Sago » Entries tagged with "education"
California Fiscal Policy: The Crowding-Out Effect
In the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, some delegates expressed the concern that giving the General (federal) Government the authority to tax income would eventually result in a “crowding out” of the ability of state governments to raise revenue. Over two hundred years later, in 2012, California had cut its budget by 20 percent over the previous three years and was still faced with a $16 billion deficit. Unlike Greece, California cannot avail itself of bailout funds from the federal level. Additionally, the Federal Reserve, like the European Central Bank, is barred by statute from bailing out a state government. Even as the U.S. Government places certain requirements on California’s budget that make it more difficult for the Government of California to make cuts, it could not avail itself of … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
Gov. Dayton sides with unions…again
It isn’t surprising that Gov. Dayton has sided with the PEUs each time he’s had the chance to side with working class people. That’s why it’s disappointing, not surprising to read about this: St. Paul – Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman Pat Shortridge issued the following statement regarding Governor Dayton’s veto of the Last In, First Out (LIFO) legislation that would have allowed schools to make teacher employment decisions based on more than just seniority, including teacher effectiveness. If we thought it was all about our children and providing them with the best possible education, we were wrong. Governor Dayton has once again sided with the teacher unions over our children. Minnesota children deserve the best possible education, and eliminating the Last In, First Out policy is an important reform that would … Read entire article »
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Is the SCSU Aviation department expensive?
On December 10, 2010, President Potter said “Accreditors noted the deficiency of the curriculum and, for two years, no progress was made.” That’s an odd statement to make considering the fact that AABI, the accrediting team, didn’t audit the SCSU Aviation Department until July, 2009. That means they didn’t examine SCSU’s curriculum until that time. President Potter has repeatedly said, though not consistently, that the Aviation program was too expensive. Let’s examine that rather than take it as Gospel truth. If a person based their opinion on this article, they’d likely think that President Potter’s story isn’t steeped in the truth: “SCSU doesn’t own a single plane; it’s one thing that makes this aviation program really unique. We started out as an Aero club, it’s a student-run organization that owns the airplanes. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Page Two
Is MnSCU overfunded?
Back in March, 2007, DFL Sen. Sandy Pappas said that the GOP was “starving higher education.” The higher education budget increased by $296,000,000 that biennium: Under the Senate targets, public education would get the most of $1.3 billion in new money: $498 million in the next two years. Following would be higher education ($296 million) and health and human services ($245 million). Other parts of the budget would get relatively insignificant increases considering the total state spending will top $34 billion over the next two years. Despite that 11.3% increase, DFL Sen. Pappas still said this: Higher Education Chairwoman Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, said college and university funding is far from enough. “We are starving higher education,” she said. It’s worth noting that tuition increased at Minnesota universities despite that hefty increase. Besides, I’d … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
When monsters patrol the classrooms
I was appalled with the teachers’ behavior written about in this article. I’m more disgusted with the United Federation of Teachers’s protecting these monsters: Gym and health teacher Willie Laraque was charged with bending a male student over a desk, leaning in to him and saying, “I’ll show you what is gay.” The Daily News reports Laraque is back in the classroom after paying a $10,000 fine. Norman Siegel, a high school teacher, was accused of pressing his genitalia against a female student’s leg. Siegel only received a 45-day unpaid suspension, “although the arbitrator found that the girl’s charge was likely true” and that Siegel “was previously accused of a similar offense,” the Daily News writes. There’s also a case involving Edward Cascio, a gym teacher who accepted pornographic pictures from a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Sago
Terminated SCSU administrator blows whistle on President Potter
Last week, I interviewed Dr. Mahmoud Saffari. During our interview, Dr. Saffari talked about how St. Cloud State hired a marketing company called Earthbound Marketing from California to do a series of focus groups and to put together a marketing plan to cast SCSU in a positive light. That’s significant because this happened right after they had eliminated 32 majors and minors due to $14,000,000 in state budget cuts. What’s more is that Dr. Saffari raised the question about whether the focus groups were randomly picked. Allegedly, the focus groups were hand-picked. In addition to spending money on consultants and marketing firms, President Potter’s management style has led to a serious decline in on-campus morale. This incident is a perfect illustration of how President Potter’s management style is hurting on-campus morale. Here’s … Read entire article »
