurate summation of the controversy).

I had not thought of Ayers since I blogged about him two years ago (“ Little Red School House”). In retrospect, while the issue was balance, not bias (so I argued) how does one balance someone so far to the Left? Can one even imagine a former member of the John Birch Society sans explosives being welcomed with open arms by education schools?

On turning radicals into academic entrepreneurs: The more incendiary, the better (think Angela Davis, Ward Churchill). And think of the speaking fees one can draw as a radical professor! Sure, sure, the student fees are supposed to represent the range of opinions in society at large (U.S. Supreme Court,Southworth, 2000). But who polices such Court decisions? The barbarians within the gates? Hardly.

Professor Ayers, erstwhile domestic terrorist, lived on the wild fringe of sixties radicalism. Like so many others, Ayers secured a position in academe that allowed him to bore within education by promoting “social justice” and “revolutionary education.” While his ideas on education might seem “out there,” they are taught in education schools as part of the canon of “progressive thought”–often in “School and Society” courses required of all future K-12 teachers.

Not that I am ungrateful. I must thank the Ayers of the world for making education school so stultifying that I left and entered graduate school to become a historian – for better and worse.

Why Are Schools of Education Such an Oxymoron?

Official: Media exec to be NYC schools chancellor

Be Patriotic! Cheat! Spend!

Hot Post:Children Under Sharia Law, Part 7: British Muslim Kids Being Taught How To Cut Off Hands in School

For thieves their hands will be cut off for A first offence, and their foot for a subsequent offence. The specified punishment of the thief is cutting off his right hand at the wrist. Then it is cauterised to prevent him from bleeding to death.

Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country, I have no desire or wish to intervene in the decisions that the Saudi government makes in its own education system. But I’m clear that we cannot have anti-Semitic material of any kind being used in English schools. - Michael Gove, British Education Minister.

David Horowitz’s Archives: My Encounter With the Enemy in Milwaukee

Feds Should Flunk out of Education by Neal McCluskey

Daily Headlines for November 29, 2010

Daily Headlines for November 29, 2010

Funding Inefficiency in Education: DCPS v. DCOSP

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report last week on the fiscal accountability of D.C. Public Schools (DCPS). While their analysis suggests that DCPS has “enhanced internal controls over federal payments for school improvement,” it also clearly shows that the well-known inefficiencies of the school system persist.

According to the Washington Times:

The Government Accountability Office report said the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent (OSSE) “continues to be designated as a “‘high risk’ grantee” and that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) continues to have “systemic problems in its internal controls” of federal funds.

For the period between 2004 and 2008, D.C. provided expenditure datA showing that DCPS used federal payments to fund a variety of programs.

The D.C. Public School system continues business as usual and is plagued by a lack of accountability. ... In cutting off Opportunity Scholarships, it’s deeply troubling that poor D.C. school children have no alternatives for getting an education.

After the Freeze: Real Reforms Toward Fair Federal Pay

President Barack Obama announced today that he will ask Congress to freeze federal worker pay for the next two years saving $5 billion through 2012. Good for him. This is a welcome acknowledgment on two fronts: 1) that, as Heritage research has definitively shown, federal workers are paid more than their private sector counterparts even after accounting for skills and education; and 2) that our federal budget deficits are driven by a spending, not A revenue, problem.

But while President Obama should be congratulated for this small step toward fiscal sanity, a federal pay freeze is not enough and far more than $5 billion could be saved be reforming federal worker pay. Heritage Foundation Senior Labor Analyst James Sherk writes:

Federal employees earn between 30 percent and 40 percent more than equivalently skilled private-sector workers. This represents costly forced sacrifices by lower-earning American taxpayers. ... [M]ost federal compensation is not a contractual obligation and Congress can reduce it in those positions which are overcompensated. If Congress reduced this federal pay to market rates this would save taxpayers about $47 billion a year— more than eliminating the entire Department of Commerce, Department of the Interior, or Department of Energy. It would be enough to fully offset the cost of patching the alternative minimum tax in 2012.

• Abolish the General Schedule and implement performance-based pay. Congress should replace the General Schedule with pay-for-performance systems tied to market compensation. The Office of Personnel Management should set broad pay bands for each occupation and region of the country with managerial discretion to award raises for good performance, subject to budget limitations. OPM should adjust these pay bands up or down based on qualified applicant-to-position ratios and quit rates. This would align federal pay with market rates while allowing high-performing federal workers to earn what their skills merit.
• Hire More Private Contractors. Many jobs performed by federal employees are not inherently governmental tasks and can be performed by private-sector workers. However, federal regulations deter government agencies from hiring private contractors for this work. Congress should eliminate these regulations and instead require the federal bureaucracy to compete on cost and quality with private-sector workers to perform non-inherently governmental tasks. This would expose federal employees to the same market competition that private-sector workers face each day. This competitive pressure would force federal agencies to reduce compensation to market rates in order to keep work in-house. To the extent that more work was contracted out, it would also create more jobs for private-sector workers.
• Reduce Federal Benefits. Congress should reduce the generosity of its benefits to market rates. Paid leave should be reduced to comparable levels at private corporations. Congress should re-examine the utility of the existing defined-benefit plans and consider moving federal workers to a fully portable and funded 401(k)-style system instead.
• End Dismissal Restrictions. Federal workers who have passed their probationary period can only be fired with great difficulty. As a result, some federal workers slack off knowing they will not lose their jobs. Congress should allow government managers the same discretion to remove poor performers as that of private managers.

Six-State Survey Reveals Voters Want Choice

Monday Sector Laggards: Education & Training Services, Agriculture & Farm Products

The Thomas Friedman Bubble

On Nov. 19, Rasmussen Reports published results from a national telephone poll that showed that 47 percent of America’s likely voters said the nation’s “best days are in the past,” 37 percent said they are in the future. Sixteen percent were undecided. Just before President Obama was inaugurated, 48 percent said our best days were still ahead and 35 percent said they had come and gone. This is a disturbing trend.

What’s driving it? Let me say what’s not driving it. It is not that millions of Americans suddenly started worrying about the national debt. Seriously, do you know anyone who says: “I couldn’t sleep last night. I was tossing and turning until dawn worrying that the national debt was now $14 trillion.” Sorry, that only happens in contrived campaign ads.

I think what is driving people’s pessimism today are two intersecting concerns. The long-term concern is that people intuitively understand that what we need most now is nation-building in America. They understand it by just looking around at our crumbling infrastructure, our sputtering job-creation engines and the latest international education test results that show our peers out-educating us, which means they will eventually out-compete us. Many people understand that we are slipping as a country and what they saw in Barack Obama, or what they projected onto him, was that he had both the vision and capability to pull America together behind a plan for nation-building at home.

But I think they understand something else: that we are facing a really serious moment. We have to get this plan for nation-building right because we are driving without a spare tire or a bumper. The bailouts and stimulus that we have administered to ourselves have left us without much cushion. There may be room, and even necessity, for a little more stimulus. But we have to get this moment right. We don’t get a do-over. If we fail to come together and invest, spend and cut really wisely, we’re heading for a fall — and if AmericA becomes weak, your kids won’t just grow up in a different country, they will grow up in a different world.

National School Choice Week is proud to announce its partnership with the “Done Waiting” education reform coalition.

“Waiting for Superman’s” Three Stages of Grief

The GOP's Education Dilemma

• To qualify for Race to the Top money, states and districts were expected to evaluate their teachers by using student test scores, even though research consistently warns of the flaws of this method.
• Similarly, the Obama administration is pressing states and districts to replace low-performing regular public schools with privately managed charter schools, even though research demonstrates that charters don't, on average, get better academic results than regular public schools.

• Countries like Finland, Japan and South Korea have improved their schools by offering a rich and broad curriculum in the arts and sciences, not by focusing only on testing basic skills, as we do.
• These nations have succeeded by recruiting, training and supporting good teachers, and giving continuing help to those that need it.

Daily Headlines: November 30, 2010

Daily Headlines: November 30, 2010

Ask Education Consumers

Humanity+ Conference at Caltech this Weekend

• Session 1, Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods
• Session 2, Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan
• Session 3, Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds
• Session 4, Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis

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