Filed under: Page Two
Taxpayers get Screwed to Finance a $537,767-Per-Year Bureaucrat
I’ve reported some horror stories about bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers with lavish compensation packages, including: The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year. Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000. A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year. A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension. California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time. An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000. We now have another über-bureaucrat to add to our list. Here are the key details from the New York Post. Take your salary cap and shove it. While Gov. Cuomo continues to push a bill that would limit New York school superintendents’ annual salaries to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
Experts on the Supreme Court: Lawyers Who Teach and Journalists
For all theAmerican lawyers and law “professors” who had been predicting clear-sailing forthe Affordable Healthcare Act before the U.S. Supreme Court, the three days oforal arguments must have been a rude awakening. Lest the public be taken in bysuch predictions, we might want to recalibrate just how much expertise theso-called experts really have on the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court. This public face of the U.S. Supreme Court may be distinct from what goes on behind the curtain. NYT Pete Williams, ajournalist, reported on NBC Nightly News after one of the days of oralarguments that “Obamacare” was in trouble. Unless Williams had clerked at theCourt, it is unlikely that he knew the Court’s inner workings, not to mentionhow the justices use oral arguments.For example, a justice might use the arguments … Read entire article »
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In Defense of No Child Left Behind and in Criticism of Those Who Manipulate its Intent
De Cito Eindtoets Basisonderwijs. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Few things scare me more than zombies (I promise this has a point so please stick with the article). I know they are not real, but even the thought of a human being coming back from the dead with the sole purpose of hunting the living has kept me awake, clutching my crucifix necklace, many a night. Now knowing my somewhat embarrassing but very real fear of zombies, it should come as no surprise that the new popularity of the zombie archetype in American pop culture confuses me. I am baffled by the appeal. It makes no sense that millions of people would read about, watch television on and even dress up as this terrifying figure. Maybe we are all preparing ourselves for some type … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
Wasn’t it ‘for the children’?
Gov. Dayton’s statements on LIFO indicate that the DFL version of education reform isn’t about the children. Here’s what he said that enunciates the DFL’s priorities on education reform: Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton today (March 30) indicated he would not sign a Republican marque education initiative, Last In, First Out (LIFO). Indeed, Dayton styled LIFO, a push for allowing school boards to determine the order of teacher layoffs based on teacher effectiveness rather than seniority, as part of a Republican “onslaught” against teachers and public employees. Teachers feel “demoralized,” said Dayton. Rather than celebrating recent accomplishments in education in Minnesota, Republicans focus on “negative stuff,” the wrongheaded premise that the state’s education system is a wreck, Dayton explained. I don’t give a damn if teachers feel demoralized. My first priority in this is giving school … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
Cardiologists as Ethicists: On Cheney’s Heart Transplant
The Huffington Post reports that “(f)ormer Vice PresidentDick Cheney had a heart transplant [on March 24, 2012], after five heartattacks over the past 25 years and countless medical procedures to keep himgoing. Cheney, 71, waited nearly two years for his new heart, the gift of anunknown donor.” At the time, more than 3,100 Americans were on the states’waiting list for a heart. Of the roughly 2,300 heart transplants performed in2011, 332 were over sixty-five. On average, heart failure was killing 57,000Americans a year at the time, so just a fraction of those who could use a heartget one. One might question, therefore, whether the 332 recipients who wereover 65, and Cheney, who was 71, should have been allowed to avail themselvesof the relatively short supply of available hearts. Dick … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
Shame on the Teachers’ Union and Double-Shame on the NAACP
Utterly despicable. But this is an understatement, an entirely inadequate phrase to capture my feelings about how the NAACP and the teachers’ union have joined forces to undermine educational opportunities for minority children. There are honest left-wingers, who are misguided but genuinely wish to make America a better place. But that’s definitely not the right way to describe people who put the narrow interests of teacher unions ahead of helping disadvantaged kids. This new video from Reason TV has the sordid details. Both Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have very appropriate comments on this issue. And this video looks at the broader issue of school choice. Authored By DanielJMitchell International Liberty … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
The Aviation Gospel according to President Potter
Over the past 18 months, I’ve written about the different stories President Potter has used to rationalize his shutting down the Aviation Department. Thanks to a new website, (Check it out here.) we now have President Potter in his own words on video. Here is President Potter in his own contradictory words: According to President Potter’s Convocation Address in August, 2007, President Potter remarked how the Aviation program had positioned itself on the “national radar” with its unique on-site labs at Twin Cities corporate flight departments. By December, 2010, President Potter had changed his opinion of SCSU’s Aviation program: POTTER: Accreditors had noted the deficiency of the curriculum and, for two years, no progress was made.” That statement is especially noteworthy because the AABI accreditors didn’t get to the SCSU Aviation Program offices … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
EDUCATIONAL REFORM…THE FAILED SERIES
EDUCATIONAL REFORM….THE FAILED SERIES Every President and most Governors feel obligated to “reform” education (aka blame/spend/fail). The problem is they will not or can not admit the real root issues are the awful cultural decay/sorry parenting, the growing loss of teaching time to discipline and the pressure to inflate grades (avoiding reality to keep parents happy). Graduation rates often reveal this rampant grade inflation pressure. The players in the education game are the students, the parents (who have kids 16 hours a day), the local school admins and the nosy state/federal governments. Guess which one is always the goat? Oh, you don’t need two guesses, do you? Education is properly a local function, never was a federal or state playground. Now you see why it still should be in most every educational … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
Question Answered
When critics of Barack Obama’s policies gather, the question arises: “How could we have elected such a man president?” His shaded past, that he never held a real world job or had any administrative experience at all, are issues frequently raised. Nevertheless, the November 2012 election could compound what many view as an unfathomable lapse in voter judgment. Congress is considering the administration’s plan to vest control of education, kindergarten through college, in Washington. (For details see “A Power Grab of Monumental Proportions” on this blog.) It is the final step in the left’s take over of academia and the public school system begun some 5 decades ago. Textbooks filled with revisionist history make the case for an expansionist government. Civics is out the window and social justice, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism and … Read entire article »
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Thomas Sowell Wonders Why the Obama Administration Is Trying to Undermine Educational Opportunities for Black Children
Welcome, Instapundit readers. This school choice video shows the best way of dealing with the problems described in this post (though, as Walter Williams explains, that’s only part of the answer). ======================================================= If you care about helping the less fortunate succeed, I’m commenting today on a Thomas Sowell column that will make you sad and angry. It is a story about how powerless and disadvantaged people are being hurt to advance the political interests of some elitists. Here is the clever way he starts the column. I particularly like the reference to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, which reminds me of this cartoon. There have been many frauds of historic proportions — for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin … Read entire article »
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DFL activist: DFL “acts like wholly owned subsidiary” of EdMinn
I got mental whiplash after reading this op-ed. First, here’s the introduction: So there I was, in late February, a lifelong, die-hard progressive DFL mom from Minneapolis, sitting in the governor’s office with Rep. Branden Petersen, a die-hard conservative Republican dad from Coon Rapids. We were there to see if Gov. Mark Dayton would consider signing Petersen’s bill to get rid of “last in, first out” (LIFO), a law that forces school districts to make teacher layoffs based solely on seniority, instead of effectiveness. Branden and I are unlikely political allies who don’t agree on much except that every kid deserves the best possible teacher and that LIFO is really stupid. According to a recent poll, 91 percent of Minnesotans agree. In a nonpolitical world, this isn’t close. Getting 9 out of 10 people … Read entire article »
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MOOCs: Massive Open Online “Courses”
“What’s sospecial about a diploma?” This is how Tamar Lewin opens an article entitled“Beyond the College Degree, Online Educational Badges” at the New York Times.The question itself points to the perspective of people who view colleges anduniversities as providing job training for a very high price. From the standpointof those who value job skills, a diploma, not to mention a university itself,barely counts in terms of things that are valued. It makes no difference thatuniversities were not created or designed as vocational training institutes.Were universities to reverse the trend and exclude vocational skill trainingaltogether, people who are geared a particular vocation would dismiss what theyperceive as “knowledge factories” as irrelevant at best. Such people arrogantlydismiss liberal arts programs as not of the “real world.” An implicationfrom the vocational mentality is that … Read entire article »
Filed under: Raw
